Thomas Clement Douglas was a Scottish-born Baptist minister who became a prominent Canadian social democratic politician. As leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1942 and the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, he led the first socialist government in North America and introduced universal public medicare to Canada. When the CCF united with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party, he was elected as its first federal leader and served in that post from 1961 to 1971. He is warmly remembered for his folksy wit and oratory with which he expressed his determined idealism, exemplified by his fable of Mouseland.
In 1930 Douglas married Irma Dempsey, a music student at Brandon College. They had one daughter, actress Shirley Douglas, and they later adopted a second daughter Joan, who became a nurse. Through Shirley, he is grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland.
In 2004, he was voted "The Greatest Canadian" of all time in a nationally televised contest organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, was filmed between February and May of 2005 and aired on CBC Television in two parts on March 12 and 13, 2006.
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_tommy
