The Roots of North America's First Comprehensive Public Health Insurance System

Abstract

askatchewan, sandwiched between Alberta and Manitoba, is one of three prairie provinces in Canada. The province consists mainly of dry prairie in the south (where it borders the states of Montana and North Dakota) and subArctic forest, giving away to tundra along its border with the North West Territories. It was opened for European settlement after the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway at the end of the nineteenth-century and grew slowly, stabilizing at a population of between 900,000 and one million after the 1940s. Until the 1950s, this sparsely settled province was sustained by a one-crop wheat economy. Saskatchewan's population distribution reflected this, as most people lived in rural areas. There were only two medium-sized cities (Regina and Saskatoon) and six smaller ones ‘which anchored a network of villages and towns that covered an expanse of agricultural land larger than France’. Although less than eight per cent of Canadians lived in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, this province has played a large role in the development of national social policy. Western Canada, particularly Saskatchewan and Manitoba, was the crucible of the nation's Social Democratic movement which was based largely on the strong tradition of co-operative prairie wheat farming and marketing. Canada's first Social Democratic party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the forerunner of the New Democratic Party, was born during the Great Depression in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The party came to power in the Saskatchewan pro-