Ed Waters lives in Phoenix. He’s in the upholstery cleaning business.

On the side, he writes songs. In 2007, he wrote one about the political economy in the USA.

It’s called – I Wanna Be a Pirate.

To secure single payer here in the United States —

We have to understand how Canada did it.

And to understand how Canada did it, we have to understand Tommy Douglas.

And not just that Canadians voted him The Greatest Canadian in a recent poll. Or that he’s the grandfather of the actor Kiefer Sutherland.

But we have to understand how Tommy Douglas built a political movement that toppled the two corporate parties in Saskatchewan in the mid-1940s. And what the lessons are for citizens in the USA.