CALGARY, June 23, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Recently, Canadians voted in a nationwide contest for who they thought was the “Greatest Canadian” of all time. They chose socialist icon, Tommy Douglas, the “father of medicare,” and founder of the extreme left party, the New Democrats.
The 2004 “Greatest Canadian”, however, held views on the poor and disabled that his zealous fans on the left would like to keep quiet. In the July 3 edition of the Western Standard, John Robson quotes Douglas’ 1933 master’s thesis, where he argued that “The subnormal family presents the most appalling of all family problems.”
“Because this class tend[s] to intermarry…the second and third generations are nearly always worse than the first. The result is an ever increasing number of morons and imbeciles who continue to be a charge upon society.”
In his thesis, titled The Problems of the Subnormal Family, Douglas went on, “This does not include the generally low tone of morality among these people, which cannot be shown by statistics, but which is very low.”
Robson says that Douglas, as a man of the rapidly advancing left in the early 20th century, joined his like-minded peers in the US and Europe early on, before his political career, in adhering to the eugenics philosophy. And, as Robson says, he was a proponent “in the most merciless terms.”
Douglas advocated sterilization for the morally, physically and mentally “unfit,” using terms such as “defective” and “moron,” to describe those who, he said, should not be allowed into the mainstream of Canadian society.
The “subnormal,” he said, should merely be educated in effective methods of contraception once a predetermined family size had been reached.
His thesis recommended compulsory certificates of “mental and physical fitness” saying, “Society does not hesitate to segregate criminals, lepers or any others that threaten the well-being of society.” It recommended that the state should operate “farms” or “a colony where decisions could be made for them by a competent supervisor.”
Although Robson goes on to say that Douglas appears to have later abandoned his early devotion to the eugenics philosophy, he points out, “One cannot simply dismiss these views as youthful folly; when he wrote it, he was nearly 30 years old.” Robson suggests that a visit in 1938 to Hitler’s Germany, where eugenics was being violently implemented on real people, was the “eye-opening” that ended his “flirtation” with the philosophy.
In its declaration of Douglas as the “Greatest Canadian of all time,” the CBC said, “From his first foray into public office politics in 1934 to his post-retirement years in the 1970s, Canada's 'father of Medicare' stayed true to his socialist beliefs -- often at the cost of his own political fortune -- and earned himself the respect of millions of Canadians in the process.”
Historically, eugenics has been a popular and integral element of leftist ideology that holds the good of the state above that of individuals. Prominent statists in the United States in the early 20th century advocated Margaret Sanger’s birth control program as a means of ridding society of mentally or morally undesirable people, poor immigrants, and for controlling the black population. Sanger’s theories were taken up by many who remain influential in international politics and who promote the organization Planned Parenthood, which she founded.
The Western Standard, in a sidebar article, points out some others among liberal icons of Canadian mythology who were also supporters of racial eugenics. Emily Murphy, the subject of a loving government-funded TV spot as the hero of the early Canadian women’s movement, wrote, “It sometimes seems as if the white race lacks both the physical and moral stamina to protect itself, and that maybe the black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy.”
Mrs. Murphy was included in the recently minted Canadian fifty-dollar bill along with the other members of the so-called “famous five” – women widely credited with beginning the movement for ‘women’s rights’ in Canada and to whom a statue is erected on Parliament Hill. The famous five were all signatories of the infamous Albertan Sterilization Act, which victimized nearly 3000 “mental defectives” between 1928 and 1972.
Read Douglas’ master’s thesis:
http://www.westernstandard.ca/douglas
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Famous Five Statue Honours Racism and Eugenics Advocates
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2000/oct/001018a.html
McGill Speaker Condemns New 'Eugenics'
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2002/oct/02101003.html