Greatest Canadian - CBC Style

I tripped across the beginning of the end of the finale to announce the Greatest Canadian. It was too treacly for my taste and classically CBC in its amateurishness. Deborah Grey swooped onto the stage like a gigantic red comet trailing fabric tails, and cheering wildly for the man she was touting and who finished dead last in the top 10 list – Wayne Gretzky. Wendy Mesley forgot the name of the Alexander Graham Bell cheerleader and that was enough for me. (It was the squeaky voiced Evan something or other who took over from Avi Lewis when the latter went off to save the world from corporatists, riding tandem on her broomstick with wife Naomi Klein).

I later read that Tommy Douglas garnered the most votes and Terry Fox finished second ahead of Trudeau and Frederick Banting. I was encouraged that the viewers who could stand to watch this trifle, actually came up with two out of four good selections. Brave men who did not seek the spotlight, but instead soldiered on against heavy odds; in one case to raise money for research to fight the disease that killed him, and the other to discover insulin which has saved millions of lives all over the world.

There is a deep irony in the other two when compared to Fox and Banting. Tommy Douglas the bantam rooster prairie socialist and his arrogant and cerebral acolyte, Pierre Trudeau each represents much of what is wrong with this country. Douglas foisted medicare upon the province of Saskatchewan, causing great social upheaval and the exodus of many health professionals from that province. The fiscal question of just how Saskatchewan and later the entire country could afford a universal health care program was not one Douglas had any interest in addressing. His legacy is a sick, bloated, inefficient system that is failing its users and abusing the care and commitment of the many health care professionals and support workers who deliver the services. Worse still Douglas’ socialism continues to plague the system and the country, encouraging those who can afford to pay for the prompt delivery of services, and the physicians who want to treat patients and not sit idly by waiting for operating rooms to be made available, to be treated like queue-jumpers and greedy pariahs.

Trudeau made us all think we were special because he did flips off diving boards, pirouetted behind the queen, wore capes and married a woman 30 years his junior. His arrogance we excused as impatience. His dismissive shrugs as Gallic charm. He brought us the Charter of Rights and the War Measures Act, both evidence of the true radical and reactionary who lived beneath the surface of the cerebral Jesuitic intellectual. We even excused his canoe trips to Cuba and his helmeted motorcycle protest parades during WW II.

He plundered our treasury, created regional rifts between East and West that still divide us, and fueled not only the separatist movement, but the pork barrel politics of appeasement which continue to this day despite Royal Commissions and Auditor General reports. And when it was time to leave the political scene, he hopped into his gull-wing Mercedes roadster and rode off to our cheers!

Contrast these two politicians and their love of the limelight with Fox and Banting. Terry Fox endured the pain of hopping across half of Canada to raise money for a broken and bankrupt national medicare system. He ran through rain and sleet and heat, a tribute to man's independence and will to survive and to produce something out his own sweat and tears, never asking for a handout or looking to someone else to fight his fight or bear his burden. Banting laboured long and hard for little financial reward and even today the government of Ontario can’t find the will to properly preserve his homestead as a tribute to this great Canadian.

Two great men and two poseurs. The challenge for Canadians continues to be to know how to tell them apart.