The collapse of the New York stock market in October 1929 dramatically signalled the end of the shaky prosperity of the post-war years. The Canadian economy began its downward descent into the worst depression in the country’s history, one that would indelibly mark two generations of Canadians. In Canada, as elsewhere, the crash was assumed to be temporary, merely another abrupt readjustment in the complicated mechanism of modern capitalism. Both company presidents and politicians alike, and doubtless most other Canadians, agreed with Edward Beatty, the president of the CPR, who, after reviewing the economic problems of 1929, concluded, “It is probably a fact that, when the temporary adverse effects of each shall have run its course, Canadian economic conditions will be that much more soundly based, and it will be found that the way has been cleared for a more vigorous and better bal-
The prairie dustbowl of the 1930s. The drought began in 1929 and continued, on and off, until 1937. Each summer the hot, dry winds carried off more of the rich topsoil, turning the breadbasket of Canada into a land of desolation, and destroying the hopes of those who had arrived in the promised land only a generation earlier.
Anced forward movement than has been experienced in the past...What seemed “temporary” in 1930 became unremitting by 1935. The simple, tragic fact was that no one realized the extent of the crisis that Canada, along with the rest of the industrialized world, faced. What made the crisis in Canada so desperate was that both industrial and agricultural sectors of the economy were hit: the first by the decline in investment and demand, the second by the shrinkage of markets and the ravages of nature. One blow would have been serious; together they amounted to a knock-out.
On the agricultural front the main problem of the early Depression years was the contraction of overseas markets for Canadian grain, especially wheat. During the war and early post-war years. North American grain farmers had increased their share of the European market. By the late 1920s, however, most European countries, in an effort to save their farmers, began to raise tariffs. And by 1928-29 the Soviet Union began to export wheat again. Once the protective trend began and wheat prices fell into decline, markets for Canadian grain contracted.
Nor was the trend towards protection limited to agricultural products. As virtually every country attempted to fight the economic crisis by protecting the home market, exporting countries like Canada suffered severely. The enactment of the Hawley-Smoot tariff in the United States in 1930 was just one of several measures that led to a drastic decline in Canadian exports which, prior to the crash, accounted for more than a third of the country’s national income. With the shrinking of export markets for grain, pulp and paper, minerals, and manufactured goods, employment disappeared and farming became nearly futile. A bushel of Number 1 Northern, which sold for $1.03 in 1928, dipped to $0.29 four years later. The gross value of pulp-and-paper and base-metal production was more than halved in the same period. While manufacturing was less dependent on overseas buyers, the shrinkage of purchasing power at home meant that these industries, too, slowed down, farm-machinery manufacturers, the automobile industry, and steel producers all retrenched by withholding new investment and laying off workers. By the summer of 1930 more than 390,000 workers were reported jobless. That represented nearly 13 per cent of the labour force; by 1933 the percentage of unemployed had doubled (26 per cent), and it fell back to the 1930 level only once before the outbreak of war in 1939.
And these figures do not include agricultural labour; a further measure of the destructive impact of the Great Depression can be seen in the decline of incomes. Between 1928 and 1933 annual per-capita income in Canada declined by 48 per cent, from $471 to $247. Saskatchewan led with a drop of 72 per cent, from $478 to $135;
For young, unemployed men, riding the rods became a familiar activity during the Depression. In the summer of 1935, men in the government’s relief camps rebelled and organized an “On to Ottawa” trek to protest their lot; here a group of trekkers change trains at Kamloops. The excursion ended in riot and bloodshed in Regina.
Alberta followed with a 61 per cent fall, Manitoba 49 per cent and B. C. 47 per cent. Ontario, where the highest per-capita incomes were enjoyed, declined by 44 per cent, with Prince Edward Island, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia always at the lower end of the scale, falling between 49 per cent and 36 per cent. By every economic yardstick these were years of desperation for the jobless and for most prairie farmers, though there were marked regional variations.
Hardest hit was the prairie wheat belt. There market declines were followed by natural disaster. With wheat prices down near the thirty-cent-per-bushel mark, farmers discovered that the debt burdens assumed in the previous decades were unbearable. A University of Saskatchewan study reported in 1934 that, “To pay the interest on the present farm debt of Saskatchewan would have required about 4/5 of all the wheat available for sale from the 1933 crop, and for payment of farm taxes 2/3 of this wheat.” Even when there was a crop, the market prices were too low to cover production costs.
In 1937, there was virtually no crop in Saskatchewan, two-thirds of the province’s rural population was forced to seek public assistance—“relief,” as it was called—and more than 95 per cent of rural municipalities were at the brink of bankruptcy. Indeed, by that year the solvency of the entire province was in serious doubt.
Sun, wind, and grasshoppers produced crop failure. The drought that struck the prairies in the mid-thirties was unprecedented. Years of adequate rainfall had disguised the unsuitability of some prairie land for grain growing. Now those lands, or at least the fertile top soil, blew away, piling up against fences and buildings, mixing with thistles and tumbleweeds, about all that the parched earth produced. When the wind relented and the red-rimmed sun blazed through, it was often only to be obscured by the clouds of grasshoppers that swept over the plains in search of the last blade of wheat or grass. These locusts were especially devastating in 1937, a crop year that also experienced hail and dust. As one journalist recalled the last weeks before the harvest:
The grasshoppers came in clouds, curiously from the north, in concentrations never before experienced in Canada. Huge swarms appeared over Saskatoon and Regina in late luly.
They devoured everything in their paths as they ate their way out of sight. They travelled in narrow paths, but only the broken straw of what had promised to be a bumper crop was left behind. Then, seemingly from nowhere, came a second and even greater invasion.
Reduced to relief, the costs of which the province could not afford, prairie farmers lined up for a monthly food allowance of ten dollars and a ninety-eight-pound bag of flour for a family of five. Though the amount increased slightly in the late thirties, so too did the severity of granting conditions. Nor did relief meet unforeseen needs and tragedies. That, and the humiliation felt by those who had helped open up a new country and now faced disaster, was revealed in one of hundreds of letters received by R. B. Bennett, Conservative Prime Minister from 1930 to 1935, in those desperate years. An Alberta farmer wrote in 1933:
My crop is entirely gone,... and my wife is very sick... she has a tumor and as she has some terrible homorrhages which made her very anemic, an operation as inadvisable.... As you are aware the past three years have been very trying for farmers and ranchers. The price of products being below the costs of production, so with sickness also I have no money. Last week I enquired about relief... I have been humiliated and sent from pillar to post, just as if I were a criminal or something. I have lived on my farm, or ranch in the old days for over 30
Years, 31 years next March to be exact____Have paid taxes all the time, have helped several
Hundred people and yet, when I am frantic with despair what happens?... For my wife’s sake
I am asking you to help me____Only the most dire necessity would have induced me to apply
For it. There is also the children, two of whom are of school age, 12 and 14 years of age. My wife has been ordered milk, beefsteak, orange juice, etc., and some certain medicines. She must build her strength up. I don’t want to see her die by inches before my eyes.
With almost no protective social-security measures—a small old-age-pension scheme had been started in 1927, but nothing for the unemployed, the sick, or the destitute— farm and urban workers were thrown on the charity of private and public institutions. Many men took to “riding the rods,” hitching rides on freight cars moving across the country in search of work, food, or relief from the boredom of idleness. The Bennett government, in an effort to provide some work and to control these moving gangs of men, established work camps in British Columbia. By early 1935 deep dissatisfaction had developed and some 1,800 men, organized by the Communist-sponsored Relief Camp Workers’ Union, set off on a trek to Ottawa to demonstrate against a government that seemed unwilling to deal with the unemployment problem. They reached Regina before Prime Minister Bennett agreed to meet their leaders. And that meeting was little more than an acrimonious exchange of abuse. Then, on July 1, the rcmp moved in and arrested the leaders. In the ensuing riot one policeman was killed and many others were injured. The trek was halted. The problem remained.
Virtually every urban centre experienced unrest and disturbances, usually less serious than the Regina Riot. The Toronto city police were especially assiduous in checking every sign of suspected subversion, especially if university professors were involved. Uneasy public authorities often acted hastily, claiming the need to control a growing Communist menace. The arrest and imprisonment of the principal Communist party leaders in 1931, and the subsequent attempt on party chief Tim Buck’s life in Kingston penitentiary, only encouraged the suspicion that what Prime Minister Bennett called the “iron heel” was the only answer the government had for the social discontent which the Depression nurtured.
Nor was it only supposed Communist-inspired activities that governments met with hostility during these troubled years. In almost every province, efforts to organize workers, especially the unskilled, or strikes by organized workers, were resisted by employers often supported by governments. The Cape Breton coal fields continued to be the scene of brutal conflict. A strike in the coal mines in Estevan, Saskatchewan, led to bloodshed In 1931 when the RCMP fired on a strikers’ march. There were almost equally bitter struggles in the mines of British Columbia, the textile factories of Quebec, and the New Brunswick lumber camps and mills. But perhaps the most publicized conflict took place in one of the new industries where a new union attempted to gain a foothold. It was in the automobile industry in Oshawa, Ontario, where the American-based Congress of Industrial Organizations began its campaign to unionize non-skilled workers in 1937. The reputation of the cio and its leader, John L. Lewis, preceded it to Ontario—especially the use of the so-called “sit-down” strike. Ontario business leaders, and their friend Premier Mitchell Hepburn, were determined to keep the cio out of the province. Though Hepburn had been elected as a reformer in 1934, he had only hostility for the new unionism. When the United Automobile Workers, a cio affiliate, began signing up General Motors’ workers and then called a strike for union recognition, Hepburn declared that the CIO had no place in Ontario. When Ottawa rejected his appeal for the use of the rcmp to break the strike, he organized his own police force, “the sons of Mitches.” But the company saw that a compromise was a better way out than a violent struggle, and an agreement was signed. In the short run, however, Hepburn had strengthened his hold on office by his vociferous opposition to the CIO.
Yet despite labour unrest and the hostility of business and government to unions, the 1930s was not a period that witnessed a large number of strikes and lock-outs. There was simply too much unemployment and too much insecurity to allow workers to take radical actions that might jeopardize their ill-paid jobs. Nor were workers much attracted to radical political movements, such as Communism. Some of the disenchanted on farms and in factories expressed their discontent at the polls, either by voting against the government in office, or by throwing their support behind one or another of the new political parties that sprang up. The very appearance of these groups was evidence that the economic and constitutional orthodoxy of the old parties no longer satisfied a significant portion of the voters.
World History
