Prairie Giant

Abstract

The CBC documentary ‘Prairie Giant’, depicting the life of T.C. Douglas, most particularly during the time he was premier of Saskatchewan, 1944-61, has generated turbulence in the normally still waters of Canadian biography. The source of the controversy is the film’s depiction of J.G. Gardiner, another earlier premier of Saskatchewan, and for most of the life of the Douglas Government federal minister of agriculture under Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent. In the public mind T.C. Douglas personified the C.C.F.’s social-democratic ideology almost from the time he entered electoral politics, a reputation that kept on growing and has crossed party lines, as witnessed by his selection in 2004 as the greatest Canadian. Gardiner, a powerful political force for more than two generations (holding uninterrupted elected office from 1914 to 1958), has by contrast all but disappeared from public consciousness.