The Great Depression

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Nobody could tell exactly when it began and nobody could predict when it would end. At the outset, they didn’t even call it a depression. At worst it was a recession, a brief slump, a “correction” in the market, a glitch in the rising curve of prosperity. Only when the full import of those heartbreaking years sank in did it become the Great Depression – Great because there had been no other remotely like it and (please God!) there would never be anything like it again.

In retrospect, we see it as a whole – as a neat decade tucked in between the Roaring Twenties and the Second World War, perhaps the most significant ten years in our history, a watershed era that scarred and transformed the nation. But it hasn’t been easy for later generations to comprehend its devastating impact. The Depression lies just over the hill of memory; after all, anyone who reached voting age in 1929 is over eighty today. There are not very many left who can remember what it was like to live on water for an entire day, as the Templeton family did in the Parkdale district of Toronto in 1932, or how it felt to own only a single dress – made of flour sacks – as Etha Munro did in the family farmhouse on the drought-ravaged Saskatchewan prairie in 1934.

The statistics of those times are appalling. At the nadir of the Depression, half the wage earners in Canada were on some form of relief. One Canadian in five was a public dependant. Forty per cent of those in the workforce had no skills; the average yearly income was less than five hundred dollars at a time when the poverty line for a family of four was estimated at more than twice that amount.

This army of the deprived was treated shabbily by a government that used words like “fiscal responsibility” and “a sound dollar” as excuses to ignore human despair. Balancing the budget was more important than feeding the hungry. The bogey of the deficit was enlisted to tighten the purse strings.

R.B. Bennett, who presided over the five worst years of the Depression, said he was determined to preserve the nation’s credit “at whatever sacrifice.” But the burden of that sacrifice did not fall on the shoulders of Bennett or his equally parsimonious opponent, Mackenzie King. It fell on those who, in spite of the politicians’ assurances to the contrary, were starving and naked – on the little girl in Montreal who fainted one day in school because, as her teacher discovered, it wasn’t her turn for breakfast that morning; on another little girl in Alberta who could go to school only on those days when it was her turn to wear “the dress”; on the Ottawa landlord who collapsed in the street from hunger because none of his tenants had been able to pay their rent; on the New Brunswick father who awoke one cold winter night in a house without fuel to check on his three-month-old baby, only to find her frozen to death.

The most shocking statistic of all reveals that the federal government from 1930 to 1936 spent more of the taxpayers’ money to service the debt of the Canadian National Railways than it did to provide unemployment relief. That debt was the legacy of the great Canadian boom. The builders of the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific (not to mention the government’s own National Transcontinental), revered as audacious and far-seeing captains of industry, left a questionable legacy. The bondholders enjoyed a free ride on the backs of the people. Where was “fiscal responsibility” then? Without that burden of debt the government could have doubled its relief payments to every family in Canada.

Had there been no railway debt, would either Mackenzie King or R.B. Bennett have taken that more generous route? One doubts it. Neither had any co-ordinated plan of relief. Like the business leaders who backed them, they were convinced the Depression couldn’t last and so made no long-range plans to deal with the crisis. Planning, after all, was a dirty word in the thirties, a subversive notion that smacked of Soviet Russia.

Both the Liberal and the Conservative governments stumbled from crisis to crisis, adopting band-aid solutions that often became part of the problem. At every level of government the authorities attacked the symptoms and not the cause, trying vainly to hold down the lid on the bubbling kettle of protest. If single transients clog the streets of the big cities – get them out of sight.
If radicals demand a better deal for the jobless – jail them. If “foreigners” ask for relief – deport them. If farmers stage hunger strikes – disperse them with police billies. At no time did those in charge consider the practical advantages of allowing the dispossessed to let off steam unmolested.

Every level of government tried to evade its responsibilities for the unemployed. Ottawa washed its hands of the problem, as Ottawa often does, and tried to lay it on the provinces. The provinces tried to lay it on the municipalities. The municipalities tried to lay it on the local taxpayers, who couldn’t cope with it because so many were themselves out of work. Then everybody – taxpayers, municipalities, and provinces – turned on Ottawa.

Relief was given grudgingly. The Calvinist work ethic belonged to an earlier century, but it lived on into the thirties. Conventional wisdom dictated that any healthy man could always find a job; that if he was idle, it was deliberate; that to ask for public charity was shameful; that those who got too much wouldn’t want to work. Thus, it was held, relief should provide no more than the bare necessities and should never approach the level of “real” wages.