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Maurice Richard

by Charles Foran

Tommy Douglas

by Vincent Lam

Ask any patriotic Canadian what this country’s greatness is based on, and you’re liable to receive two responses: hockey and health care. New instalments of Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians titles (which comprise two of the final three books in the series) focus on men who were instrumental in establishing these as prominent aspects of the Canadian body politic.

Charles Foran steps up to the red line with a biography of iconic Montreal Canadiens forward Maurice “Rocket” Richard. Thankfully, Foran’s book is not just another hagiography of the storied Hall of Famer. This economical, eight-chapter volume focuses on the hockey legend’s lifelong internal struggles, rather than his scoring prowess and brutal grace on the ice.

Much has been written about Richard embodying the emerging Québecois consciousness that developed into the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, and this is true, to a point. But once the agendas of those who would use Richard for political or commercial purposes are stripped away, what remains is a working-class gars who loved hockey and not much else.

Despite being cast as the Great French Hope in Quebec, Richard twice tried to enlist in the Canadian military to serve in the Second World War, and was twice rejected – once due to lingering hockey injuries to his wrist and ankle, and once because he hadn’t finished high school or earned his machinist’s trade certificate.

Although he was a devout Catholic, a father of seven, and a secular saint to many in Quebec, Richard was also a volatile character, a hothead who could give a bruiser like Marty McSorley lessons on the use of a hockey stick as a weapon. “Being pre-TV probably worked in his favour,” writes Foran, “editing out the shocking visual evidence of his lack of restraint, his disturbing capacity for violence.” Part of Richard’s ferocity on the ice was meant as protection from the many cheap shots and carve jobs he received at the hands of his opponents, who knew how to set him off, but no doubt some of it was also a physical expression of the injustice and bigotry he felt off the ice at the hands of English Canadian society.

Richard played on a team that won eight Stanley Cups – including five in a row, from 1956–60. He personally scored 544 goals and recorded 965 points in 978 games over 18 seasons. But Foran’s portrayal of post-retirement Richard is of a lonely, diffident, reticent, and sullen man who, without hockey in his life, had lost his purpose. Elsewhere, Foran depicts the Rocket as an antisocial loner who loved children and worked on fishing lures in his basement – fittingly, since the motives and demands of children are uncomplicated, and you don’t have to engage with the outside world if you’re alone in your basement. Throughout, Foran avoids mythologizing his subject, instead capturing the off-ice melancholy and inner turmoil of hockey’s great anti-hero.

Richard was clearly an extraordinary Canadian. But Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare, is considered by many to be the single greatest Canadian ever (as a 2004 CBC television series determined). It’s appropriate that Vincent Lam should author this contribution to Penguin’s series: the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning writer is also a practicing physician, and understands first-hand the legacy of universal health care that Douglas fought for in Saskatchewan and was later adopted by the federal government.

We learn that Douglas, who was born in Scotland but raised in Winnipeg, was profoundly affected by his experience with a bone infection that nearly cost him his leg as a child. Later, the violence of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, the economic devastation of the Great Depression, and the lot of rural residents and farmers would have equally significant impacts on his character and thinking.

Lam’s portrayal of Douglas is mostly positive, but it’s not all sweetness and light. He acknowledges Douglas’s misguided support, in the late 1920s, for eugenics and forced sterilization of those deemed “mentally defective and incurably diseased.” This “solution” came to Douglas as a young man while working on his master’s thesis in sociology, which was entitled “The Problems of the Subnormal Family.”

While Lam effectively documents the acrimonious history of single-payer health insurance – from the anti-medicare propaganda (which was as hysterical and vitriolic as any of today’s partisan posturing) to a 23-day strike by furious Saskatchewan doctors in 1962 – what this book captures best are the ways in which the outspoken prairie preacher-turned-politician and his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (later the New Democratic Party) affected first the governance of Saskatchewan, where Douglas relocated after university, and then the entire country.

The CCF gave civil servants the right to organize, and as a result, the civil service was infused with fresh talent and bright ideas, not just patronage appointments, as had been the case previously. Saskatchewan had a Bill of Rights in 1947 (a year before the United Nations and 13 years before the rest of Canada). Douglas and his party called for greater government control over natural resources. Federally, the CCF pushed Liberal governments to enact legislation on, among other things, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and workplace standards.

What Lam’s book makes abundantly clear is that when people talk about the Canadian social safety net, it is really Tommy Douglas’s legacy they are referring to.

 

Reviewer: Stephen Knight

Publisher: Pengiun Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $26

Page Count: 178 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-67026-412-0

Released: March

Issue Date: 2011-6

Categories: Memoir & Biography

Reviewer: Stephen Knight

Publisher: Pengiun Books Canada

DETAILS

Price: $26

Page Count: 239 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-60706-851-7

Released: March

Issue Date: June 1, 2011

Categories: Memoir & Biography