"Prairie Giant" is a very good film about the great Canadian social democrat Tommy Douglas, the creator of the first Medicare system in North America, along with the first provincial government leader to sign into law a bill of rights and to legally guarantee collective bargaining in all sectors of the economy. Douglas was a witty and clever speaker, and Theriault does a good job at conveying his oratorical skills. The usual minuscule CBC budgets aren't noticeable here. A few of the minor actors don't seem terribly well cast: Paul Gross as Diefenbaker, Andy Jones as Mackenzie King, though they give it the old college try. Yet Don McKellar is good as Saskatchewan's finance minister, as is Kristin Booth as Irma Douglas, Tommy's wife. Douglas' final speech to the 50th Anniversary meeting of the CCF about the greed of private enterprise still rings true today in our globalized, McDonaldized, corporatized world.
It would have been nice to see the political struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s, which were skipped over the film, but these were sacrificed to show the struggle over Medicare in detail. You might have thought this would be a somewhat dull three hours... yet it could easily have filled five hours and kept my attention. We need more films like this from the CBC.
It would have been nice to see the political struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s, which were skipped over the film, but these were sacrificed to show the struggle over Medicare in detail. You might have thought this would be a somewhat dull three hours... yet it could easily have filled five hours and kept my attention. We need more films like this from the CBC.