Tommy Douglas (Cinco De Mayo)

Thomas Clement "Tommy" Douglas (20 October 1904 - 24 February 1986) was a Canadian communist politician best known for his "classical Marxist" reforms during the 1960s and 1970s during his long tenure as General Secretary of the Proletarian Republic of Canada, serving from May 2, 1962 until his abrupt resignation on October 19, 1974, when he was replaced by longtime ally and former Premier David Lewis. Along with Lewis and Worker's Party Chairman Bill Kashtan, he ruled as part of a troika in the 1960s and early 1970s known as the "Classicals," where they significantly reshaped the Canadian economy, embarking in an ambitious "10-year plan" of industrialization, harvest quotas and expanded public benefits, such as the Communist world's first true socialized medical system. Douglas also improved relations with non-Communist bloc countries, most notably the United States - in 1969, Hubert Humphrey became the first US President to visit Canada.

Though Douglas was well-regarded in Canada for his disestablishment of much of the state security service that had terrorized civilians during the age of the Red Three and his allowance of the practice of religion that did not interfere with the proletarian revoluton - Douglas was a Baptist who wrote that he believed that Communism was the natural evolution of Christian thought - he was weakened by ethnic conflict in Quebec, infighting within the CWP after he had purged its membership in the mid-1960s, and the government was destablized first by the "revolving door" of Premiers in the 1960s and he was later undermined by Premier Pierre Trudeau, a young, charismatic and less dogmatic Worker's Party official who clashed with Douglas.