Hard times

In 2012, the C.D. Howe Institute issued a report on economic downturns in Canada. Titled “Turning Points: Business Cycles in Canada Since 1926,” the report rated Canada’s recessions much like meteorologists rate hurricances, on a scale of 1 to 5, with Category 5 being the most severe.

Of the twelve downturns listed, only two rated a catastrophic 5: the periods between April 1929 and February 1933, and between November 1937 and June 1938.

Both periods were part of what we today call the Great Depression.

The Depression began in October 1929, when two years of soaring stock markets came to an abrupt crash. The C.D. Howe Institute tells us that the collapse in Canada was much more severe than it was in the United States.

The economic crisis was compounded by a prolonged drought that turned swaths of the Prairie provinces into a dust bowl.

In his book The Great Depression: 1929– 1939, Pierre Berton described in vivid detail the widespread suffering as more than 1.5 million people went on the dole and as many as “70,000 young men travelled like hoboes.”

In this issue, historian Bill Waiser writes of a moment when those so-called hoboes fought back against a federal-provincial relief program that forced them to labour in remote camps for twenty cents per day.

“Hold the Fort” tells of an attempt in 1935 by jobless men to illegally ride by train to the nation’s capital to demand better wages and living conditions.

The protest was peaceful, but the official response was not; the trek would come to a jarring, violent end in Regina.

Today, the pain of the Great Depression is a fading memory. We hear the word “hobo” and think of Charlie Chaplin, and not of the tens of thousands of Canadians who suffered from deprivation and want.

The C.D. Howe report tells us that the recession of 2008–09 was a Category 4 event. Jobs were lost, investment values plumetted, but Canada actually fared better than many other nations.

The Depression generation wasn’t so fortunate. Their crisis ended in 1939 because of the outbreak of the Second World War. As Berton reminds us, “war, which would bring mutilation and death, would also bring jobs... [and] that is the bitterest irony of all.”

Elsewhere in this issue, we bring you a story about civilian women who survived a Japanese prison camp in the Second World War; an investigation into the mysterious parentage of Samuel de Champlain; a look back at 1816, the “Year Without a Summer”; and a profile of a former Governor General of Canada whose pulpy potboiler helped to propel the spy novel to new heights.