What Louis St Laurent best known for?

St-Laurent was a leading proponent of the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, serving as an architect and signatory of the treaty document. Involvement in such an organization marked a departure from King who had been reticent about joining a military alliance. Under his leadership, Canada supported the United Nations (U.N.) in the Korean War and committed the third largest overall contribution of troops, ships and aircraft to the U.N. forces to the conflict. Troops to Korea were selected on a voluntary basis. In 1956, under his direction, St-Laurent's Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson, helped solve the Suez Crisis in 1956 between Great Britain, France, Israel and Egypt, bringing forward St-Laurent's 1946 views on a U.N. military force in the form of theUnited Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) or peacekeeping. It is widely believed that the activities directed by St-Laurent and Pearson could well have avoided a nuclear war. These actions were recognized when Pearson won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize.

St-Laurent was an early supporter of British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's proposal to transform the British Commonwealth from a club of white dominions into a multi-racial partnership. The leaders of the other "white dominions" were less than enthusiastic. It was St-Laurent who drafted the London Declaration, recognizing King George VI as Head of the Commonwealth as a means of allowing India to remain in the international association once it became a republic.

St-Laurent's government was modestly progressive and fiscally conservative, taking taxation surpluses no longer needed by the wartime military and paying back in full Canada's debts accrued during the First World War, the Great Depression and World War II. With remaining revenues, St-Laurent oversaw the expansion of Canada's social programs, including establishment of the Canada Council to support the arts, and the gradual expansion of social welfare programs such as family allowances, old age pensions, government funding of university and post-secondary education and an early form of Medicare termed Hospital Insurance at the time, that lay the groundwork for Tommy Douglas' healthcare system in Saskatchewan and Pearson's nationwide universal healthcare in the late 1960s. Under this legislation, the federal government paid towards around 50% of the cost of provincial health plans to cover "a basic range of inpatient services in acute, convalescent, and chronic hospital care." The condition for those cost-sharing legislation was that all citizens were to be entitled to these benefits, and by March 1963 98.8 of Canadians were covered by Hospital Insurance.

In addition, St-Laurent modernized and established new social and industrial policies for the country during his time in the prime minister's office. Amongst these measures included the universalization of old-age pensions for all Canadians aged seventy and above (1951), the introduction of old age assistance for needy Canadians aged sixty-five and above (1951), the introduction of allowances for the blind (1951) and the disabled (1954), amendments to the National Housing Act (1954) which provided federal government financing to non-profit organisations as well as the provinces for the renovation or construction of hostels or housing for students, the disabled, the elderly, and families on low incomes), and unemployment assistance (1956) for unemployed employables on welfare who had exhausted (or did not qualify for) unemployment insurance benefits.