Famous Scots.Tommy Douglas.

Voted “the Greatest Canadian” in 2004, the diminutive Tommy Douglas was in fact born in Scotland and spent most of his youth there…

The date is October 17th, 2004. The clock reads 7PM, central time. Canadians across the land are fixated on their television sets. This night they will choose a winner. The results of the second part of a two part voting system that has involved the entire country, are about to be revealed. Three months earlier the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had polled thousands of citizens to discover whom they considered to be the “Greatest Canadian”. Any Canadian was allowed one vote per their choice. Votes could be cast by fax, by letter, or on-line. Viewers were presented with the 50 semi-finalists but in random order. From this jumble votes were again registered, and the field was narrowed to a final top ten.

The final ten included the following luminaries: 9th – Alexander Graham Bell, 8th – Sir John A. Macdonald, 6th – Lester B. Pearson – 4th – Dr. Frederick Banting – 3rd – Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 2nd – Terry Fox. And from this formidable group the clear winner was one Tommy Douglas.

So how did this diminutive Scottish-Canadian come to rise above them all and what had he done to attain this honour? The answers are “grit” to the first query and “much” to the second. The Tommy Douglas story begins in a midsized Scottish town located halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh named Falkirk.

Tommy Douglas was born to a working-class family in a working-class town of the Scottish central lowlands. His paternal grandfather was known to kith and kin as Mr. Douglas and his father was known as Tom Douglas. But the youngster would be known to the world for the rest of his life as “Tommy.” The elders had toiled for generations working in one of several sooty foundries of Falkirk. It was in one of the humble dwellings that scarred the town’s landscape that an event would take place that would change young Tommy’s life profoundly.