While reading Chronic Condition, the new book about Canada's troubled health care system, I came across a reference to an almost forgotten chapter of B.C. history.

"To B.C. should go the honour of being the first Canadian province where something at least approximating a serious debate about public health care occurred," wrote author Jeffrey Simpson, the national affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail.

B.C. launched the country's first of many royal commissions on health care in 1919. Then in 1936, the Liberal government of premier Duff Pattullo enacted the first health insurance legislation, a rudimentary scheme that nevertheless provided basic medical coverage to many workers, their spouses and children.

What happened to it? The question sent me to the legislature library and a trove of dusty scrapbooks full of yellowed newspaper clippings, there being no Hansard in those days.

Those scrapbooks told the story of one of the most unusual debates in legislature history, distinctive because it pitted members of the governing party against each other, amid outside pressure from the business community and the medical establishment.

One Liberal, a medical doctor, denounced the proposed Health Insurance Act as "a half-baked scheme," "an abortion," "an encephalitic monstrosity" and the product of "sob sisters."

Another Liberal, a lawyer, called it "a piece of political chicanery" and threatened to resign his seat, forcing his own government into a byelection, that in his view it was bound to lose.

At different times in the two weeks of debate, a number of Liberals either voted against the legislation or vacated the chamber, that being the method of abstention.

A cabinet minister, manoeuvring to save the legislation, twice broke ranks with his own government on procedural votes. The look from his cabinet colleagues "would have fried an egg," wrote Bruce Hutchison, the legend of Canadian journalism then covering the legislature for the Province newspaper.

Still the legislation survived, an outcome that Hutchison credited to two factors in the main.

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B.C. pioneered health insurance in Canada for brief period during '30s