The Great Depression (7 page)

Standing on the rock of the British North America Act, the Prime Minister told the delegates they must first go to their provinces for help; the federal government had no duty to assist the municipalities, which, he suggested, were simply being greedy.

Here was the crux of the problem. Canada’s unwieldy constitution divided responsibility in such a way that the destitute could not rely on help from anybody. Throughout the decade political leaders would lean on the BNA Act in order to pass the buck. If the provinces wanted help, King told the delegation, let them ask for it; but none had asked. The canny prime minister was well aware that any province that asked for government funds to pay for municipal relief would be forced to shoulder part of the
burden. That was why Simon Fraser Tolmie, the Premier of British Columbia, was disclaiming all responsibility for relief, and why Premier Howard Ferguson of Ontario was doing his best to discourage any municipal pleas for aid.

Though relief was traditionally accepted as a municipal problem, the burden was becoming unbearable. In Regina, to cite a typical situation, the weekly relief bill had soared from ten thousand dollars in December 1929 to a staggering forty thousand in January.

Returning empty-handed from Ottawa, Mayor Webb found his city faced on March 6 with a major communist demonstration. The bulk of the Winnipeg police force waded into the crowd with billies and struck down a number of demonstrators. Even the diminutive alderman Bill Kolisnyk, who was haranguing the meeting, was not spared. He was, after all, a Communist.

But policemen’s truncheons couldn’t crack the problem that Webb and the Western mayors faced. As they had discovered, few politicians or businessmen in the East had grasped the truth that the country was suffering from a depression that wouldn’t go away. The Prime Minister continued to think of the problem as seasonal. The only way to deal with it, he had told the delegates, was through a system of unemployment insurance. It was an easy out for King, since under the country’s awkward division of powers, unemployment insurance was a provincial responsibility. For the whole of the decade left-wing politicians, labour unions, social workers, some editorial writers, and even R.B. Bennett called for unemployment insurance with no result. It wasn’t just the constitutional roadblocks that stood in the way; it was also the knowledge that while some form of jobless insurance might help in a future depression, it wouldn’t be of much use in this one.

Predictably, the business community was not enthusiastic about any increase in social services. “Whither are we drifting in this matter of socialistic paternalism?” asked the Montreal
Gazette
, the voice of St. James Street. “… While human nature remains as it is … it is sheer madness to tell idle and shiftless men and women that the state will step in and save them from the penalties of their violation of fixed social laws.”

Edward Beatty, the president of the CPR, which owed its existence to repeated transfusions of public funds, resorted to the age-old argument that too much charity would make the recipient
soft. Beatty said he wasn’t opposed to unemployment insurance or the dole in principle, he was just worried about “the effects of its application upon the individual.”

But the individual was already beginning to feel the effects of the government’s apathy. The inane suggestion that government handouts to the jobless (as opposed to handouts to the railways) would somehow sap initiative was on a par with the equally inane theory that the Depression was psychological and not real. That, however, was the opinion of the head of one of the country’s leading advertising agencies. Hard times, J.J. Gibbons told the press, were merely a state of mind!

Parliament met on February 20, but the government was so indifferent to the mounting crisis that the House didn’t get around to discussing it until March 31. The debate lasted more than a week, and by that time it must have been clear that the country was in serious trouble.

Member after member of the Opposition rose to give evidence. Tommy Church, the former mayor of Toronto, told of counting a line-up of 347 hungry men waiting one morning outside the Yonge Street Mission. Another reported twelve hundred being fed daily at a Montreal soup kitchen. A third told of hundreds sleeping in the CPR station in Calgary. Hugh Guthrie, formerly a Conservative Cabinet minister, rattled off a series of new statistics: four or five thousand men jobless in Vancouver; four hundred families being fed by the city of Edmonton; twenty-five to thirty thousand out of work in Toronto; thousands of mechanics laid off in Windsor. This was all guesswork. Nobody knew how many were unemployed in Canada because there were no verifiable statistics.

The country had been thrust into the Depression blindly and, as the debate that week made obvious, nobody really knew how serious it was or what caused it. Various speakers on both sides of the Commons attributed the unemployment situation to the high tariff, the low tariff, the wheat pool, the wheat crop, immigration, the gold standard, the stock market crash, world conditions, mechanization, the weather, American competition, foreign treaties, the reduction of purchasing power, the lack of technical education, the unprotected shipbuilding industry, and the lack of railway traffic.

The Liberal position was that there was no real unemployment problem; it was merely a seasonal aberration. W.K. Baldwin, the
septuagenarian member from Baldwin’s Mills, Quebec, went so far as to insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that there was work in Canada for anyone who wanted it. Those who wouldn’t work ought to be deported, Baldwin declared. He went on to invoke the example of Benito Mussolini. “In Italy, the chief ruler makes the people stay on the land,” he said. “I would vote for a law to make an able-bodied man work.”

With no clear policy on unemployment, the government contented itself with attacking the “blue ruin talkers” as King’s Minister of Labour, Peter Heenan, called them. That was too much for H.H. Stevens, who had for years represented the hard-hit riding of Vancouver-Centre. Up he jumped to ask sardonically: “Are the minister and his colleagues aware of
any
unemployment problem which exists in Canada at the present time or which has existed during the past three months?” Heenan carefully stepped around that question. R.J. Manion twisted the knife a little deeper. “It is appalling,” he cried, “to think that the government has no policy on this question … [or] on any other question except the policy of hanging on to power.”

This parliamentary furore was doing nothing for the jobless. In Edmonton, even as Manion was speaking, eight hundred unemployed, led by communist organizers, marched to the city hall asking for work, only to be told by the mayor that their demands were “ridiculous” and “unreasonable.”

On April 3, the Prime Minister entered the debate in the House and, in the course of a long speech, managed to dig himself into a hole from which there would be no escape. His position was that the problem was purely local and required no infusion of funds from Ottawa. Why should the taxpayers of wealthy provinces be asked to take money from the federal treasury to help certain provinces and certain municipalities? It was a question that struck at the very underpinnings of the Canadian federal system and chipped away at the cement of national unity, which King himself had always made his cause. The Prime Minister, in short, was suggesting that Central Canada – the hated “East” – should remain aloof from the growing destitution in the West.

A system of federally supported unemployment relief was quite unnecessary, King declared. “I submit that there is no evidence in Canada today of an emergency situation which demands anything of that kind.” All the talk about unemployment,
he indicated, was no more than a political move by the Opposition “because of a point of view that they intend to take in discussion on the budget.”

King was engaging in the kind of obfuscation for which he was well known, spinning cobwebs to mask the real issue, speaking extemporaneously without the security of one of those contrived and cautious speeches over which he often laboured far into the night. For the past three days he had been goaded mercilessly by the Opposition, which wanted him to loosen the federal purse strings and help out the provinces, half of which had Tory governments. The thought of handing money over to the Tories was too much for the Liberal leader.

“So far as giving money from this federal treasury to provincial governments is concerned,” King said, “in relation to this question of unemployment as it exists today, I might be prepared to go to a certain length possibly in meeting one or two western provinces that have Progressive premiers at the head of their governments.…”

The House broke into an uproar. King had lost control of himself and was provoked into a gaffe that would cost him the election. “But,” he continued, “I would not give a single cent to any Tory government!”

“Shame!” shouted Bennett.

“Shame!” cried Stevens.

At that point King should have backtracked, but, uncharacteristically, he failed to scent disaster and plunged on. “My honourable friend is getting very indignant. Something evidently has got under his skin. May I repeat what I have said? With respect to giving moneys out of the federal treasury to any Tory government in this country for these alleged unemployment purposes, with these governments situated as they are today, with policies diametrically opposed to those of this government, I would not give them a five cent piece.”

At that the Speaker was forced to call for order. The Opposition could scarcely believe its good luck. The phrase “five cent piece” would haunt the Liberals in the months that followed, but King himself appeared oblivious to the damage he had inflicted on his party. He pooh-poohed the idea of a national conference on unemployment. What was needed, he said, was more foreign
investment in Canada. He followed that with the extraordinary statement that if Canada admitted to having an unemployment problem by holding such a conference, that act alone would dry up foreign investment!

After King sat down, Isaac Macdougall, a Nova Scotia Tory, asked if there was anything in the British North America Act to prevent the federal government from helping the provinces meet the unemployment crisis.

“Nothing,” King replied.

“Then why don’t you do it?” Macdougall asked.

“Because,” King answered, “we have other uses for our money, other obligations.”

He still didn’t understand the full impact of his words about the five-cent piece. The Liberal claque had responded with the usual applause that any major speech by a party leader demanded. King, who was susceptible to the most transparent forms of flattery, thought he’d given a magnificent speech. He didn’t get back to his Ottawa residence, Laurier House, until four the following morning, but he took the time to write that “our side of the House was well pleased.… I got a splendid reception from the men, as fine an ovation as I have ever received in the Commons. It was a fighting speech and except in two particulars was what was needed.”

Those two particulars, however, caused him some unease. “I made a slip I think.… It was a slip in that it can be read apart from the context and it is capable of much misrepresentation as applied to unemployment.…”

He returned to the matter the following day: “… I went perhaps too far. It is not in accord with my gen’l attitude of conciliation etc. – But it has the other purpose of making a definite line of cleavage between the Libs & Cons which our men like. It is, however, not good speaking to lay one’s self open to where explanation is necessary.…”

By April 8, King realized that he was in trouble. The press had already pounced on the five-cent piece remark. “I feel very sorry about this unnecessary break,” King wrote. “I can see wherein the Tories intend to misrepresent it as meaning not a cent for unemployment & not a cent to a Tory province for anything. It may afford a chance on the public platform for me to show how I
am seeking to guard expenditure, & I believe will appeal to the people when limited to unemployment, as most persons get nothing therefrom.”

These internal musings demonstrate how out of touch the Prime Minister was with the realities of the Depression. In the cities and the small towns, housewives had become accustomed to – and appalled by – the steady stream of shabby young men knocking at their back doors, asking for a handout. Everybody except those in the top echelons of society was affected by unemployment. Few (except the same top echelons) wanted the government to pinch pennies when jobless men were going hungry. The cries for a national conference on unemployment had been so strident that King in his circumlocutory way was forced to back into one.

Since the government didn’t want to be seen to reverse its policy, it called for a dominion-provincial conference on immigration at which time the unemployment situation could also be discussed. It never took place because King decided in May to call an election. It was the very worst time to go to the country, but the Prime Minister didn’t seem to realize that. The campaign would begin in June. Election Day would be July 30. Mackenzie King was certain he would win.

When he went to the polls in the summer of 1930, William Lyon Mackenzie King had been Prime Minister of Canada for the best part of nine years. He was fifty-six, at the mid-point in his career, and, although he would never admit it, as healthy as a horse. For King was a monumental hypochondriac. To read the despairing comments in his diary about his condition, one would think he was poised on the brink of a breakdown from exhaustion or nervous tension.

“It must be a brain fatigue greater than I imagine” (February 1, 1927). “Too fatigued to do my work properly” (January 23, 1929). “My brain was fagged out …” (October 17, 1929). The litany of complaint is unending: “tired and strained” … “excessively weak and faint” … “fatigued and exhausted.”

King portrayed himself, to himself, as a man all but crushed by
the burden of office, with no one at his side to help shoulder the load, yet gamely prepared to sacrifice his health and well-being for the good of the Party and the nation. “It is hard not to get discouraged with the load I have to carry so largely alone,” he wrote early in 1929, adding, “I am determined to keep up if I can.”