Canada's Great Depression: Part 2 - Bennett, King, and Government Mismanagement

During the Great Depression, wheat prices dropped 54% while the prairies had the worst drought in history (Saskatchewan had 1/10th of the grain of previous years). Locust were so thick in the skies they'd form their own clouds, going so far as to even stop traffic from plugging up radiators with their corpses. Even the winter proved every bit as brutal, as 1936 held the coldest on record. There was no way possible the country was going to come out looking anything but beaten and defeated, and the role of government at the time would be to stymie the damage as best as it could. Of course, like any government inheriting a bad hand, they'll be blamed for the peoples' misfortune whether justly or unjustly. It's a tough sell for a government to play the "hey, everything sucks right now, but it could have been worse!" card. But that wasn't the case with the Great Depression. Canada in the '30s was plagued by incompetent, unfeeling and often bizarre leadership which took a sinking ship and tried to keep her afloat with a few anchors.

Our first leader of the governmental powers that be was William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest serving Prime Minister and by all accounts a bit of a weirdo. You'd think a Prime Minister who serves as long as he did would be a point of Canadian pride, but sheesh - there's things you just can't overlook. We know more about him than most as he kept thousands of diary entries, inundating the history buffs with page after page of mostly useless scribblings with the occasional bit of juicy gossip. It shows him to be a hypochondriac, prone to falling for flattery, and oddly, a man who would make himself deliberately boring as a political ploy. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

One would have thought King would be quite
the ladykiller with that mischievous half-raised
eyebrow.

King breaks the mould of the "tough-as-nails early 20th century man" type. He never married, yet  found himself constantly pining over women (one hilarious and awkward diary entry details King ogling the shapely legs of ladies at the beach in what can only be assumed are comically conservative bathing suits). Also a bit of a mother's boy, he counted on her dearly, and after her passing needed her guidance so terribly he would hold seances to try to reach her. In fact, the supernatural was a guiding force in many of his political decisions, basing much of his belief in how the depression would play out through the work of fortune tellers and other such charlatans. Further in that vein, he would also try to contact the spirit of Sir Wilfrid Laurier to guide his actions (asking for experienced advice is a good play, but it typically works better if they're amongst the living). If you're not thinking it already, yes, yes it is indeed disturbing that when our country was in one of the worst crises of its history some of the decisions were guided by crystal ball.

His successor as Prime Minister (and also predecessor, as King would return later) was less of an oddball, but not much better in terms of leadership. R. B. Bennett of the conservatives was something much more of what one would expect from the times. Cold, hard and calculating, Bennett was a shrewd, wealthy businessman; one of the richest in Canada. He was also almost the worst possible thing for Canada at the time, as he was one of the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" type in a time where it was impossible to do so. Unable to see the plight of the poor for what it was (not an unwillingness to work, but an inability to find it) he took a terrible situation and piled on.

Bennett, pictured smugly satisfied after having
noted his bootstraps are quite thoroughly
pulled up by his own accord. His wry
smile just screams "but why can't yours be?"

However, while in the 1920s, who would have guessed you'd need a strong leader? When everyone's making money faster than they can spend it, you could put just about anyone in power and they'd find their way through. Perhaps it was because of that '20s optimism that right when the depression began to hit in full, the liberal government under King believed it to be a seasonal, one-off event that would more or less repair itself. The federal government could help the poverty stricken west, but municipalities would have to take on a part of the load as well, and with none willing to do so, it mostly was left unattended. Through a lack of foresight, King didn't think the Great Depression was something lasting nor important; more of a... Mild Sadness, perhaps. To be fair, I don't blame him on this particular issue as almost everyone thought that things would bounce back pretty darn quickly.

Meanwhile, the conservatives under Bennett played into it hard, acknowledging it fully as a crisis and jumping in headfirst. In the election that followed he won easily, promising to go to an old school method of raising tariffs (up to as high as 50% in some cases) which, unfortunately, didn't do much. Beyond that, Bennett lacked a plan; he ran on a belief that yes, the Great Depression was very real, will last, and things have to be done about it. What those things were, however... that's where things went downhill. Bennett had the idea that the fault lay with the people asking for the money, thinking that the reason they couldn't find jobs was due strictly to laziness. He went as far as to tell the downtrodden "look at yourself in the mirror" when asking why times are tough.

A "Bennett Buggie". Those that couldn't afford gasoline
would have horses pull the cars instead. Because somehow
it makes fiscal sense to lack the money for gasoline but
have the money for two full-grown horses.

He would eventually be voted out (only to be replaced by King) but not after going heavily against his own principals in a last-ditch plan to save his political future. Opting for an increase in pensions, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and other such safety-net economic plans, he hoped to win over the voters but it was too little too late. That, and much of it didn't work. Take the minimum wage and maximum work week hours, for instance. Employers would circumvent the hours by simply punching your card out early even if you were still at work. Others would work on a piece rate and have to greatly increase the amount of work they got done in an hour just to meet the minimum wage - otherwise they'd be fired. Many of the reforms only caused a shift in workplace abuses from one form to the other; there would be stories of people working almost triple-digit work weeks for pennies both before and after the changes.

It's impossible to say how things would have turned out with greater competence at the helm. When unemployment goes from 2% in Ontario in 1929 to 36% later in the decade, of course the government will struggle, but the flat out weirdness of King's prophetic visions and Bennett's coldness and lack of empathy towards the common man twisted the knife in the deeply wounded Canada.

Canada's Great Depression: Part 1 - From Prosperous to Penniless

Imagine living through the Roaring Twenties. Economically, things seem to have gotten figured out by the powers that be in the government sector. Capitalism has made everyone rich, there's wealth and growth everywhere, and as a Western Nation, you're on top of the world - now that the fight that almost destroyed it is done and dusted, that is. I think it's fair to say you've got to be pretty darn optimistic. Heck, everyone was. It wasn't just the general public either, as the newspapers were reporting how things were just going to keep getting better and better, whereas the rare exception seeing things for how it really was would be pushed to the back for being too doom-and-gloom.

Men lining up for a free meal. This was back in the day where
being homeless and out of work still required the dignity of a
peacoat and three-piece-suit.

Those that foresaw the collapse told of how over-developing the nation and having far too much supply and not enough demand was going to ruin the markets. Of course, that sounds like something far off in the future or just some vague possibility - until all of a sudden it knocks you off your feet. After all, how could things go wrong? Many were so optimistic that the good times would keep on rolling they would buy on margin. One such man, who bought $80,000 worth of stock from a broker with $8,000 as a down payment (pretty well everything he had) was hoping to hold onto it and sell it later, making more than the cost of the interest by a landslide. People had been doing this for years. He was one of many that was struck suddenly and debilitatingly by the collapse of the market. The next day, he realized that $8,000 was not only gone, but he owed $8,000 to the bank.

Here I am, feeling like I gambled away my life savings if I drop $20 at the casino. That Kitty Glitter machine is a cruel mistress.

The cause for that poor man's sudden economic demise was the crash of the market in October, 1929.  Seeing as how the market had just veritably exploded in the American stock exchange, speculators began selling their shares at record rates. Montreal averaged 25,000 trader shares on an average day, but on Black Tuesday, the 29th of October, they sold 400,000. So many were selling so quickly that you could get a different price on a stock just depending on what side of the room you were on, so loud and crazy was the stock exchange. People were crying, feinting, screaming, and whatever other human emotions come out in a mix of tragedy and panic (nervous peeing?), and just like that, the Great Depression was born.

A man during the Dust Bowl, desperately searching for where
he dropped his keys.

Canada, for the remainder of the decade, plunged into a world that seems so against how one would expect our nation to handle a trainwreck like this. The government became exceedingly heavy handed, thinking that an iron fist would fix things when a soft touch was desperately needed. Canada was ruled by distant, callous and ineffectual leadership, made worse by the fact that it was already a near impossible situation to escape. All the while, any dissenting voice would get - quiet literally - beaten down. The rise of communism was a looming spectre reaching over Canada, and the government did everything in its power to push it down by any means necessary whenever it popped up, like some ideology-based game of Whack-a-Mole.

Busy with the reds, the government failed to help was the average, everyday citizen, ready and willing to work but unable to do so. People were quite literally starving to death, a problem that sounds so out of touch with Canada. Conditions were so terrible that in Halifax 192 houses were condemned that had 370 families living in them. Unemployment in Toronto had, at one point, jumped 34% from the level in 1929. 1,357,262 Canadians were on relief by 1933 - and that was long before the worst of the Depression had struck.

I know I'm harping on this, but why do these poor men
dress better than I literally ever have? How can you
be both dapper and destitute?

Of course, these are all just numbers, and once you hit a certain point it fails to hit quite the way it should. When numbers get too high they cease being understandable, and it becomes difficult to relate to it. It's when you look at the personal toll on people, and the occasional individual story of tragedy and heartbreak brought on by the Dirty Thirties, that's when it stops becoming a laundry list of distressing facts and the brutal nature of it truly becomes real. If I had to sum up the degree of tragedy with one such story, it would be the life of Ted Bates, his wife Rose, and their nine-year-old son. Reading on history has a tendency of inundating you with such a slew of horrible things that you almost get desensitized, but man... this one stuck with me.

Ted and Rose had lost everything they had. With their final scraps of cash, they rented a car and just enough gas to lock themselves in a garage and attempt to commit suicide as a family through carbon monoxide poisoning. However, misjudging how much they needed or simply not having enough to afford the amount required, it only managed to kill their young boy and severely weaken the husband and wife. Dizzy from the fumes, Ted tried to knock his wife out cold - by her wishes - to then stab her to death, but neither was able to do so. Instead, they only managed to cut each other deeply but not enough to kill. Taken to hospital, they managed to survive their wounds. Contrary to how one would think the story would go, and a testament to the dire situation Canadians found themselves in, the town - in a shocking display of sympathy - agreed to not only pay for the funeral of their son but to provide them money to cover their legal expenses. The couple was found not guilty.

This is the Canada in the 1930s. Brutal, desperate, and filthy. A government that couldn't provide, a police force making a mockery of the law, and good, hardworking people pushed to the depths of despair. It kind of makes today look like a walk in the park.