Federal Relief Camps
For officials in cities across the Prairies, news that the prime minister had, in early October 1932, accepted a plan to create a series of relief camps for jobless single men was welcome indeed. The cities had been calling for a similar idea for at least a year. In the early years of the Depression, most cities had been able—with the help of their respective provinces, the federal government, and charitable groups—to offer single unemployed men some form of short-term, emergency relief. Three related trends made this practice increasingly difficult to continue by the summer and autumn of 1932. First, after two full years of depressed conditions, the city relief machines were overwhelmed. Edmonton’s monthly relief bill in the winter of 1932, for instance, averaged more than $100,000. As more and more businesses failed and banks foreclosed, revenue generated through property taxes decreased. “At the rate we are going now,” Edmonton mayoral candidate James Ogilvie forecast in November 1934, “it won’t be long before the entire city is owned by the city.” Other Prairie cities were in similar straits: they simply lacked the financial resources to support emergency relief for single men in addition to their responsibilities to their unemployed married residents. Second, relief officials feared that their cities would develop a reputation of offering “relief largess” and attract single migrants in search of “generous” emergency relief. Finally, most city relief officials shared the prime minister’s concerns that Communist organizers were active in especially Western cities, preying on impressionable young men congregating in search of work, relief, or a handout.
On 8 October 1932, the governor general signed an order-in-council establishing a string of relief camps throughout central and eastern Canada. Organized under the authority of the Department of National Defence, the camps were to accommodate two thousand men immediately. At the same time, Prime Minister Bennett agreed to spend an additional $200,000 to establish a series of relief camps in western Canada’s mountain and prairie national parks under the authority of the National Parks Branch. By the following spring, the two streams of relief camps had been consolidated under General Andrew McNaughton through the Department of National Defence.
While the federal promise to finance relief camps for the urban unemployed did little to ease their fears, uncertainty, and anger, the news must have comforted municipal officials anxious to mitigate an increasingly tense situation developing in their cities. On 21 October 1932, for example, Saskatoon city police were on guard at city hall as rumours of potentially violent protests circulated throughout the city. Although the rumours were not realized at that time, frustration among the jobless continued to simmer. On 7 November, some of the city’s unemployed clashed with local police. The Star-Phoenix carried a description of the day’s violence:
Wielding blood-soaked batons and sticks, police and the unemployed clashed in a fierce pitched battle at 2 o’clock this afternoon. Charging a yelling mob of workless, nearly 90 officers accounted for a dozen or more casualties and half-dozen arrests.
A little more than a month later, a similar confrontation between police and protesters, this time aimed primarily at provincial officials, occurred in Edmonton. On 20 December 1932, city police and the RCMP clashed with hundreds of unemployed workers and farmers in Edmonton’s Market Square who were attempting to march on the provincial legislature to protest the Brownlee government’s relief policies. The Edmonton Bulletin described the clash the next day:
Batons rose and fell, yells and jeers filled the air as here and there a rioter went down before the police clubs. Women among the marchers screamed imprecations at the police, charging them with being cowards who were riding down their class, but the steady police pressure continued and the back of the parade was broken.
The bloody conclusion of the Hunger March, like the conclusion to similar protests in Saskatoon a month earlier, revealed the extent of anger and frustration with relief policies at all levels. The large number of unemployed workers and farmers who participated speaks to the evident unpopularity and apparent inadequacy of relief policies and provisions, both rural and urban. This anger and frustration would crystallize once more, this time emerging out of single relief camp workers’ experiences.
Almost immediately, it became clear that the camps were unpopular among their young single residents as well. On the surface, camp life seemed a better, more productive alternative to living hand to mouth on the watery soup and dry bread available in the cities and to being constantly harassed, in the words of one historian, by
local police [who] would shoo the men away rather than arrest them as vagrants, while special patrolmen chased them from the freight yards back towards town.
One early camp organizer noted in December 1931 that while the camps promised no easy time, “particularly to men not used to this kind of life,” the camp benefits, including accommodation and free clothing, outweighed any hardships. But for many camp workers, the reality was quite different. To some, they were “slave camps” that paid very little for arduous, backbreaking work in isolated conditions. One camper later recalled:
We were slaves. What else would you call a man who is given twenty cents a day and is expected to believe their bullshit that he is an important part of the country.
To others, the camps were an affront to human dignity. Historian Bill Waiser describes the harsh conditions: the workers slogged through
endless days of heavy toil with little to show for it. . . . From one monotonous day to the next, nothing changed for the men, and the unnatural, stagnant conditions of camp life steadily ate away at their self-identity.”
The camps also, according to one informant, threatened the morality of especially their youngest—and presumably most vulnerable—charges:
The terrible thing about it is that many of the men who are congregated in the camp are teenaged Canadian boys forced into close association with mature men, who have tramped the country, with the result is that the outlook for these boys stands a good chance of being completely warped and their characters so degraded and demoralized that their future is unquestionably seriously menaced.
Many campers were clearly dissatisfied with the whole business. Federal authorities recorded more than 350 camp strikes, demonstrations, and disturbances between 1932 and 1936. Approximately 10 percent of all campers over the same period were dismissed for disciplinary reasons.
In the end, the Conservatives’ establishment of relief camps to house the thousands of single unemployed men ended in disorder and chaos, and in the deaths of at least two men on Regina’s downtown streets on Dominion Day, 1935. The story of the now-famous On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot, however, began not in the Queen City but in British Columbia. Conditions had been deteriorating in the British Columbia camps for some time. Many young single men had gone to the relief camps in that province, in large part because most provinces to the east actively pushed single men out or made their staying intolerable. This situation was exacerbated after the autumn of 1934, when Department of National Defence relief camps in Alberta reached their capacity. Thereafter, “surplus” men were sent to open camps in Canada’s westernmost province.
Meanwhile, the Communist-organized Relief Camp Workers’ Union (RCWU) had been busy trying to organize the relief camp workers. Formed shortly after the first camps opened, the RCWU quickly began agitating for better camp conditions by organizing strikes and walkouts, and formed grievance committees to give voice to campers’ complaints. In December 1934, faced with an outright ban on grievance committees and other measures to hamper its activities, the RCWU called for a general relief camp workers’ strike. Hundreds of relief camp workers from across the West answered the call and descended on Vancouver in a show of solidarity and protest at camp conditions. After a meeting with BC’s Premier Duff Pattullo ended with little more than a promise that the province would call on the federal government to investigate the camps, however, the strike quickly collapsed. The strikers returned to their camps disappointed.
Nevertheless, the December strike had struck a chord. Only a few months later, the RCWU was already well into the planning stages of organizing a wider, more impressive, and precise strike. RCWU organizers enlisted the help of veteran radical labour activist and Workers’ Unity League member Arthur “Slim” Evans and called a strategy meeting in Kamloops for mid-March. There, organizers drew up a list of demands, established what would become the strike’s organizational structure, and set a strike date for 4 April. In early April, men began arriving in Vancouver, by the tens at first, but soon by the hundreds. More than fifteen hundred strikers remained in Vancouver for the next two months, parading through the city’s streets, generally publicizing the poor camp conditions, and demanding work for wages, at the very least.
Municipal, provincial, and federal authorities were divided as to the best course of action. Some, like Chief of Defence Staff Andrew McNaughton, believed that the strike would soon run out of steam. In some respects, it seemed as though he had a point. Hundreds of men had already quit the strike by mid-May, and more appeared ready to leave. Others, RCMP Commissioner MacBrien among them, favoured a harder-line approach, suggesting that all remaining strikers be detained and interned. Vancouver’s Mayor Gerry McGeer and BC’s Premier Duff Pattullo viewed the whole matter as a federal problem. The strikers, after all, were protesting federally organized and administered relief camps, not provincial or municipal ones. Of one thing, however, everyone was certain: the strike must quickly conclude.
It remains unclear as to who first proposed the idea of taking the strike’s message directly to Ottawa. Ron Liversedge—who participated in the On-to-Ottawa Trek and would later write a book detailing the strikers’ progress through British Columbia and Alberta and the violent clash at Regina—attributed the idea to an unidentified man who calmly stood up at a strike meeting and suggested, “Let us go to them.” The On-to-Ottawa Trek left Vancouver on 4 June 1935. The men were, for the most part, orderly, disciplined, and dignified. They climbed aboard Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railway freight cars and made their way east, picking up more men at each stop, singing songs of solidarity, laughing and joking, but determined and serious in their intent. In Edmonton, over 150 men joined the Trekkers, now nine hundred strong, who arrived in Calgary on 7 June.
Prime Minister Bennett followed the Trekkers’ progress with much interest and perhaps equal measures of rage and disquiet. He had been out of the country visiting Britain when the strike broke out in Vancouver, but he had returned to Ottawa in mid-May determined to regain control over a problem that appeared to be rapidly spiralling out of control. They were communists all, Bennett had decided, or at least their leadership was, and they were bent on nothing less than destroying the capitalist system and replacing it with a communist one. In truth, although the Trek’s leadership had communist leanings, most of the rank-and-file Trekkers were simply discouraged, disillusioned, and tired, their hopes and aspirations to find a job and start a family dashed on the shoals of the economic crisis. That said, Bennett did have reason for concern. The Trek’s leaders headed up a highly organized and disciplined march east, almost military in its precision—the army of the unemployed. And its numbers were growing. In Bennett’s mind, the solution was simple: the Trek had to be stopped.
And stopped it was. At Bennett’s insistence, the Canadian Pacific Railway—which, up to that point, had carried the men toward their goal—complained to the RCMP that the Trekkers had been illegally riding the rods on CPR freight trains. This complaint gave the RCMP and Bennett the excuse to crush the Trek. RCMP officers quickly descended on Regina and prevented any Trekker from boarding a train. This action made the situation deteriorate rapidly, for now the men were trapped in the city, and they were fast running out of food and cash. Bennett’s next move was to dispatch two Cabinet ministers—R. J. Manion, the minister of Railways, and Robert Weir, the minister of Agriculture—to Regina to assess the situation and try to negotiate an end to the Trek.
The ministers met with Trek leaders and arranged for a small delegation to travel to Ottawa and speak with the prime minister directly. The meeting between the delegation and Bennett, by all accounts, went badly, degenerating swiftly into little more than a shouting match. The delegates returned to Regina, even as Bennett determined to end the standoff. He instructed the RCMP to move in and arrest the Trek leaders. The constables could not have selected a worse time to carry out the prime minister’s directive. By attempting to take the leaders of the Trek into custody while they were in the midst of addressing the Trekkers during a Dominion Day rally, the RCMP promptly ignited a firestorm. When the riot finally ended later that day, one man lay dead and another would die later in hospital as a result of wounds sustained during the battle.”
- Eric Strikwerda, The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929–39. Edmonton: University of Athabasca Press, 2013. pp. 191-197.
Photo is “The Edmonton Hunger March, 1932.”. On 20 December, hundreds of the unemployed gathered in the city’s market square. They planned to march to the provincial legislature some nine blocks away and confront Alberta premier John Brownlee with their grievances. Edmonton police, together with RCMP, blocked their way. Glenbow Archives, NC-6-13014g.
