The twenties in Canada, as elsewhere, were years of optimism and promise that ended in disillusionment and economic crisis. The roots of that crisis were embedded in the political instability and uneven economic development of the first post-war decade. Yet it was during this decade that the country acquired a new definition of itself on the international scene and gained a new confidence in cultural matters.
The heavy demands for Canadian products created by the war produced a boom that continued through most sectors into 1920. Relatively cheap credit in the immediate post-war years, and the consumers’ rush to buy goods that had been in short supply during the war years, resulted in serious inflation. But the bubble burst quickly. By 1922 a rapid contraction of the economy had taken place and unemployment had risen dramatically. The collapse of prices was most serious in the agricultural sector, with wheat prices, for example, falling by 60 per cent between 1920 and 1922. Lumber, fish, iron, and steel also experienced steep drops in price. The hardest-hit regions were the Maritimes and the prairies.
Some parts of the Maritimes, notably Halifax, had experienced unprecedented prosperity during the war, but the whole region had benefited from a renewed export trade. Even the tragic Halifax explosion had its positive side, for it led to an increase in building activity. But after 1920 the value of virtually every type of production declined drastically, and the downward trend continued until 1925. Particularly hard hit were sales of coal and iron, which meant heavy unemployment in Cape Breton. Labour conflict, including strikes, lock-outs, and the repeated use of the militia to prevent violence and break strikes, was regular fare in Cape Breton in the twenties. More than any other region, the Atlantic provinces underwent difficult economic readjustments and enjoyed little of the intermittent prosperity that touched other parts of the country. The increase in freight rates on maritime routes, the integration of the Intercolonial Railway into the Canadian National, and the movement of some railway facilities from the Maritimes to central Canada all had detrimental effects on the eastern provinces. While overseas markets contracted, changes in transportation made access to central Canada more costly. It was these tough economic circumstances that underlay the “maritime rights” agitation central to the political life of the eastern provinces in the 1920s.
The prairie provinces, the heart of pre-war economic expansion, entered a period
By the 1920s and 1930s, as middle-class Canadians won shorter work weeks and bought family cars, they began flocking to resorts, national parks, and other tourist attractions. In Ontario one mecca was the Georgian Bay area, which the Group of Seven had popularized. This poster, possibly depicting Lake Muskoka, is by J. E. Sampson, head of Sampson-Matthews Ltd.—the commercial art firm that employed Group members Franklin Carmichael and A. J. Casson.
Of marked instability in the early post-war years.
Sharp declines in wheat prices, partially offset by increased yields, followed the war, while farm costs rose rapidly. The farmer’s purchasing power dropped by about 50 per cent in the first half of the 1920s, though it bounded back and farming remained fairly prosperous until the crash in 1929. Throughout the period farmers carried large fixed costs which left them extremely vulnerable when the markets collapsed: heavy taxes required to finance roads, schools, and other necessities in undeveloped areas, rising land costs once homesteading ended, and the high price of tractors, separators, and threshing machines. Between 1926 and 1931, the number of tractors on prairie farms increased from 50,000 to 82,000, harvesters from zero to 9,000, and trucks from 6,000 to 22,000. These were not mere conveniences but rather necessities which made it possible to work larger farms and thus increase profits. New wheat varieties with higher yields did the same, while the opening of the Panama Canal shipping route provided cheaper transportation. But more mechanization and larger farms also often meant more expenditures and heavier debts.
These accumulating problems were disguised, to a degree, by the apparent
Prosperity of the last years of the twenties. Prairie agriculture shared in this turnaround as international demand for grain, and Canada’s share of the market, increased, for Europe and the Soviet Union only slowly regained their pre-war agricultural output. During these years the area of grain farming expanded and immigration resumed, spreading out into the Peace River and other parts of northern Alberta and British Columbia. Some diversification also took place in the prairie economy: hydroelectric generation in Manitoba and British Columbia, and crude-oil production in Alberta. Railway construction resumed, including the completion of the controversial Hudson Bay route. Agriculture, nevertheless, remained the foundation of prairie life.
Ontario and Quebec, the urban-industrial heartland, had benefited greatly from wartime demand. The post-war years were a time of further growth. After wheat and flour, the country’s leading exports were newsprint and wood pulp, base metals and gold, much of which came from the newly developed areas of the two central provinces, and also British Columbia. So, too, central Canadian manufacturing industries increased their output: pulp and paper, lumber, farm machinery, rolling mills, and steel furnaces were leaders, though by 1929 non-ferrous metals, smelting, and electrical goods were increasingly significant. The automobile industry, rubber manufacturing, and meat packing remained important. Cheap power prices were basic to the growing dominance of central Canadian industry, making possible the exploitation of aluminum in the Saguenay and nickel in Sudbury. Quebec remained heavily dependent on large-scale natural-resource industries and such traditional labour-intensive manufacturing as textiles and leather goods. Qntario, by contrast, grew more specialized and diversified, moving into automobiles and parts, electrical appliances, and tools.
The economic growth of the 1920s, especially during the second half of the decade, was once again accompanied by urban growth and concentration. The 1921 census recorded a population increase of nearly 22 per cent over the previous decade, the total reaching 8,787,749 Canadians. Ten years later, after another 18 per cent increase, the population finally broke 10 million. But once again the principal cities grew at an even faster pace: Montreal by 38 per cent, Toronto 32 per cent, Vancouver 48 per cent, and Winnipeg 24 per cent. That Winnipeg’s rate of growth had fallen behind Vancouver’s was highly significant. So was the spectacular growth of the southern Qntario automobile-manufacturing city of Windsor; its population increased by 56 per cent in the 1920s. Maritime cities, by contrast, remained virtually stable, reflecting the economic stagnation of the area.
Although Ozias Leduc (1864-1955) earned his livelihood as a church decorator, he also created works of symbolic and lyrical power that remained largely unknown during his lifetime. Erato (Muse in the Forest): oil, 1906.
Charles W. Jefferys (1861-1959) is perhaps best known as an illustrator of literary and historical subjects, but he was also one of the first Canadian painters to evoke that special relationship of earth, sky, and light so characteristic of the prairies. A Prairie Trail: oil, 1912.
Although contemporary with the Group of Seven, and at the time overshadowed by them, David B. Milne (1882-1953) followed his own modernist impulse, creating gentle landscapes and quiet interiors of exquisite beauty. Interior with Paintings: oil, 1914.
Above; Tom Thomson (1877-1917) died before the Group of Seven came into being, but his paintings of Ontario’s rugged beauty and stunning colour had been a major influence on its members. The Jack Pine: oil, 1916-17.
Facing; The art nouveau technique and graphic-arts experience of J. E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932) lent themselves brilliantly to patriotic poster-making. After the war MacDonald was a founder of the Group of Seven. Canada and the Call: gouache, 1914.
Facing: without stooping to mere propaganda, the Russian-born Paraskeva Clark (1898-1986) catches the Punch-and-Judy quality of the politicians’ response to the social crises of the 1930s. Petroushka: oil, 1937.
In a letter of 1941 or 1942,
Emily Carr (1871-1945) noted, “Today 1 have worked hard on a mysterious little bit, little round umbrella trees, spindly runts who grew up under forest giants that have been reduced to timber long ago.” Trees in the Sky: oil, c. 1939.
No painter has more imaginatively captured the unique quality of French-Canadian life than Jean-Paul Lemieux (b. 1904). Here war and peace, complacency and the miraculous, are all brought together in a droll yet utterly serious fashion. Lazare oil, 1941.
Smelter Stacks, Copper Cliff. Mining and smelting created whole new communities in the northern regions of most provinces. In this 1936 oil, artist Charles F. Comfort caught—perhaps unwittingly—both the majesty and the menace of the industry, in these pollutant-belching smokestacks near Sudbury.
The economy thus passed into the post-war years without any enormous dislocation, except in the maritime region. But there were serious problems in some sectors of an economy encumbered by heavy debt and dependent upon an often unpredictable international market. Indeed, it was the very openness of the economy that was both its strength and its weakness. Its openness and its changing nature were revealed when in 1926 the United States replaced Great Britain as the largest foreign investor in Canada. Less observed was the change from bonded debt in railways and manufacturing, to direct investment in mining, pulp and paper, petroleum, and other high-risk resource industries; bonded debt represented a repayable loan, direct investment meant ownership. Canada was not becoming less dependent on foreign money than in the past, but the altered terms under which the money was invested gradually drew the British Dominion more and more closely into the orbit of the United States.
World History
