Review
DREAM NO LITTLE DREAMS: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE DOUGLAS GOVERNMENT OF SASKATCHEWAN, 1944-1961
by A.W. Johnson, with the assistance of Rosemary Proctor
University of Toronto Press, 394 pp.
Saskatchewan has always held an important – perhaps sentimental – place in the politics and the culture of the left in Canada. As the home of the continent’s first "socialist" government, Saskatchewan proved that expansion of social services and education, innovations in health and labour policy, government involvement in resources and agriculture, and numerous other endeavours in social and economic policy, could be put into practice while still maintaining an element of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, balanced budgets and public accountability.
Of course, the design and implementation of medicare was one of the high points of the Tommy Douglas and Woodrow S. Lloyd regimes, and has had a positive impact on Canada as a whole. However, the initiative was just one of many far-reaching programs implemented by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) that responded to the demonstrated needs of the people, and helped create a more just, inclusive and democratic society. Saskatchewan proved that socialism with markets works.
A.W. Johnson’s book Dream No Little Dreams: A Biography of the Douglas Government of Saskatchewan, 1944-1961 provides an excellent overview of the practical dimensions of the Douglas government, and although Tommy Douglas, the "greatest Canadian," figures prominently in the volume, it is also clear that the success of the CCF in Saskatchewan was due to the work of the party as a whole. The CCF stayed solidly grounded in the grassroots of the province, sought professional advice widely, and based its admittedly mild version of "socialism" more on the specific dictates of Saskatchewan than the imperatives of political theory. The ongoing negotiation of this amalgam helped ensure that the CCF remained in power for five consecutive terms until 1964.
Johnson was a senior bureaucrat in the province for the balance of this period, and the book is based on his Harvard PhD thesis from the early 1960s. At times his writing can prove too technical for a general audience, but this is a minor complaint. The book’s main strength is that it places the imaginative policy and program leaps of the CCF within the context of the development of the proto-welfare state.
When the CCF was first elected in June 1944, the economic impact of the Depression was still being felt in Saskatchewan, but the province’s specific experience of co-operatives, and the larger Canadian experience of collective planning during the Second World War, created conditions supportive of a central role for an activist government. Johnson provides a balanced overview of these activist achievements, ranging from successful endeavours, such as medicare and public auto insurance, to some less successful ventures, such as a shoe plant and a brick factory. Overall, he does a commendable job of revealing the tensions between ideology and practice, and outlining the practical limits of socialism, particularly the tactic of nationalization, within the Canadian political context. Yet, even within those limits, Johnson clearly shows that Saskatchewan was considerably better for having had a CCF government.
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