On this day in 1962, Saskatoon members of the Keep Our Doctors Committee travelled to Regina for an anti-medicare rally.
From the StarPhoenix archives:
Both sides are sure they are right. Both feel themselves to be fighting for great and noble ideals. And both, in the crisis which now grips the province, have denied in practice the ideals they profess to hold dear.
The doctors went into the battle proclaiming the sacred nature of the doctor-patient relationship — the right of the patient to select his doctor without hindrance, to confide in him without fear of disclosure and to repose personal confidence in his judgment.
Today in Saskatchewan as a result of the doctors’ strike, there is no such doctor-patient relationship.
Anyone who seeks medical treatment must sign a form specifically giving up his right to treatment by a personal physician. He must put himself into the hands of a changing staff of volunteer physicians in an impersonal hospital emergency centre. He has no right to select his doctor.
The government — North America’s first and only socialist administration — is fighting for the principle of medical care for all, without economic barrier.
The issue has been pressed to this extremity because both sides look on Saskatchewan as a battleground of much more than provincial significance. …
Now that it has been forced to the point of strike action by the doctors — an action which goes against all the traditions of the profession — it seems that somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.
Or perhaps it is truer to say that everybody will lose — government, doctors and patients.
Throwback Thursday is a weekly StarPhoenix series where we revisit photos from Saskatoon’s past.
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