Canada & The Great Depression

The Great Depression was a period of economic hardship during the 1930s. It began in 1929, when the United States stopped buying Canadian goods. This forced many Canadian industries out of business. Thousands of Canadians lost their jobs. Some lost their homes as well.

It was difficult to find any type of work during the Great Depression. Young people found it especially hard. More experienced people applied for the same jobs as they did. People who were lucky enough to find jobs often earned extremely low wages.

Unemployed men travelled across the country because they hoped to find work elsewhere. Many could not afford to ride on passenger trains. They often stole rides in, or on, freight trains. "Riding the rails" was illegal, but there were too few police officers to catch the many riders.

Many families from the Prairies also moved to other parts of Canada. Their problems began when other nations stopped buying Canadian wheat. When the demand dropped, the price of wheat also fell. The farmers had to sell their crops for less than it had cost to grow them.

From 1929 to 1937, the Prairies received little rainfall. This dry weather turned the soil to dust. Strong winds then lifted it into violent dust storms. Prairie farmers often lost their seeds as well as their soil.

Most Prairie farmers could not make enough money to feed their families. They were also too poor to buy many other items. Farmers who could not afford gasoline removed the engines and used horses to haul their cars. They named these "Bennett buggies" after Prime Minister Richard Bennett.

Government Reaction Government reaction At the start of the Depression, the provincial and municipal governments were already in debt after an expansion of infrastructure and education during the 1920s. It thus fell to the federal government to try to improve the economy. When the Depression began William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister in He believed that the crisis would pass, refused to provide federal aid to the provinces, and only introduced moderate relief efforts.

veterans claimed that they were entitled to state protection from poverty and unemployment on the home front. The rhetoric of patriotism, courage, sacrifice, and duty created powerful demands for jobs, relief, and adequate pensions that should, veterans argued, be administered as a right of social citizenship and not a form of charity. At the local, provincial, and national political levels, veterans fought for compensation and recognition for their war service, and made their demands for jobs and social security a central part of emerging social policy.

The Liberal Party lost the 1930 election to Richard Bedford Bennett and the Conservative Party. Bennett, a successful western businessman, campaigned on high tariffs and large scale spending. Make- work programs were begun, and welfare and other assistance programs became vastly larger. This led to a large federal deficit, however. Bennett became wary of the budget shortfalls by 1932, and cut back severely on federal spending. This only deepened the depression as government employees were put out of work and public works projects were cancelled.

With falling support and the depression only getting worse, Bennett attempted to introduce policies based on the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States. Bennett thus called for a minimum wage, unemployment insurance and other such programs. This effort was largely unsuccessful, the provinces challenged the rights of the federal government to manage these programs. Unlike Roosevelt, who simply threatened to sack the Supreme Court of the United States to defeat any constitutional challenges, Canada's supreme court at this time was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, an institution controlled by Great Britain.

The failure to help the economy led to Bennett's defeat in the 1935 election when William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Liberals returned to power. Nevertheless, by this time the worst of the Depression was over. King's government implemented some relief programs such as the National Housing Act and, and it established Trans-Canada Airlines (1937, the predecessor to Air Canada). It took until 1939 and the outbreak of war for the Canadian economy to return to 1929 levels, however.

The dissatisfaction with the government during the Depression resulted in a rise of third party activity in Canada. Some remnants of the Progressive Party from the 1920s organized to form the Social Credit Party of Canada In Alberta in 1935, radio evangelist William Aberhart led the newly formed Social Credit Party of Alberta to electoral victory when he was elected premier. According to "Bible Bill," as he was called by his detractors, the capitalist economy produced goods and services but did not provide people with sufficient purchasing power to enjoy them. This could be remedied by the distribution of money in the form of social credit. In office, he found he could not translate his ideas into reality.

Elements of the progressive left consolidated to form the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a socialist party that achieved some success and was the precursor to the New Democratic Party. J.S. Woodsworth, the party's leader, was a vocal fixture in the Canadian House of Commons, and CCF candidates routinely won a portion of seats in provincial and municipal elections.

The radical left also consolidated in the 1930s under the leadership of the Communist Party of Canada, which provoked great controversy as the government made the party illegal under Section 98 of the criminal code.

On to Ottawa Trek The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government asked the Canadian Department of National Defense to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The poor working and living conditions led to general unrest in the camps and facilitated the work of Communist agitators, who organized the men into the Relief Camp Workers' Union. A walkout was called on April 4, 1935 and about 1600 strikers headed for Vancouver. The strikers’ demands included the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers, the repeal of Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada, and that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in federal elections. Public support for the men was enormous and they decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men boarded boxcars headed east in what would become known as the “On-to-Ottawa Trek.”

Meeting in Ottawa Once the protesters reached Regina, Saskatchewan, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett invited eight leaders of the protest to Ottawa to meet him on the condition the rest of the protesters stay in Regina, where a large RCMP contingent was located. The protesters who remained in Regina, meanwhile, were confined by the RCMP in a local stadium. The Ottawa meeting turned into a shouting match, with Bennett attacking the group as radicals and accusing Trek leader Arthur "Slim" Evans of being an extortionist. Evans in turn called the Prime Minister a liar before the delegation was escorted out of the building.

Regina Riot Upon returning to Regina to unite with the rest of the protesters on July 1, 1935, a public meeting was called in Market Square in Germantown (now the site of the Regina City Police station) to update the public on the progress of the movement. It was attended by 1,500 to 2,000 people, of whom only 300 were Trekkers. Most Trekkers decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.

Three large vans were parked on the sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police were standing by in a nearby garage. At 8 p.m. a whistle was blown and the police charged the crowd, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city's centre. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then charged into the crowd and attacked with clubs. Driven from the Square, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for four hours. Trekkers on the speakers' platform were arrested by plainclothes police.

Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.

When it was over, 120 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. One plainclothes policeman had been killed, and one protestor would later die in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. Hundreds of injured local residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protestors had been killed in the melee; the hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.

Bloody Sunday, 1938 Bloody Sunday was the conclusion of a month- long “sitdowners’ strike” by unemployed men at the main post office in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was depression-era Vancouver’s final violent clash between Communist-led unemployed protesters and police that provoked widespread criticism of police brutality.

As in 1935, unemployed men from across the country drifted to British Columbia because of the milder climate, but also because relief projects in forestry camps paid as much as three times as much as farm placements. From the perspective of the government, the main difference between the earlier camps established under R. B. “Iron Heel” Bennett and the relief projects under Mackenzie King’s Liberals was that the men were comparatively isolated from each other making it more difficult to organize. In both cases, the throngs of disaffected unemployed men were kept out of urban centres.

Zero hour arrived at five o’clock on the morning of 19 June 1938, presumably timed to surprise the strikers and to minimize the number of onlookers. Colonel Foster enlisted the services of Harold Winch of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, who had acted as a liaison between the unemployed and the police during the 1935 relief camp strike. His task this time was to ensure that the treasures of the gallery went unscathed during the eviction. Along with police tear gas canisters, Winch successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the unemployed.

The post office was a different situation. Because it was a federal building, the RCMP led the assault, and the leader of these protesters, Steve Brodie, was reputed for his infectious militancy. The men responded to the first round of tear gas by smashing the windows for ventilation and arming themselves with whatever projectiles they could find. The RCMP entered the building and forcibly ejected the men, who were subjected to a cordon of police armed with batons upon leaving the building. City police outside assisted the Mounties. Of the 42 hospitalized, only five were police and all of those were Vancouver police constables.

It took the outbreak of World War II to pull Canada out of the depression. From 1939, an increased demand in Europe for materials, and increased spending by the Canadian government created a strong boost for the economy. Unemployed men enlisted in the military. By 1939, Canada was in the first prosperity period in the business cycle in a decade. This coincided with the recovery in the American economy, which created a better market for exports and a new inflow of much needed capital.