The Great Depression (20 page)

Whitton had planned a short holiday in British Columbia but cancelled it because, as she told the Prime Minister, “I found things too upsetting, and demanding too much intensive effort to lose any time.” Reading her lengthy letters, written in flowing longhand, Bennett must have had some cause to regret his optimistic
New Year’s Day remarks, for she wrote: “I do not think that the East, blue as it feels, has any conception of what has happened and is happening financially in these western provinces.”

In Winnipeg, she reported, “things are bad and getting constantly worse.” Sixty new families a day were applying for relief, bringing the total to 5,670 when she arrived on June 16. The city was also caring for 3,200 homeless men and the “homeless girl problem is growing even worse than normal.” The transient problem, she warned Bennett, was “getting out of hand.” Whitton estimated that there were more than one hundred thousand roaming about Canada, and it concerned her that “a better class is joining them daily, and giving them leadership and organization.” The federal government must take hold, she wrote, “and ‘beat’ anyone else to organization.”

Again and again she hammered home her point – that because local relief spending was handled incompetently and carelessly, money could be saved if the federal government took over. “The more I see … of politics in the West the more I think there is danger as great in provincial relief.… What is bothering me is that all the West through there is impatience and annoyance that there is no ‘federal lead’.”

On the boat north from Victoria to Prince Rupert, she used her spare time to butter up the Prime Minister. She had risen at 6:30 on a cold morning, she wrote, to hear him open the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa. “Your splendid address came through wonderfully well, your voice was vibrant, strong, and unmistakeably young.… I could almost imagine the out thrust chin and frowning intensity which accompanied that delivery.… I got great pleasure out of some of those very neat phrases … that ‘driving clear channels through the stagnant streams’ of our trade was particularly happy.” It was hard to imagine the conference failing, she told him, “with you in the chair, and all the people through the West hanging suspended to this meeting as the force that will ‘bring us round the corner’.” Whitton’s flattery would prove as unavailing as Mrs. Bleaney’s predictions to Mackenzie King.

Obeisance paid, Whitton got down to facts. British Columbia, she reported, was in confusion. The government, knowing it was doomed in the following year’s provincial election, had ceased to
function and was breaking up. The municipalities were desperate. She forecast riots in Port Alberni where “people were actually without food.” Vancouver was facing a serious financial crisis. “The provincial crew … are trying to make ‘Ottawa’ the goat,” she told him; but the public wasn’t buying that, and “every effort in this direction only enhances your prestige.” Again she belaboured her one theme: there was “no central authority, plan or leadership within the provincial group.”

She did not tell him then – she saved it for her later report – of the graft and patronage that accompanied the setting up of relief camps for transient men in British Columbia. By shifting its responsibilities onto the shoulders of the province the federal government had invited trouble. British Columbia was fertile ground for boondoggle, corruption, and impropriety, and there was no lack of examples. The relative of one cabinet minister received an annual rent of seven thousand dollars when his property was used for a relief camp. In Mission, 104 carpenters were put on the payroll at four dollars a day each; an investigation revealed that all the work was done by four men. The government bought lumber from “friendly firms” at more than double the going rate. Tools had to be ordered by the dozen when only one or two were needed because “they did not break up the lot.” The big logging companies had offered to rent their own well-equipped camps at low rates, but the province refused. One lumber company executive of long experience told Whitton that he had never seen such “graft, extravagence [
sic
] and exploitation” as existed in the provincial camps. All this disturbing evidence supported her original thesis.

Whitton’s two-hundred-page report, written on her return, was predictable. Left in the hands of the provincial and municipal authorities, the relief system was in a mess – “potentially in Western Canada there could be nearly 1100 systems of relief.…” The ablest people in public life, she wrote, were at the federal level, the least able at the municipal; yet the most serious problem facing the country had been left to be administered by inexperienced municipal personnel who “would never be considered by even a small business for any responsible position calling for vision, energy and executive ability.…”

In one eloquent passage, she provided some insight into the psychological trauma of applying for unemployment relief. She
wrote of “the overbearing ignorance, abrupt roughness, discourtesy and general lack of consideration with which the unemployed are received in only too many relief offices; the dark, dingy, ramshackle quarters in old firehalls, basements, ramshackle buildings, etc., into which men and women must crowd and wait, often in long queues, standing against walls, herded indiscriminately; the routine mass treatment accorded the weary, unending, often ‘haggard’ lines can only darken despair already deep and desolate; can only wear down pride and self respect already endangered; can only lead to bitter, brooding resentment and determination to ‘beat the system’ that allows such things.”

Yet Charlotte Whitton was convinced that thousands were beating the system and getting relief to which they weren’t entitled. In her determination to convince Bennett that money could be saved by social workers at the federal level, she over-reached herself. To support her claim that local officials were inept, she estimated that an astonishing 40 per cent of those getting direct unemployment relief either didn’t need it or could be helped by other, more conventional means.

In Whitton’s remarkably callous view, no one should be given the dole unless it could be proved that his or her needs were a direct result of the Depression. Unemployed women of middle age who had never been steadily employed fitted her standard of ineligibility. “They present a problem at any time that should rest primarily upon local resources.” Deserted wives and single girls should be taught housework. Women on mothers’ allowances did not “form a justifiable charge.” The same was true of seasonal workers – trappers, farmers, and miners, especially in areas such as Cape Breton that had been depressed before the Depression. She conceded that their situation was pitiable but not “justifiably chargeable to direct relief.”

Whitton revealed her own Calvinist outlook (or paraphrased Bennett’s) when she wrote that there was less need for relief in the small towns and rural villages, where “life is characterized generally by a thrift and resourcefulness that has been a real factor in the sturdiness of Canada generally.” Unless it could be proved that a real emergency existed “there is grave danger of undermining the self reliance of what has always been perhaps the sturdiest group in the national character.”

The drought, she considered, was a different problem, a temporary one that would not be a drag on the public purse for very long. In a remarkably optimistic passage, she wrote that “there is every anticipation of early emergence from dependence on public aid, as soon as uncontrollable circumstances cease. Furniture, home and other resources have not been dissipated, nor faith lost in the possibility of future self-support. There is hope, determination, and full co-operation in regard to the future, and frequently a definite plan for repayment of relief extended.…” Those who had moved out of the drought areas were not eligible for relief but might be helped by “colonization aid” in their new communities.

“The Breed” (Whitton’s name for the mixed bloods and Métis) had always been a problem, her report noted, “and a menace both to the Indian and white races, with whom they mingle.” Since they had already suffered from a low standard of “living, health and morality” they should not be given the dole. Money should come out of another federal pocket and it should be “consistent with their normal needs and habits.” It was “inexcusable” to issue supplies such as sugar, coffee, canned goods, bacon, butter, corn syrup, dried or tinned foods and so on if these had never formed part of the staple diet. The implication here was that the dole should not be used to change the status quo. Those who were traditionally deprived must not be given an allowance that would help them escape from the cycle of poverty.

Whitton’s attitude to “foreigners” also reflected the general public view. There were too many on relief, she believed, and they were troublesome. “Language difficulties, their tendency to segregate, their corporate loyalties, their susceptibility to seditious propaganda, their known proclivity to hoard money, and the consequent difficulty of ascertaining their need of relief all greatly complicate an already difficult job.…”

Her solution to the problem of jobless hordes riding the freights was blunt, though not original: again, the federal government must assume responsibility; the military should take over. Every transient should be forced to register and carry a registration card in the nature of a passport. Homeless boys under eighteen would be placed in homes or given provincial relief along with young men between eighteen and twenty-five, with Ottawa paying
half. Those over twenty-five were to be confined in what Whitton called “concentration camps” – a word that Adolf Hitler had yet to redefine. Anyone who left these camps without permission would be denied relief; if he was found “riding the rails,” he would be handed over to the police. That was one of the few recommendations of the Whitton report that came into being, though the impetus was from another source.

What Whitton had actually recommended was that Ottawa should pare down the cost of the dole by throwing a good many relief expenditures on the provincial and municipal authorities she appeared to despise. Her report emphasized waste and extravagance at the lower levels of government, but there was precious little in it about human suffering. The effect on the Prime Minister was the very opposite of what she wanted. The report confirmed Bennett’s worst fears. The provinces were wasting Ottawa’s money, therefore Ottawa would give them less. But Bennett still had no intention of taking responsibility for the distribution of the dole, let alone hiring more social workers. He didn’t need
that
burden. Whitton had simply confirmed his own social and political philosophy – that it was time individual Canadians took responsibility for maintaining themselves. A balanced budget and a sound dollar – those were R.B. Bennett’s priorities. Massive relief expenditures were not part of his program.

The squeeze was being felt at every level that year. The federal government squeezed the provinces, the provinces squeezed the municipalities, and the municipalities squeezed the people. In January, for instance, Manitoba’s Minister of Public Works warned the city of Winnipeg that it must pare down its direct relief spending; if not, the province would start cutting back its share of the expenses to a third. Faced with that threat, the city made all recipients sign a note promising to pay back any funds they’d been given.

In Sudbury, one of several communities that urged the immediate deportation of all “undesirables,” civic workers had their wages cut, residence qualifications for relief were increased to a year, couples who had been married for less than six months were
cut off, and any person who could be shown to be domiciled elsewhere was denied aid.

Nobody wanted to pay for the rising cost of relief. On the one hand, the provinces were pleading with Bennett to increase Ottawa’s share of relief payments. On the other, many of his own supporters were urging him to decrease them. These penny-pinchers resorted to the outworn argument that relief sapped the spirit of enterprise. A special report prepared by a committee of the Canadian Bar Association deplored the encroachment of the state in the sphere of individual activity. The lawyers, meeting in Calgary in September, were told that unemployment was a problem for the private sector and that “the attempt to shift the burden to governments is bound to prove expensive to industry and to the public generally.”

The easiest way, and the most popular, to cut relief costs was to get rid of the foreigners and troublemakers. “Bohunks” and “Polacks,” to use the common expressions, were seen to be taking food from the mouths of the native born. Red agitators were stirring up trouble and threatening traditional Canadian values.

Bennett lived in terror that peace, order, and good government would be disrupted by a Soviet-style revolution. The extraordinary precautions he took before meeting a delegation of unemployed on March 3 illustrates a distrust bordering on paranoia. The meeting took place not in his office but on the steps of the Parliament Buildings, and, as always, its outcome was foreordained. Bennett, however, treated the encounter as he would have a military invasion. He actually had an armoured car circling Parliament Hill. He had armed policemen everywhere: fifty city police marching up and down Wellington Street in front of the Parliament Buildings, thirty-five more in a state of readiness at the police station, a detachment of the RCMP – a hundred strong – guarding the East and West blocks, another detachment of twenty-six RCMP on horseback held in reserve behind the Centre Block, and dozens of plainclothesmen mingling with the crowd. There he stood at the top of the stairs, a pugnacious figure – Bennett, the champion of law and order – ready to face his enemies and not give an inch. The outcome of this “Chicago-like flaunting of firearms,” as the Ottawa
Journal
called it, was anti-climactic. The jobless men presented their demands, Bennett bluntly refused them, and the delegation left peacefully.

Bennett’s view – that radicals and “foreigners” should be sent back to Russia, or wherever it was they came from – was the view of the majority. In the worst years of the Depression from 1930 to 1935, Canada deported more than twenty-eight thousand men and women either because they were radicals or because they made the mistake of asking for relief. Unless they were naturalized citizens they had no chance; they were hustled aboard steamships leaving for the old country, often secretly and with no right of appeal.