Faced with the Depression, the Canadian government did try to provide all the citizens with the basic necessities. The federal government provided “emergency assistance payments” according to Barry Broadfoot’s book Ten Lost Years, “[T]he city family got $15 a month and the country family got $10 a month…”. Citizens could also get food from the various government organizations and soup kitchens in cities like Vancouver. There were also various relief work camps nation wide. Men were hired to do strenuous work like logging and mining. They were provided with meals, board, and a wage of a meager twenty cents per day at the lowest. Those social assistance and relief program made sure that everyone at least had somewhere to stay for the night and would not starve to death.
However, the meager relief could hardly truly help everyone. The assistance payments were not enough for the monthly expenditure. The country families were even more hard pressed because they received less assistance payments “because they’d likely have a cow and a pig and a big garden…”, yet the drought and the “dust bowl” of the prairies made any meaningful harvest impossible. In the cities countless people lined up in front of soup kitchens to receive food. The waiting often took entire days. The relief camps were especially debatable. The working condition was horrendous, and the pay was unjustly slight. Some still starved while in the work camp; others became ill and epidemic spread out. There were numerous protests, strikes and other unrest in the work camps because of the worker’s resentment. Like a relief camp worker had said “men made numerous complaints…”. One can see that while the Canadian government did provide means of assistance, they were not enough and people still suffered tremendously.
The Canadian government’s economic policies in response to the Depression were also abysmal failures. During the Depression many governments like the American and the British abandoned the passive “laissez-faire” policy and took more active roles in shaping the economy. Those governments spent money on large programs building roads, bridges, public facilities, etc that would put people back to work and therefore jump-start the economy. However, the Canadian government was reluctant to adopt those policies. When provincial government of BC tried to adopt similar programs to improve the economy, the federal government shot it down over legality of federal-provincial responsibility and halted the progress. The federal government under R.B.Bennett had its own policy of “using tariffs to blast a way into the markets of the world” to improve economy. Basically Bennett imposed heavy tariffs to protect Canada’s own industries. But this policy was in fact highly detrimental to Canada. The tariffs made popular Canadian goods like wheat, paper and pulp, wood, etc very expensive. This coupled with an already dropping demand for such agricultural goods made Canadian export plummet. The federal government’s flawed policies did not improve the economy at all. People were very disappointed and resentful, their mood plainly represented in the multitude of strikes and protests nationwide.
In the Depression the Canadian government did try very hard to lead the country through the hard times. Through the soup kitchens, the assistance payments and the relief camps nation wide, the government provided everyone with the basic necessities. However, because of the lack of resources on the government’s part and the number of people needing assistance, there was never enough for everyone and people still suffered considerably. The Canadian government also failed to adopt intelligent policies to ameliorate the economy; whatever policies the government did implant only harmed the economy even more. All of those show that the Canadian government had only minimum success in dealing with the Depression.
