“If labour camps were to be the solution to the transient problem, it would make fiscal sense for those who already owned camps to branch out into this line of business. On 29 October 1930, Relief Officer Cooper, along with Mayor Malkin and a handful of aldermen, met with a delegation from the BC Loggers’ Association at the latter’s request. In a memo to Alderman Atherton a few days later, Cooper noted that “bad market conditions” would soon add to the seven thousand lumber workers already jobless. The association’s representatives, led by those from the Abernethy Lougheed Logging Company, offered to “accommodate these men in the Camps” under the arrangement that Vancouver would contribute money toward feeding the jobless loggers, while the industrialists would provide “sleeping accommodation free” to the municipality. “A salient point of the proposal,” Cooper pointed out to Atherton, “is that the men should sign acknowledgements for the amount expended, which would be collected by the Loggers’ Association from their pay, when conditions are again normal.”
In short, as part of a relief program, unemployed men would be charged not just for food but also for the use of a bunk in a bunkhouse that would have otherwise remained empty, and then would have to work off their incurred debt once market conditions indicated the resumption of activities: not for nothing had British Columbia earned the nickname “The Company Province.” Cooper and the City’s other elected officials believed that they lacked sufficient funds to devote at the outset of the project and encouraged the association to present its plan to the Province. Meanwhile, several representatives of the United and Anglican churches expressed their concern that the plan entailed “comparative idleness” for the unemployed because it contained no work-related component.
Substantial controversy erupted when knowledge of the offer became public: the Abernethy Lougheed Logging Company was partly owned by Nels Lougheed, a long-time Tory MLA and a current cabinet minister of Tolmie’s government. With a political firestorm spreading, Lougheed contacted Cooper via telephone to clarify matters, after which Cooper wrote a curious memorandum to Atherton, which, in today’s terms, resembles a non-denial denial:
The suggestion that the Abernethy Lougheed Co. be paid $1.00 per day for boarding single men, did not originate with the Company. During the discussion between representatives of the City and the Company as to how best to utilize the vacant camps for relief purposes, a tentative suggestion was made by the Company’s representatives that the City pay $1.00 towards the $1.50 per day which is the approximate cost of feeding the men under usual conditions.
Alderman Angus MacInnis loudly denounced the plan at the 3 November meeting of City Council. Observing that no actual logger had been consulted, MacInnis highlighted the Loggers’ Association’s long opposition to industrial unionism, which had led the association to maintain what MacInnis claimed was “the most efficient blacklist of any organization on this continent.” Instead, “the loggers should get assistance the same as all other workers,” he demanded. Most council members ignored MacInnis and passed a motion that civic representatives should express their support for the plan in the upcoming meeting with the provincial government. On 11 November, Mayor Malkin offered to purchase bedding to be used by Abernethy Lougheed as an incentive for the Province to adopt the plan.
Nonetheless, MacInnis did not stand alone in opposition to the camps. “Not a ‘Bum’” wrote to the Vancouver Sun to complain of the association’s logic. He noted that an association member had declared that the lumber workers to be housed in the camps “are not bums. They have too much pride to appeal for aid from the city.” The disgruntled worker went on: “This appears to be a direct slap to all who register for relief work. It is a fine state of affairs we have arrived at when a man who registers for work is branded as a ‘bum.’”
The most detailed critique of the plan appeared in the Unemployed Worker under the title “Back to the Woods”:
The Lumber Bosses of the province intend taking advantage of the plight of the thousands of idle loggers in order that in the future they will be able to exploit them even more savagely than heretofore. This gang of industrial pirates have presented to the civic and provincial authorities a scheme which in its viciousness beats anything yet launched. They want to get the jobless loggers out in their logging camps to be fed until the camps open up (whenever that will be). The money is to be advanced by the government and charged against the loggers, to be paid back by them when they start work. This scheme is along the same line as the Belgian bosses, through King Leopold, put over in the Belgian Congo, which was, and is a world scandal. Or like the debt system of slavery in the British African possessions and India. The lumber barons want a tighter grip on their slaves and this is why they are trying to introduce the peonage system in the woods. . . . The introduction of such a system will mean that the loggers will be bound to the bosses by the debts contracted and be in an even more helpless condition than before. This is the most brazen attempt yet made to prevent workers leaving the job when conditions become rotten.
The global analysis in this Communist critique captured the plan’s most notable feature: its quasi-legal binding of loggers to logging companies in a manner calculated to ensure their future dependence and thus their availability for work. Just as meal and bed tickets issued for the Central City Mission or the Emergency Refuge separated homeless transients from the free market and subjected them to forms of discipline, the scheme of the Loggers’ Association would deny to lumber workers the right to apply for government relief or even to remain in Vancouver. Instead, relief would become a loan, although without the contractual protections usually afforded in such an arrangement In other words, this was not relief at all but rather unfree labour-in-waiting, a form of “peonage” made possible by the economic crisis.
Not surprisingly, the loudest municipal campaign for relief camps was Vancouver’s. While lobbying the province to endorse the plan of the Loggers’ Association, the Relief and Employment Committee simultaneously discussed a proposal for a “concentration camp” to be set up in the Exhibition buildings in Hastings Park. The cost to house a thousand men for five months was estimated at $10,000, exclusive of food, in addition to the $7,000 start-up expenses.
Some residents worried that council members had not thought through the ramifications of creating a camp on the Exhibition grounds. Although then a luggage salesman, Mr. F. Leighton Thomas had had some experience with disciplinary projects; besides having worked as an inspector on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Thomas claimed to have participated in British campaigns in Afghanistan, Alexandria, and Burma. While believing the idea of labour camps to be “an admirable one,” Thomas felt obliged to draw attention to their history in Vancouver, building his narrative around “the tremendous difference in morale of the unemployed today, and the men (largely Veterans of the Great War) who were formerly in camp at Hastings Park” in 1922:
The unemployed of today are largely made up of the scum of Europe, wholly undisciplined, and almost entirely under the influence of these Communistic Leaders, and if you put a thousand men in camp there, I am perfectly certain that unless they are under the strictest discipline and controlled by an adequate Police Force, then you are going to have trouble galore.
Thomas advocated using RCMP officers to control the population, because “the scarlet coat and the gun on a North West Constable has more effect, on these scum of European hoboes, than twenty City Constables (no matter how good they may be) would have.” If the council failed to take adequate measures, “the City may wake up to find the whole of their Exhibition Building in ashes.” But even before the mayor received this dire warning, support for a civic camp had met with practical limits, related not to fears of destruction but to financing.
Civic leaders once again turned to their brethren. In January 1931, City Council sent a group to the capital to meet with Tolmie’s Unemployment Committee. The message was a simple one: “single men could be maintained in camps or central stations at considerably less cost” than the current arrangements of bed and meal tickets. Delegates stressed the necessity of a “substantial initial outlay” in order to reconfigure “certain public buildings . . . as central stations for the unemployed single men.” Additionally, the representatives argued that the lion’s share of financial responsibility should rightly be assumed by the other governments because the camps would be used to house transients from across Canada. The politicians left Victoria optimistic that Tolmie would fund Vancouver’s camps.”
- Todd McCallum, Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival images of a new world in 1930s Vancouver. Edmonton: Athabaska Univesity Press, 2014. pp. 205-208.
