since I have been working on a piece with some of this material.
I have the good fortune of having grown up in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan where the first democratically elected socialist government in North America - the CCF - was elected in 1944. I use the term "socialist" because that is what they called themselves. It was my further good fortune to have served as an assistant deputy minister in a version of an NDP government led by the last surviving early members of the CCF.
To the consternation of a number of people, I have referred to "socialism" as being a lot like ice cream in that it comes in a lot of different flavours. (In my opinion none of those flavours include Russian, Chinese or N. Korean). There is a problem here in that Pacman's piece makes the dividing line between social democrary and democratic socialism a lot clearer than I have found it in real life. From the CCF's founding through its reinvention as the NDP to today, a number of changes to the party's constitution significantly changed the focus. One of the earlier changes was backing away from large scale public ownership.
I have also caused a little consternation by referring to what I grew up with as sort of "libertarian socialism". There were certain areas where the government was very heavily involved and others where it was completely hands off. For example, providing many basic services - like electricity - to everyone at a reasonable price was an area of heavy involvement. The government knew that privately owned utilities would service the cities where they could be profitable and ignore everyone else. Remember that in 1944, Sask had a population of around 750,000 in an area slightly smaller than Texas. The province set up what in Canada are called "crown corporations" that are owned by the government but operated at arm's length. SPC as it was called used the profits from the sale of urban power to finance the expansion of the grid to cover almost the entire population years before the neighbouring provinces.
On the hands off side, there were very few curves on provincial highways until the 1960s - they were all square corners. When the province was originally surveyed, it was laid out in 1 mi. by 2 mi. blocks that had road allowances allowing farmers to access their fields. The CCF built the highways on the road allowances because the evil socialists refused to expropriate farm land for building highways.
Multi national corporations were discouraged from operating in the province but locally owned businesses were actively encouraged.
The government had an obligation to provide essentials at the lowest possible cost and otherwise stay out of the rest.
Any way you get the idea - many flavours.
If I ever get my article written, I will get into more.
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