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.