The Great Depression (19 page)

“The time to put out the fire is before the conflagration,” he said. “These men, professional agitators, have been travelling up and down the country … setting class against class … stirring up strife.”

In his summing up, Mr. Justice Wright took a similar view. The Communist party itself, he indicated, was on trial, and the question was “whether it shall be allowed to grow and flourish on Canadian soil.” He believed the testimony of Leopold, who had sworn that the party intended to overthrow the existing system in the country by force. The other witnesses, he indicated, were less objective and therefore less credible. “If you think force and violence a logical, natural result of their teachings,” he told the jurors, they must agree that the accused were “advocating, advising and defending force and violence for the overthrow of governmental and industrial institutions.” It didn’t matter whether the revolution was a long way off. “It is not a question of time but a question of the intent of their teachings.…”

As for the controversial Section 98, “whether it is harsh or not it is the law.” The judge made it clear where he stood on the controversy. “Is it unreasonable to prohibit force and violence, and does it seem very natural in a free country that changes in government or institutions shall be achieved, not by force and violence, but by pleading and reason and argument?”

Then he turned to the third count against the accused – seditious conspiracy – and bore down on the Criminal Code’s definition of sedition, emphasizing one clause that made it seditious to excite “ill will between different classes of the King’s subjects.” The judge asked, “In a democratic country like this, where the proletarian of today may be the bourgeois of tomorrow … is it just and proper to set one of these classes against the other?” The question was, of course, rhetorical.

The conclusion was foregone, as Cohen had predicted. The jury found the eight defendants guilty on all counts with no recommendations or reservations. Thus Canada became the first country with parliamentary institutions, apart from Japan, to outlaw communist organizations and to declare their property, belongings, and facilities subject to confiscation.

The sentences were extraordinarily harsh. Seven of the eight were sentenced to five years at hard labour on the first two counts and two years, to be served concurrently, on the third – seditious conspiracy. One man, Tomo Cacic, was sentenced to two years only. On appeal, the Chief Justice, the same William Mulock who had that year called communism “a treasonable, seditious virus,” upheld the first two verdicts against the seven but quashed the third as insufficiently stated. It didn’t matter to the prisoners, who would have to serve their five years in Kingston Penitentiary anyway because the sentences were concurrent.

The Prime Minister was determined that the guilty men would serve every day of their sentence with no hope of parole or pardon. No doubt he felt that he had contained the Red Menace and the turbulence that had marred his first year in office would end. If so, it was wishful thinking. The party was hydra-headed, and its front organizations became more active than ever. The jailing of Tim Buck and the others had not in any sense put a damper on the party. It had, instead, given it new life and energy by providing it with a group of martyrs and a rallying point on which to focus.

Once again as the New Year dawned, everybody from the mayor of Winnipeg to the vice-president of the CNR announced that the worst was over. “Canada has survived the crisis,” the Prime Minister declared. One might have expected him to bring some new eloquence to his optimistic remarks, but no, he was content to dust off the old saw about economic conditions being “fundamentally sound.” He clearly loved that time-worn phrase, loved its solidity, loved its reassuring ring, loved it so much, indeed, that he inserted it in the Throne Speech in February. And why not? Hadn’t Roger Babson, the man who had predicted the market crash, announced that “the Depression is in retreat”?

This time the great seer was wrong. Those who had been living on their savings and avoiding relief were coming to the end of their resources, unable to spend a nickel on new clothes and certainly not on repairs to their homes. In Halifax, to take a horrible example, 192 houses had been condemned, yet 370 families who couldn’t afford better shelter were crowded into them; and the authorities were loath to throw them out. Another 1,273 houses that should have been condemned were reprieved because the Board of Health optimistically claimed they could be brought up to standard. But who could afford to do it? As many as seven families would save money by crowding into quarters designed for far fewer, using a common sink in the hallway and climbing several flights of stairs to get water. More than 11,000 men, women, and children in that city were exposed to substandard sanitary conditions. But it was cheaper for the municipal governments to wink at health rules than it was to force people out and onto relief. Public charity was seen as a last resort. Few wanted to accept it; no level of government was anxious to pay for it.

The haphazard means of administration of relief in Canada – a patchwork quilt of provincial, municipal, and private charities – was based on the British Poor Laws of the nineteenth century. These were designed to make public aid so unpleasant that only the desperate would resort to it. The conventional Victorian attitude was that idleness was a sin and that those who didn’t work (the leisure classes excepted) were morally weak or lazy. R.B. Bennett echoed this obsolete attitude when he declared that year
that “the people are not bearing their share of the load. Half a century ago people would work their way out of their difficulties rather than look to a government to take care of them. The fibre of some of our people has grown softer and they are not willing to turn in and save themselves.”

The puritanical ethic to which the Prime Minister subscribed decreed that people should be made to work for relief. But the municipal make-work programs were rarely successful because they were so wasteful. To stretch the job, picks and shovels replaced labour-saving machinery – as in an Ontario project where relief applicants were put to work levelling a knoll and filling in a hollow.

Payments for relief work were parsimonious, covering only the barest necessities. An applicant was required to prove his family was close to destitution before he could get help. In many communities, he had to turn in his liquor permit. In some he was forced to sell his car. Even a telephone in the home could make him ineligible.

Because the municipalities were still convinced that the crisis was seasonal, those men lucky enough to get this work were laid off in the summer. Nor was there enough relief work for all. In Toronto, the average relief applicant got only one week’s work in eight, hardly enough to support a single man, let alone a family. Some could afford neither boots nor work clothing; others were so undernourished they didn’t have the energy to lift a shovel. If they weren’t British, their chances of getting relief work were low. In Toronto, no unnaturalized foreigner could even apply for relief. Transients, of course, got nothing because they had no claim on any municipality. If they stayed around for more than a day they were charged with vagrancy and booted out of town. Residence requirements grew tougher; in some towns, a family had to spend a year in the area before its members were designated “residents” and allowed public aid.

Some went to extreme lengths to overcome that problem. In Vancouver, an aging character known as “Happy” Dunning persuaded a friendly policeman to arrest him for vagrancy. In court, he pleaded with the magistrate to send him to jail for thirty days. He needed the extra month, he explained, to establish a year’s residence in the city, after which he could apply for relief. “I’ve seen tough times before,” he told the court, “but you could always
make out by moving on. Now every place you go is worse than the last one, and there’s nothing else but jail and then
pogey
”

In spite of these conditions, no one – and certainly not the government – really knew how many people were out of work or who they were. That failure was underscored by the publication that September of the only comprehensive study to be undertaken until the end of the decade. It was sponsored not by the government but by the private sector and confined to the province of Ontario.

This was the survey that Dr. Harry Cassidy, one of the founding members of the League for Social Reconstruction, had begun in 1931 for the Unemployment Research Committee. Cassidy, at thirty-two, was at the top of his field, a cheerful academic, full of energy and drive. A trained economist, he was also an idealist. He had returned to Canada from a teaching position in the United States because, he said, he wanted to “play some part in the social engineering that is essential to the development … of a worthwhile culture.” Like most of his colleagues in the LSR – Underhill, Scott, and others – he was a man in search of a new political movement. During the 1930 election campaign he had been sickened by politicians clinging to past glories and ignoring current problems. “Bennett invokes shades of Sir John A. and his National Policy,” he wrote to his wife. “I think it is a disgusting performance – with Bennett being inane and silly most of the time and King being dishonest.”

In March 1932, W.F. Nickle, the honorary chairman of the committee, sent an outline of Cassidy’s report and then the manuscript to his friend the Prime Minister, praising the research and suggesting that it could be of “great value to you by way of giving a lead in public opinion.” It’s doubtful whether Bennett ever read it. Certainly he ignored it. For Cassidy’s findings challenged some widely held myths – those to which Bennett himself subscribed.

Unemployment, Cassidy reported, was a “virulent social disease” that was eating away at the country’s morale and undermining the confidence of the people, who were living in “hopeless despair” and had developed a bitter attitude towards established institutions. The problem wasn’t seasonal and couldn’t be solved by emergency measures. In many ways, Cassidy indicated, the dole was preferable to the wasteful and inefficient system of municipal make-work. Cassidy’s statistics on industrial
unemployment were the first to be published in Canada after three years of depression, and they were shocking. From a 1929 low of 2 per cent the jobless rate in Ontario had risen to a staggering 36 per cent.

Nor were Cassidy’s solutions designed to give Bennett any comfort, for they would cost more money. Cassidy saw the problem as a national one, with Ottawa taking the major share of the responsibility and instituting a comprehensive and generous plan to deal with unemployment. Small wonder that Bennett ignored his report.

Yet it was already apparent, by the spring of 1932, that the government’s relief policy wasn’t working. The provinces could not afford to subsidize any more public works, and so Bennett, who had roared into power by promising never to adopt the hated dole, was now forced to reverse himself and institute a policy of direct relief. He attempted to blunt the effects of that embarrassment by making the provinces and municipalities responsible for spending the money. Ottawa retained its hands-off policy.

Under municipal management, spending continued to be niggardly, as the Red Cross discovered in Ontario. Those on relief received scrip or vouchers that allowed them to buy groceries – but only certain prescribed items. In one city, relief recipients weren’t allowed to buy tomatoes with their scrip; in another, spices and seasonings were excluded. Eggs were generally taboo, and in one city in the heart of the dairy district, milk was denied except to infants and invalids. Another town, using the government scale of relief allowances, preferred to earn a cent a quart on relief milk rather than pass the savings on to the jobless. One stingy community penalized families of more than five by holding them to a weekly spending allowance of twenty-five cents per person. If anyone earned more than a dollar a week, that sum was deducted from the family’s food allowance.

Medical aid was almost non-existent. In one Winnipeg area, as James Gray pointed out in
The Winter Years
, one relief doctor served sixteen thousand patients, and there was no dentist. Gray and his family got vouchers for food, fuel, and rent only – nothing for tobacco, cigarette papers, toothpaste, razor blades, lipstick, face powder, aspirin, streetcar fare, or a haircut, let alone movies or newspapers. And, of course, any recipient seen at the racetrack was cut off immediately.

With Cassidy’s research gathering dust on his desk, Bennett turned to another, more formidable social worker in the person of Charlotte Whitton, the full-time director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare. He considered her “the most capable woman engaged in social welfare in the Dominion.” She was short and stubby, possessed of a caustic wit, a fiery temper, and inexhaustible energy – a “young cyclone,” in the description of a friend.

Whitton was a woman with a mission. There was a bulldog set to her features and a bulldog tenaciousness to her character. Social workers were a new presence in Canada, and she was determined to make that presence a powerful one. The best way to achieve the goal was to wrest control of the relief machinery from the bureaucrats and turn it over to professionals like herself. To that end she proposed to the Prime Minister that she take three months off from her job and study unemployment relief in the West. She was convinced that untrained political hacks were costing the government millions through waste and inefficiency and that large numbers of people – long-term indigents, for example – were getting money specifically earmarked for Depression relief that ought to come out of another pocket.

This is what Bennett wanted to hear; it wasn’t lack of government money, as Cassidy had suggested, that was causing the problem, it was the way the money was handled. The Prime Minister gave his enthusiastic consent, whereupon Whitton immediately set off on a whirlwind tour that, in three months, covered no fewer than eighty-five separate communities with names like Pipestone, Aneroid, Yellow Grass, Blairmore, Sicamous, Comox, Alert Bay, Gimli, and Dauphin. She scarcely stopped to draw breath as she hustled from one community to the next, jaw set, brows knit, fiery red hair trimmed by the barber’s scissors, questioning, questioning, questioning in her raspy voice and scratching it all down in her notebooks. Years later, she would bring that same unsparing vigour to her several tempestuous terms as mayor of Ottawa.