The lockout of '62

I'm rather surprised to be criticized for suggesting in my novel Swimming into Darkness¹ that “the public opposed the doctors' actions.” In drawing my characters, I deliberately chose to portray the protagonist's family sympathetically, as “average” Saskatchewan citizens who supported the doctors. In fact, several fine Canadian writers have praised Swimming into Darkness for not taking the “easy” and “politically correct” route, which would have been to portray the protagonist's family firmly in the “anti-doctor” camp. Indeed, the novel explores the views of characters on both sides of the dispute. In the character of “Uncle Gisli,” a storekeeper, the novel also particularizes the view that Saskatchewan in 1962 was on the brink of a “slippery slope” that would lead to further incursions into civil rights. As Uncle Gisli states (p. 162), “We let the politicians tell the doctors how to run their business, and the next thing you know they'll be telling me how to run my business. Or farmers, for that matter.”

My research revealed plentiful evidence of opposition to the doctors' stance in many communities. During the novel's launch last fall, I was approached by members of doctors' families who recounted how, as children in Saskatchewan in 1962, they had been vilified in their community. Emotions indeed ran deep. (I have even been told that to this day, some families in Saskatchewan do not speak to each other as a result of bitter feelings engendered during that time.)

One of my intentions in choosing this important period in Canadian history as the backdrop to my novel was to encourage discourse and, I hope, understanding of the contradictory nature of this struggle. One bright young woman, who is studying for her master's degree, told me that she had never learned “anything” about medicare's history in school and only found out through reading the novel that “we didn't always have it.”

If my novel has made even one person more aware of Canada's rich history, I am grateful. As a Canadian, I have never felt that our own history, including our medical history, is dull. That's one reason why I chose to set my first novel amidst a significant era in Canadian medical history that has, as far as I know, never before been dealt with in fictional form. My hope was that other Canadians would share my curiosity about the passionate social climate that existed at the birth of Canada's medicare system.