Dream No Little Dreams: A Biography of the Douglas Government of Saskatchewan, 1944-1961 (review)

Tommy Douglas is a Canadian icon, and his ghost haunts the medicare debate, which has been linked, rightly or wrongly, to the very survival of the national identity. Despite Douglas's significant imprint on Canada, both by the ideals he represented and the policies he implemented or set in motion, he still awaits his biographer. There have been several attempts - the volume by Thomas H. McLeod and Ian McLeod is the best of the lot - but we do not have the full scholarly treatment that, for example, John Diefenbaker receives at the hand of Denis Smith. When the authoritative Douglas biography is written, it will reveal the former Saskatchewan premier and federal ndp leader to have been a more complex character than is generally recognized. He was not only a superb politician and inspiring orator, but also a highly intelligent thinker (slightly contemptuous, one might add, of intellectuals with their heads in the clouds) and a skilled manager of men. His socialist beliefs notwithstanding, he was extremely competitive. Allan Blakeney, a Rhodes scholar from Nova Scotia who was drawn to work for the Saskatchewan government in 1950 and later became premier, recalls driving down a gravel road with Douglas. Suddenly another car passed them, stones flying. Douglas was not happy until he caught up with the speeding car, passed it, and left it eating his dust.

A.W. Johnson's book is not a biography of Tommy Douglas, but rather, as the subtitle explicitly states, a biography of his government. Johnson's goal is to explain the administrative processes and structures that enabled the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to translate ideas into action and policies into programs. Soon after the Douglas team was elected in June 1944, it created the Economic Advisory and Planning Board, a cabinet committee with a supporting secretariat, which had responsibility for developing economic development strategies for the province and, in a more general sense, evaluating government policies and programs within a comprehensive planning framework. From the EAPB evolved two new central agencies: the Budget Bureau and the Government Finance Office. The former was the secretariat for the Treasury Board, the committee of cabinet in charge of allocating budgetary expenditures. In addition, the Budget Bureau had an Organization and Methods unit, which surveyed the operations of various government departments and made recommendations on how they could be managed more effectively. Budgeting became more than the mechanical exercise of divvying up the money within the constraints of revenue projections. It was, in Johnson's words, 'the meeting point of the decision-making process, the point at which all the government's diverse priorities and policies and programs must somehow be brought together into an integrated and hopefully harmonious whole.' The Government Finance Office performed a similar function for the Crown corporations so that, as Douglas said, instead of behaving like a number of horses going off in all directions, they would all 'work on the same line.'

During the Douglas government's second term, 1948-52, a new equilibrium was forged. This meant a stronger role for individual departments, each of which established a planning and research branch. In cases where departmental planning was deemed deficient, the EAPB became involved, though, as Johnson says, 'the degree of intrusion into departments varied, as did opinion about when the point of intrusiveness had been reached.' The board was the acknowledged leader in inter-departmental policy areas, often guided by inter-departmental committees, which coordinated planning. Policy changes in the third and fourth terms, 1951-60, were largely incremental, with the line departments doing most of the spadework. The planning process culminated in medicare, the last major CCF initiative, to which Johnson devotes the better part of two chapters.

The impact of the Douglas government on the rest of the country was profound, both in public policy and the bureaucratic machinery devised to implement it...