On that list, I'd say it's a toss-up between Tommy Douglas and Lester Pearson. More than anyone else, they're responsible for the way Canada is today. The ideas came from Douglas. Universal publicly funded health care, unemployment insurance, pensions, welfare services, the whole social safety net Canadians now consider to be a right of citizenship, are all in the Regina Manifesto of a socialist political party originally called the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, which has since mutated into today's New Democratic Party. Douglas was a founding member of both. But the CCF and NDP never achieved national political power. It was the minority Liberal governments of Lester Pearson that made those ideas reality. Nobody else on that list had anything like the lasting influence those two people had, and to the extent that Canada is perceived as a sane and civilized place in this world, most of the credit belongs to them.
Sir John, as the original architect of this country, is close behind, followed by Trudeau, though any thoughtful and informed Canadian would also have to concede that Trudeau was pretty divisive in a lot of ways and never really understood anything of this country west of Hamilton or east of Montreal.
Cherry and Bell shouldn't be on the list at all. Cherry's abrasive and opinionated and not at all typically Canadian, and Bell did most of his work in the United States. The others are all single-issue people and don't have the scope of Douglas, Pearson, Trudeau, or MacDonald. I freely admit to unreserved admiration for Terry Fox, he was a genuine hero who made a difference in a lot of lives, but he's about only one thing. So are the rest of them.
My vote (and yes I voted online) goes to Tommy Douglas, the quintessential good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw pain and tried to heal it, saw injustice and tried to correct it.
But there are no women on that list, and there should be. Who got votes for women, who fought for the right of women to be equal citizens, who's still fighting that battle... That's a crucial part of the Canada's social and political landscape over the last century, and it's completely absent from that list. And from that I conclude that this is just a fairly trivial popularity contest.
Dex
