Nova Scotia (43 page)

   
Activism on the part of industrial unions had grown
dramatically in the region since 1900. Strikes were often turbulent
and they were lengthy. One at the Springhill mine had lasted for
more than twenty-two months. Imagine how the miners in Cape Breton
felt in 1922 when BESCO announced they were ready to chop wages by
nearly forty percent. BESCO was also closing some of its steel
plants (including one in Sydney Mines) and wanted to trim the
number of workers and wages in its mines. In June of 1922, Cape
Breton UMW members saw a cataclysmic disaster ahead. They were good
and riled and went so far as to call for the “complete overthrow of
the capitalist system and capitalist state.” By August, “Red” Dan
Livingstone and J.B. McLachlan had their men looking as if they
were ready for just that as they went on strike.

   
One Member of Parliament reported to Prime Minister Mackenzie
King that people were “in terror of revolution.” Five hundred
troops had already pulled in from Halifax and Quebec to subdue the
radicals. Five hundred more, as well as a thousand police, were on
hand, and some influential advisers to government were suggesting
that British warships should be brought into Sydney Harbour just in
case things became really ugly.  

   
This time around, however, there was very little violence.
Red Dan signed a deal, “under muzzle of rifles, machine guns and
gleaming bayonets,” calling for a wage cut of twenty percent
instead of what BESCO had proposed.

   
Another strike broke out in 1923 as the steel workers fought
to regain lost wages. The miners voted to support the strike after
they had seen the troops arrive again and the provincial police
lead a charge on horseback against the citizens of the Whitney Pier
area. Livingstone and McLachlan were arrested for “seditious
libel.”

   
There was yet another strike in 1924 when BESCO called for a
further twenty percent loss of wages and a strike again in 1925.
These were turbulent, heady times for Cape Bretoners, who were
tired of being beaten down. In the intense strike of 1925, fighting
broke out again and again between miners and company cops and
nearly 2,000 troops were brought in to keep a lid on things.
Grievances between miners and the government, the police, the
military and the company would be deep-seated as the result of the
tension during these times.

   
While the miners proved themselves to be dedicated and
vigilant when it came to protecting their rights and their wages,
there were no clear winners. The life of a miner and his family
would continue to be a struggle. BESCO itself was in a deep
financial mire before 1926 and the company was out of business by
1930. Dawn Fraser, a Cape Breton poet of the time, had this to say
about the death of BESCO: “may Satan’s imps attend your hearse –
adieu, adieu Cape Breton’s curse.” *

In 1926, Mackenzie King finally
decided that the Maritimes really did have some special problems
and the serious disadvantages should be addressed. He appointed
Andrew Rae Duncan to head a royal commission and look into the
mess. As a result of his commission Duncan suggested reform – a
twenty percent reduction in freight tariffs, federal subsides for
coal, steel and to the provinces themselves, along with financial
assistance in developing the ports. John G. Reid notes that it was
a fine-sounding proposal but that King and his cabinet had created
it as pretty window-dressing and nothing significant came of it.
i

The Prophet of
Co-operation

The Twenties were a rough time for
Nova Scotia. In many ways, the quality of life diminished as
control over the economy moved out of the province. The union
movement brought new militancy out of self-defence, but it also
helped to draw a hard line between economic classes. On the other
hand, the sense of regional unity had been sparked by the political
and economic hammering that the province was taking, and it would
be a basis for a revitalized identity reminiscent of
pre-Confederation times.

   
One labour-related crusade that was to have a lasting impact
on the region was the Antigonish Movement, led by a Catholic
priest, Moses Coady. Coady saw that farmers and fishermen were
being taken advantage of in their business dealings and wanted to
help educate rural Nova Scotians to have more control over their
own economic and social well-being. In 1928, Coady began to spread
the word of co-operation through self-help groups. Co-ops were set
up around the province for housing, consumer goods and medical
concerns. Coady was a fiery, dedicated leader who argued that
“Co-operation is the only means in our day through which the masses
of people can again have a say in the economic
processes.”

   
Fishermen and farmers organized to create their own marketing
organizations so that they had more say over the price they would
receive for their harvest. Some saw Coady as radical and dangerous
T– after all, this was a kind of “communism.” But his approach was
down-to-earth and practical and he won over many converts to his
co-op way of thinking. Community education was at the heart of the
movement and Coady was bolstered in his efforts by the even more
“radical” priest Jimmy Tompkins, who created Canada’s first
co-operative housing project outside Reserve Mines, Cape Breton, in
1935. He also helped establish credit unions and libraries to
advance the cause.

   
The co-ops grew and became well-established and helped many
Nova Scotians through the critical rough times of the Thirties and
on into the 1940s. Coady went on to establish the Nova Scotia
Teachers’ Union and, in 1930, the United Maritime Fishermen’s
Co-operative. Soon after his death in 1959, workers from the Coady
Institute at St. Francis Xavier University were travelling to
poorer countries around the world, spreading the methods that had
proved so successful in a poverty-stricken Nova
Scotia.

Living on a Dollar a
Month

The 1930s was the decade of the
Great Depression across North America, one that Nova Scotians had
already experienced in a head start. Trying to protect their jobs,
the Americans closed down the border to Nova Scotian immigrants
looking for work, so now there would be no new money sent back home
from the Boston States to help support families in the villages and
outports. Within the province, the politicians who fared best were
those who argued that they could do the most with the least. This
was more the skill of the illusionist, not the realist.

   
Nearly every sector of industry was headed for the basement,
and jobs vaporized. Between 1929 and 1933 the forestry business
plummeted down seventy-five percent, fishing production was cut in
half and the value of farming goods produced decreased by nearly
forty percent. The need for coal was cut nearly in half and the
steel industry fell by a whopping sixty-two
percent.

   
Nova Scotia was reduced to a bare-bones economy and the
system wasn’t ready to cope with the needs of the unemployed and
their destitute families. Relief responsibility for all the victims
of the economic crash fell not to the province or the federal
government but to local levels of government. As a result, there
were insane discrepancies in the relief money available from one
town to the next. A relatively prosperous town such as Amherst
doled out a hefty $5.70 per month (close to the Canadian average)
to its 2,000 impoverished residents in 1933. If you lived in a
poorer neighbourhood, like Guysborough, for example, you’d be lucky
to receive Q$1 per month, although during many months there was
nothing at all to offer to the most poor.

   
Those who still had an income to pay taxes were fearful that
there was something intrinsically wrong with somebody getting
something for nothing, even if it was a scant amount that barely
allowed for survival. As a result, work programs were instituted
for those on relief, forcing them to cut wood as fuel for their
tax-paying neighbours. In the cities they might labour on new
streets or public building projects.

   
One of the more innovative and practical efforts to help out
the destitute was a back-to-the-land movement. In 1932, Nova Scotia
commandeered about 600 unused farms and allowed poor families to
take them over as a means of supporting themselves. Two-thirds of
these families had stayed with their farms by 1938, but in the end
only twenty-four families were allowed to gain title to the land,
having fulfilled their obligations to the
province.

   
Everybody was hurting for money and work was scarce. The Nova
Scotian Mi’kmaq people, who had been robbed of their lands and
deprived of traditional hunting and fishing grounds, lived through
desperate times as the poorest of the poor. Nova Scotian Blacks
found themselves victimized anew as poor whites went looking for
scapegoats to blame for their sorry situation. In 1937, a mob of
400 white Nova Scotians in Trenton demolishend a Black family’s
home that they claimed was in a “white neighbourhood.” This
despicable act of violent racism resulted in only one arrest: the
Black man who owned the destroyed house was accused of assaulting a
white woman as he defended his home.

War to the Rescue

Once again, war was good news of
sorts for Nova Scotians when it was declared in September of 1939.
Halifax would be open for business in a big way and spin-offs would
be felt in small towns around the province. The Thirties were a
time of great despair for a large chunk of the North American
population, but Nova Scotians were painfully aware that, for them,
things had been even worse. Confederation and the loss of
traditional sea links and self-reliant avenues of living had left
all of Nova Scotia in a highly vulnerable position. None of the
efforts of the federal government had been able to heal the wounds
of the loss. As the province climbed up out of the economic abyss,
a dispassionate observer might well predict that the boom cycle of
war could only be temporary. After that, would anything be
different? Was there any way back to a future that re-established
the prosperity that had come with sailing ships and global sea
trade?

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

A City Stretched to Its
Limits

In 1941, Admiral S.S. Bonham-Carter
called Halifax “probably the most important port in the world.”
Perhaps that would be stretching the truth a little, but Halifax
had certainly come a long way from its early days of obscurity and
insignificance. War had always brought the city back to life and
back to work. It also brought with it new demands and new problems
to go along with the profits to be reaped by the legitimate and
illegitimate profiteers. The Second World War proved no
exception.

   
More than any city in Canada, Halifax had a direct connection
to the war in Europe. In the British press, Halifax might simply be
referred to as “An Eastern Canadian Port” or in Canada, “An East
Coast Port,” as if to mask the exact location of military action
involving shipping across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, Germany was
well aware of what was going on in Halifax, and for some
Haligonians the vulnerability of the city to actual enemy attack
was a daily concern, if not a reality.

   
Halifax was in need of a good war, if things were going to
improve. The after-effects of the explosion of 1917 and economic
depression of recent years had taken their toll on the city.
Halifax was on a downhill slide from the glory days in the past.
Historian Graham Metson points out that Halifax “was no longer the
wild free city of the nineteenth century.” It was both “poor and
puritan,” perhaps the most unhappy of combinations. There was a
lack of everything, including entertainment and lodging. To such a
sad city would arrive thousands of soldiers and seamen, all getting
ready to go off to war. The government in Ottawa didn’t seem to
have a handle on the situation at all, as they were more interested
in moving the men in and moving them out. It would have been
logical to treat Halifax as if it was actually in the war zone, a
unique situation unlike any other place in Canada. But that was not
the case. If things were less than perfect for servicemen and
citizens in Halifax, they would just have to chalk it up to the
inconveniences of wartime. Everything would be strained beyond
limits, including puritanical notions.

Overcrowded and Out of
Sorts

Civilians, among them families of
the servicemen, flooded into the city. Almost overnight, the
population had doubled to 100,000. There were traffic problems in
the harbour, in the air and on the potholed Halifax streets. There
were line-ups for everything from food to entertainmnent. One
concert at the Forum drew a line-up described as “a mile long and
four people deep.”

   
One of the hotels in town had converted the ground-floor
ladies’ lounge into a dormitory with nearly fifty beds, where you
could rent a cot for $2.25 a night. Halifax Mayor Donovan blamed
much of the problem on the wives and families of military men. He
wished they had the good sense to let their men go off to war and
not try to tag along as far as they could to the furthest port –
Halifax.

   
F.B. Watt, in writing about the Merchant Navy, described
Halifax as “an overcrowded hellhole.” Beyond shoving everyone into
every nook and corner, makeshift shacks were thrown together in
parks and on the edge of the city. Halifax was a sad, depressing
place and for those who saw her only briefly during these years it
left an indelible impression as a place you would never want to
return to.