The Great Depression (12 page)

But Bennett remained convinced that the country could not afford to feed and clothe more thousands, that the Depression would melt away with the snows in spring. No amount of evidence appeared to change his view. A few months later, Harry Stevens sent him some revealing photographs showing groups of jobless men crouched against the rain in makeshift shelters on vacant waterfront property in Vancouver.

Bennett shot back an answer by return mail. His smug reply reveals the antiquity of his social philosophy. The Depression by then was almost two years old, and still the Prime Minister of Canada remained unconvinced of its seriousness. On the contrary, he appears to have persuaded himself that his government’s hasty measures had solved the crisis and that any man who really wanted work could find it. How else to explain his words to Stevens? “I thank you for the photographs you were good enough to send me showing how the unemployed housed themselves on the waterfront in Vancouver.
Surely our unemployment relief measures will rectify conditions for those who are anxious to obtain work”
(emphasis added).

Harry Stevens’s reaction to this extraordinary response can only be guessed at. He didn’t bother to reply.

For all of 1931, R.B. Bennett tried to pretend that the Depression didn’t exist. That summer he dispatched his lean, aging Minister of Labour, Senator Gideon Robertson, on a fact-finding tour across the West. But in spite of what Robertson saw and what he was told, he remained remarkably obtuse, bolstering the Prime Minister’s own view that Western M.P.s were “blackening Canada’s character” by talking about hard times.

At fifty-seven, Robertson was not the ideal choice for the labour portfolio. A former trade union leader, he was pilloried as a turncoat by the Left because of his ruthless intervention in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The radicals called him “that skunk Robertson.” In the upper house he had thwarted almost single-handed Mackenzie King’s attempts to have the infamous Section 98 withdrawn from the Criminal Code. Imposed as a result of the Winnipeg General Strike, the measure gave the authorities the power to jail anybody who attended a meeting of any organization that advocated change by violence of the system of government. It would shortly be used to imprison Canadians for their beliefs.

Robertson began his tour in Vancouver. There he encountered the remarkable Andrew Roddan, minister of First United Church in the heart of the city’s rundown East End. Roddan was doing his best to feed the jobless, the numbers in the daily bread lines at his Church of the Open Door running to more than twelve hundred. That year he ministered to the needs of some fifty thousand homeless men.

Roddan told the labour minister that conditions in the East End “jungles” were worse than they had been in Russia. He had been reading about the Soviet Union and “had not seen any picture or read any story that equalled [Vancouver’s] conditions as a breeding place for bolshevism.” Roddan painted a hideous picture of life that month at the corner of Prior and Campbell. A hundred men were sleeping in shacks made of bits of tin and wood, auto hoods, old car bodies, signs, and scraps of cloth found on a nearby dump. He found men sleeping in the rain among rats “as big as kittens,” and foraging alongside them for scraps of discarded food. Water for washing and drinking came from a
stagnant pool. But Robertson, in Roddan’s view, didn’t “seem able to grasp the seriousness of the situation.” In fact, the senator announced that conditions weren’t as bad as he’d feared – this in spite of his own statistics that twenty thousand jobless men were now congregated in the city, many of them transients.

When he reached Alberta, where the unemployed figure had already hit ten thousand, the senator remained determinedly cheerful. Conditions were improving, he told the Edmonton Canadian Club; Canada, he predicted, would be the first country to recover from the slump.

There was only one problem: the transients. The government was pretending that unemployment relief was a municipal, not a national, responsibility. But the tens of thousands of young Canadians criss-crossing the country on freight trains exploded that fiction: the municipalities couldn’t afford to feed the hordes passing through and didn’t feel responsible for them. Robertson saw this mass movement as a serious menace to public safety. In spite of the solid middle-class credentials of the occasional transient he encountered – one turned out to be the son of an old friend, another a high school gold medallist – he was convinced that the boxcars were crammed with communists and foreigners. His solution was threefold: get the railways to clamp down on those riding the freights; get the transients out of sight in semi-military work camps; and deport those “aliens who are spreading dissension.” If that were done, the municipalities could look after their own – or so the senator believed.

He was brought up short when he travelled south to Regina and Southern Saskatchewan and saw the effects of the two-year-old drought. For the first time he seemed to grasp the magnitude of the country’s plight. Robertson, who had lived twenty-five years in Western Canada, could scarcely believe what he saw. A third of all the municipalities in the south of the province had suffered crop failures. Seventy-five were hopelessly in debt. The whole region, stretching for one hundred miles, a shocked Robertson told the Prime Minister, “is a barren drifting desert, with no vegetation in sight and water supply is almost wholly exhausted.… This scene of desolation beggars description, and in areas populated by roughly 150,000 persons, it is inevitable that there can be no crops whatever this year, and that feed and fuel will have to be supplied if the people are to be preserved.…”

The water shortage was devastating. Farmers had to travel as far as twenty miles to haul brackish and muddy water from the expiring sloughs for drinking and washing. Few could afford gas or oil for their trucks, and the underfed horses were often too weak to make many journeys. Thus water had to be hoarded like gold; families were forced to endure the blazing heat of summer without taking a bath, and even the water they used to clean their hands had to be strained and saved, first to wash clothes and finally to scrub floors.

The farm people lived on a monotonous diet of stewed jack rabbit and boiled Russian thistle. They had no potatoes because the crop had failed, no milk because the cows had been sold for lack of feed, no green vegetables because the garden seeds refused to germinate.

And the wind! As a survivor of the drought later told Barry Broadfoot, “The wind blew all the time, from the four corners of the world.… I could go about 10 feet beyond the house fence and pick up a clod of dirt, as big as this fist. I’d lay it on my hand and you could see the wind picking at it. Pick, pick, pick. Something awful about it. The dry dust would just float away, like smoke.… I used to say the wind would polish your hand shiny if you left it out long enough. You’ve got to understand, this was no roaring wind. It was just a wind, blowing all the time, steady as a rock.

“That dirt which blew off my hand, that wasn’t dirt, mister. That was my land, and it was going south into Montana or north up towards Regina or east or west and it was never coming back. The land just blew away.”

Even before Robertson returned to Ottawa, the Canadian Red Cross had organized a national appeal to aid the 125,000 destitute farm people in Southern Saskatchewan. The response, especially from Ontario, was heartwarming and helped bring about a rapprochement between East and West. The farm families would long remember the hundreds of tons of clothing, collected by the churches, that arrived washed, pressed, and packed in 247 freight cars. The children would never forget the first tinned fruit and fresh apples they’d seen in two years. Only the salt cod from the Maritimes baffled the prairie people; much of it was wasted because no one had explained it must be soaked and desalted.

In Winnipeg, Robertson received an eloquent presentation from D.J. Allan, reeve of Kildonan, who insisted that fifteen
million dollars would have to be spent on public works in Greater Winnipeg to provide for the jobless. “It is true,” the reeve declared, “that it would mean mortgaging our future, but better that than to starve the present generation.” He then put into words what a lot of Canadians were thinking – a sentiment that Vancouver’s council had voiced on New Year’s Eve: “In a country with full elevators and granaries, with its factories and industries suffering from overproduction of goods, with wealth in goods and wealth in money, it is unthinkable that we can let our people go hungry without the comfort of a fire or stay out of school for lack of shoes and clothing, and this is happening and will happen in greater degree unless some immediate relief is given.”

Winnipeg’s hard-nosed mayor, Ralph Webb, had blunter proposals, which coincided with the senator’s own views: put the transients to work building the Trans-Canada Highway, kick out “all foreign agitators and undesirables,” and ban the communist newspaper, the
Worker
.

Back in Ottawa in July, Robertson told the Prime Minister that the Depression was only temporary and that “perhaps next year with any kind of luck we may be out of it.” More than luck would be needed. Bennett knew he would have to do something about the victims of the drought and also about the transients. Since he had pledged that he would never allow the dole, he would have to find work for the jobless. But, like King before him, he shrank from making any form of public welfare a federal responsibility.

His election rhetoric returned to haunt him. He was conscious that in Calgary he had declared in a ringing voice that relief was no longer a local problem but had become “national in importance.” He had chided King for pretending otherwise. Now he was forced into a position where he would have to advance a hefty share of federal money because scores of Canadian municipalities and one entire province – Saskatchewan – were too poor to shoulder the burden. He dodged part of the responsibility by insisting that the provinces should distribute the money through independent relief commissions. Relief camps for single men would also be run by the provinces, again with some federal help. British Columbia jumped at his offer and set up twenty-seven camps to provide for 18,340 men – a scheme marked by ineptitude, blatant patronage, and even fraud.

In mid-September, the federal government announced a comprehensive program to deal with unemployment by undertaking “the construction of useful public works.” Ottawa had no intention of initiating any of these; again, that would be up to the provinces and municipalities. But because the government would deal only with the provinces, a good deal of red tape would have to be cut before the municipalities could get at the money. They must prove that the works were actually contributing to unemployment relief; no other capital expenditure was eligible for federal grants. That meant that no province, city, or town could put a spade into the ground or turn a wheel and expect Ottawa’s help until the project was approved. By the time the programs got under way in November, the hardest-hit provinces were in the grip of winter and little outdoor work could be done until the following spring.

Hard times were becoming harsh times. Crime and violence, starvation and despair, repression and brutality were the visible signs of the government’s reluctance to cope with unemployment. When, in June, Dr. T.F. Donnelly, a Saskatchewan M.P., produced a telegram in the House with the shocking news that fifteen farm families in his drought-ridden constituency were literally starving to death, the Prime Minister replied, as usual, that this was not a federal responsibility. R.C. Vooght, the despondent manager of a Camrose, Alberta, lumberyard, didn’t wait to starve. When his business failed, Vooght shot and killed his wife and two daughters, then drowned himself in a nearby lake.

An unprecedented wave of bank holdups swept the country – five in Winnipeg alone in less than a year – and brought brutal penalties. In February, a sixteen-year-old boy who held up a bank at Fort Frances was strapped to an iron rack, lashed twenty times on his back with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and given five years in prison for stealing $540. The sentence provoked no editorial comment but did inspire a protest from J.S. Woodsworth, one of the few politicians who regularly denounced such practices. “Canadians will not stand for this kind of thing,” Woodsworth declared, but of course Canadians did. The Great Repression was well under way.

The country that had once invited Eastern Europeans to hew wood and haul water on the Western plains now wanted to send them all home. Elizabeth Penner, who came to Canada in 1925 and later went to the United States to take nurse’s training, was one who was held at the border. It took three months and hard lobbying before the immigration department relented and let her back in. A Polish settler who had worked hard to earn a good living was told he couldn’t bring his sweetheart to Canada because the government had tightened the law to prevent people from arriving for purposes of marriage.

In Toronto, members of the Communist party – or indeed any organization
thought
to be communist – were still being denied basic civil liberties by the police. In January, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a new group of Christian pacifists, decided to sponsor a Sunday debate in a local theatre on the resolution “that the Toronto Police Commission is justified in its present attitude in regard to free speech.” The head of the commission and the chief, Denny Draper, were invited to take the affirmative. The response to this even-handed invitation was extraordinary. The police not only refused to attend but also labelled the event “a communistic meeting under thin disguise” and threatened the theatre owner with a five-thousand-dollar fine under Section 98 of the Criminal Code if he didn’t cancel the fellowship’s lease.