Hard Times: Life During the Great Depression

Hook: what would you give up first?

Imagine your family's income fell by 90%, as Saskatchewan's did in two years. What would you stop buying first? What could you grow, fix or share? Millions of Canadians faced exactly these choices in the 1930s. In this lesson you will see that the Depression was not the same for everyone: where you lived, your gender, your background and your job shaped how hard it hit.

Losing work, losing homes

By 1933 about 30% of workers had no job, and many others worked fewer hours for lower pay. The Canadian Encyclopedia estimates that one in five Canadians depended on government relief at some point.

• Families lost homes and farms when they could not make mortgage payments. Some moved in with relatives; others took in boarders.
• Young people left school to find any work they could. Many delayed marriage and starting families.
• Single young men were often refused relief in cities, which preferred to help families. Thousands rode the rails across the country looking for work, a dangerous and illegal way to travel.
• Women were told that married women should give jobs to men. Many still worked as domestic servants or in low-paid factory jobs, and nearly all were stretching tiny budgets at home.

The Dust Bowl: drought on the Prairies

The southern Prairies suffered a double blow. Wheat prices collapsed, and then years of drought turned fields to dust, especially in Palliser's Triangle in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.

• Causes: low rainfall and heat; and also farming methods. Years of ploughing and leaving fields bare (summer fallow) had broken up the grass roots that held the soil, so the wind could lift it.
• Effects: dust storms that darkened the sky, failed crops, plagues of grasshoppers, and cattle with nothing to eat. In Saskatchewan, The Canadian Encyclopedia reports, 66% of the rural population ended up on relief.
• Many families abandoned their farms and moved north to the wooded Parkland or to cities. Some people from other provinces sent relief trains of food and clothing west.

The Prairie provinces were close to bankrupt by 1932, so the federal government had to lend them money to pay for relief.

How relief worked

In the 1930s there was no unemployment insurance and no national welfare system. Helping the poor was mainly the job of municipalities, with some money from the provinces and the federal government.

• Relief was usually vouchers for food, fuel and rent, not cash.
• To qualify, people often had to prove they had sold their possessions, and many towns required men to do work (like breaking rocks or clearing snow) for relief.
• Some towns required people to have lived there for a long time (residency rules), which excluded people who had moved for work.
• Rates varied hugely. A family of five might get $60 a month in Calgary but only $19 in Halifax.
• Many people felt deep shame at being "on the dole" or "on pogey", because they had been taught to be self-reliant.

Relief was even harsher for some groups. Immigrants who were not yet citizens could be deported for needing relief: almost 30,000 were deported during the decade. First Nations families on reserves had to apply through the federal Indian agent, and help was often very limited.

In the North

For many Inuit and northern First Nations communities, the 1930s brought their own hardship. Over the previous decades, the fur trade had made many families depend on trade goods such as rifles, ammunition, flour, tea and cloth, bought with furs at trading posts. When fur prices fell sharply in the Depression, families could buy far less, while the game they relied on was sometimes scarce. Communities relied on their own knowledge of the land, sharing and kinship networks to survive, as they always had.