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KMID : 1001320180450040089
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Social Welfare Policy
2018 Volume.45 No. 4 p.89 ~ p.114
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Backgrounds and Results of the Doctors’Strike Against the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance in 1962
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Cho Young-Hoon
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Abstract
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The Canadian medicare of universalistic character originates in the Saskatchewan Medical Care Insurance Act passed in 1961. The social-democratic CCF provincial government, which had initiated diverse medical reforms including the Hospital Insurance of 1947 since its first inauguration as a ruling party in 1944, attempted to introduce a universalistic state medical insurance. Such an attempt was faced with a harsh resistance from the doctors’ organization. The Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons(SCPS) put all the efforts to prevent the introduction of the Act, and went on strike on July 1, 1962. This article aims to analyze the backgrounds and results of the doctors’ strike taking place in Saskatchewan in 1962. This paper deals with two topics. Firstly, it is hard to understand why doctors as socially respected professionals called a strike to oppose to an act made by a legitimate government. Did they have no other option than a strike, or were they confident that they could win the battle? Secondly, doctors could not get their goal and the state medical insurance was finally enforced. Was the CCF provincial government strong enough to overcome the harsh resistance from the doctors, or did the doctors fail to mobilize their resources? Most of the existing studies on the formation of Saskatchewan medicare and the doctors’ strike simply list several important historical events in sequence or enumerate important figures and social organizations so that they do not explain the causes and results of the doctors strike and fail to show its significance for social policy. This article is academically significant in the sense that it attempts to provide a rational explanation on the backgrounds and consequences of the conflict with special attention to the power relations between the CCF provincial government and SCPS.
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KEYWORD
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health care reform, CCF, SCPS, Saskatoon Agreement, private health insurance
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