The Question of Consent

The Swiss-born jurist, Jean Louis DeLolme, once declared that a British legislature "can do everything except make a woman into a man or a man into a woman." Last week, as angry doctors in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan went into the second week of their strike against a new, compulsory state medical insurance plan, Premier Woodrow Lloyd's socialist government stoutly refused to give way on its plan. But the emerging question was whether--as happened with Prohibition--any legislation can be effective without the consent of the people it most closely concerns.

When the original socialized medicine proposals were drawn up by a twelve-man committee (including three doctors from the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons), then Premier Tommy Douglas promised that the program would have to be "acceptable both to those providing the service and those receiving it." Instead, after he ran for re-election in June 1960, Douglas got a favorable interim report from the committee majority, and blithely ignored the three doctor members who opposed it. This past history is one reason why Saskatchewan doctors are now leary of the government's promise to take the doctors' objections into account in drafting new legislation, if only the doctors will end their strike first.

On the sweeping lawns of the Capitol in Regina, 5,000 demonstrators mobilized by a Keep Our Doctors committee gathered to urge Premier Lloyd to withdraw his plan, and to sit down with doctors to negotiate a new one. For the moment, no one in the province lacked emergency care. Of Saskatchewan's normal strength of 900 doctors, 336 were still on duty, including 189 who are manning free emergency clinics set up by the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Arthur Kelly, general secretary of the Canadian Medical Association, warned that the impasse might continue "for a considerable time--possibly several months." If so. many doctors might make good their threat to move to the U.S. So far, 40 already have.

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