The Great Depression Page 5
Canada in the twenties was a racist country. The vast majority of Canadians, from the Prime Minister down, were at least passively anti-Semitic. Everybody knew what the warning sign RESTRICTED meant at golf clubs and tourist resorts. It bothered few that banks, insurance companies, department stores, financial firms, and a variety of other institutions, from Procter and Gamble to Maclean Hunter, barred Jews from employment. Jewish doctors couldn’t get hospital affiliations. Law firms rarely hired Jews. The universities and professional schools refused to hire Jewish faculty and devised quotas for Jewish students. High offices in the federal government from the Senate to the Supreme Court were barred to Jews. The Privy Council that year agreed that a woman could become a senator, and a woman shortly afterward did; but it was twenty-five years before a Jew was admitted to the upper house and forty before a Jew sat on the Supreme Court. The files of the RCMP hint at the general attitude. The undercover constables who were assigned to keep tabs on anybody they considered left of centre had a habit of classifying their non-WASP quarry as a “Jew” or a “foreigner” or both.
Jews, like communists, were fair game in 1929. An incident that occurred in Toronto that year underscored the racism in that citadel of WASP privilege. The police, backed by their commission, had issued an extraordinary order. No one, they decreed, could make a public speech in any language but English! Today it sounds laughable – the kind of thing a right-wing crank might suggest on an open-line show – but the police were in deadly earnest. When Philip Halpern, editor of the Jewish weekly Kampf, tried to address a communist rally in Yiddish, he was immediately arrested. The Globe, quick off the mark as usual, endorsed the action in a long editorial entitled “The Police Are Right.” And those who protested the action, it said, were indulging in “silly twaddle.”
These authoritarian measures were a foretaste of what was to come when the Depression settled in. Within a month of the stock market crash, mounted police were breaking up a demonstration of hundreds of unemployed men in Vancouver. The jobless statistics were mounting – already 10,000 in Toronto, 8,500 in nine prairie cities – but nobody in authority took action. When A.R. Mosher, president of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, demanded an immediate federal conference to consider the situation, the government turned him down. Mackenzie King’s Minister of Labour insisted that the crash hadn’t affected Canada as it had the United States. His complacent remarks echoed those of the bankers who, as always, were seeing shafts of sunlight breaking through the dark economic clouds.
Hard as it is to swallow, the same financial seers who had predicted good times at the start of the year ignored the crash and predicted good times on the eve of the next. A heavenly choir of bank executives raised hymns of praise to undimmed prosperity, trotting out the familiar clichés – “undiminished confidence in Canada’s continued growth …” (White of the Commerce); “constructive optimism” (Moore of the Nova Scotia); “… future as promising as any time in her history” (Bogert of the Dominion); and, of course, “fundamental conditions are sound” (Gordon of the Bank of Montreal).
The press, as usual, trailed along, indulging in the familiar boosterism. “There’s very little the matter with Canada!” exclaimed Frank Yeigh, editor of Saturday Night. “CANADA STANDS UNSHAKEN AFTER MARKET COLLAPSE,” headlined the Ottawa Citizen. But the prize for the murkiest crystal ball must go to the Vancouver Sun, which, with the unfettered conceit that was even then the hallmark of the West Coast press, went so far as to announce that “Vancouver people can create in 1930 the greatest era of activity and prosperity … that this continent has ever known.”
The Days When a Dollar Was Stretched
This selected list of prices of goods and services in 1933, the nadir of the Depression, shows how far a dollar went in the thirties compared with today. All measurements have been adapted to pre-metric figures.
1933 price 1990 price
tin of Campbell’s tomato soup approx. 8 cents 59 cents
1 lb. minced beef 8 cents $4.40
loaf of bread 6 cents $1.59
milk per quart 9.5 cents $1.63
dozen eggs 24-26 cents $1.65
ticket to first-run movie
(after 6:30 p.m.) Loew’s, 50 cents $7.00
rent, 3-bedroom apt. (Toronto) $40 $1,300
price of 3-bedroom house:
Toronto (West Annex)
Victoria (Oak Bay) $4,700
$3,000 $300,000
$135,000
postage stamp 1 cent 39 cents
Toronto Star newspaper 2 cents 35 cents
university fees (U. of T.) $550 $1,610
cup of coffee 5 cents 50 cents
hamburger 10 cents from 99 cents
(McDonald’s)up
Coca-Cola 5 cents
(6½ ozs.) up 75 cents
(10 oz. can)
man’s white shirt $1.95 $36
haircut (barber) 50 cents $6 to $15
Ford car, 5-passenger $685, 4-cyl.,
4-door Escort LX
$9,920
sterling silver – Birks Chantilly,
5-piece set $12.61 $475
Maclean’s magazine 10 cents $2 plus tax
best-selling novel 30 cents (U.S.)
(Master of Jalna) $26.95
(The Negotiator)
pack of 25 cigarettes 25 cents $4.40
bottle of Canadian Club whisky 15 cents per ounce 70 cents per
ounce
1930
1
“Not a five cent piece!”
2
Mother’s boy
3
Mrs. Bleaney’s clouded crystal ball
4
“Bonfire Bennett”
5
Old-fashioned nostrums
1
“Not a five cent piece!”
As the New Year approached, the Prime Minister of Canada had confided to his diary that all was right with the world. “A good year it has been on the whole,” he told himself, “a year in which there has been I believe, some improvement in mental and moral strength, some slight growth in wisdom.…”
He continued to congratulate himself: “The session of parliament was a good one. I had to carry much of the load myself, but I came out stronger in public regard I believe than I went in.… The summer was a good one and a happy one.… The fall has been good.” For thousands the fall had been very bad, but King didn’t mention the market crash. He was still basking in the glow of Ramsay MacDonald’s visit to Canada. King, who loved to hobnob with great men, was certain that the British prime minister’s brief sojourn was “an important international event which added a little I believe to my prestige in the country.…”
He saw no dark clouds on the political horizon. “… I believe that with the party & the country I am stronger than any time since I assumed office … I thank God with all my heart for protecting me through the year now drawing to a close.…”
These smug and self-complacent scribblings seem almost demented in the light of what we now know, but King was not alone in his musings. The business and political world felt the same way.
The exception seemed to be R.B. Bennett, who was demanding a radical change in government policy to ensure prosperity. A radical change was the last thing that Bennett expected from the cautious King and the last thing that he himself contemplated when he took office, unless by radical he meant an increase in the country’s protective tariffs. But he was Leader of the Opposition, and so his demands were as predictable as the response of John Dafoe’s Manitoba Free Press. The Liberal voice of Western Canada pointed the finger of scorn at the Tory leader for his “lamentations.”
“Whom are we to believe,” the paper asked, “… the sober financial executives who say that conditions are essentially sound and full of hope for the future, or the politicians who declare that in many respects the country is in a deplorable state …?”
The sober financial executives, of course, were dead wrong. The country was in a deplorable state
, for which the Honourable Mr. Bennett had no cure and which Mackenzie King simply ignored, in the belief that the trouble would shortly go away. Within a fortnight, with ten thousand jobless men in Winnipeg alone, Dafoe was less sure of himself and was calling for federal action. The mayors of the larger Western cities, from the Lakehead to British Columbia, poured into Winnipeg on January 29 for a conference on unemployment. They wanted the federal government to underwrite a third of all relief costs, to launch a massive program of public works, to appoint a royal commission to investigate the situation, and to stop all immigration to Canada – radical suggestions indeed, by the standards of the day.
The Free Press now changed its tune to declare that unemployment was “a social condition … which cannot be explained away by soft phrases or met by emergency palliatives.”
Nonetheless, when a Western delegation headed by Winnipeg’s pugnacious mayor, Ralph Webb, went to Ottawa, it got neither soft phrases nor emergency palliatives but instead tough talk. The Depression had struck the West but was only beginning to be felt in Eastern Canada. Cushioned from reality in the green womb of his Kingsmere estate, Mackenzie King shocked the delegates by refusing to believe there was a crisis. “If the situation is so deplorable as you try to picture, why is not eastern Canada represented?” he asked Webb. “The answer is that, generally speaking, the employment situation in Canada is not abnormal. I have a telegram from the government of the province of Quebec that conditions there are quite satisfactory.”
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 we
re “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!”