[1918 - 1939] The Interwar Years and Great Depression

The year is 1918. The guns have fallen silent over Europe, and a generation of Canadian men, thinned by a staggering loss of over 60,000 souls, begins the long journey home. They return not just to a country grateful for their sacrifice, but to one irrevocably changed. A sense of national identity, forged in the fires of Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele, now permeated the Canadian consciousness. But this newfound pride was met with a harsh reality. As soldiers stepped off the ships, they were met by another, more insidious enemy: the Spanish Flu. This global pandemic swept through the country with silent ferocity, killing an estimated 50,000 Canadians, often striking down the young and healthy in their prime. It was a grim welcome home, a somber overture to an era of dizzying highs and devastating lows.

The initial post-war years were fraught with tension. In 1919, the city of Winnipeg became a battleground, not of armies, but of labour. Seeking better wages, collective bargaining rights, and improved working conditions, over 30,000 workers walked off the job, paralyzing the city in the Winnipeg General Strike. For six weeks, the city was run by a citizens' committee. The establishment, fearing a Bolshevik-style revolution, responded with force. On June 21st, a day that would be forever known as 'Bloody Saturday,' the North-West Mounted Police charged a crowd of strikers, killing two men and injuring dozens. The strike was broken, but it lit a fire in the Canadian labour movement that would smolder for decades.

Yet, as the trauma of war and plague began to recede, a new energy surged through the nation. The 1920s arrived, and they began to roar. This was the Jazz Age, an era of unprecedented prosperity, technological marvels, and social revolution. In the cities, smokestacks billowed from new factories. The automobile, once a luxury for the rich, began to roll off assembly lines in Oshawa and Windsor, transforming the landscape with paved roads and service stations. In living rooms across the vast, sparsely populated country, the crackle of the radio brought families together, listening to hockey games or the latest dance music, shrinking the immense distances that had always defined Canada. Telephones became common, stitching the nation together in a web of instant communication.

It was an age of new freedoms, especially for women. The flapper, with her bobbed hair, shortened hemlines, and defiant spirit, became the icon of the era. Having won the right to vote in federal elections in 1918, women pushed for further recognition. The defining moment came in 1929 with the 'Persons Case.' Five remarkable women from Alberta—the 'Famous Five'—challenged a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that women were not 'qualified persons' eligible for appointment to the Senate. They took their case all the way to the British Privy Council, then Canada's highest court of appeal, which overturned the Canadian court’s decision. It was a landmark victory, a declaration that women were, in every legal sense, persons.

Beneath the surface of this glittering prosperity, however, deep inequalities persisted. While cities boomed, the Maritime provinces stagnated, their traditional industries in decline. On the Prairies, farmers who had fed the war effort now faced falling wheat prices and mounting debt. And Canada’s own ‘Noble Experiment’ with prohibition was a chaotic affair, varying wildly from province to province and creating a lucrative black market for bootleggers and rum-runners, who smuggled Canadian whisky to thirsty American clients like Al Capone.

Then, in October 1929, the roar of the twenties fell silent, replaced by the deafening crash of the stock market. Canada, with its economy heavily reliant on the export of raw materials like wheat, pulp, and minerals, was hit exceptionally hard. As global trade ground to a halt, the bottom fell out. The Great Depression had arrived. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who had presided over the boom, was voted out, replaced by the stern, wealthy Conservative R.B. Bennett, who promised to end the hardship. But the crisis was far deeper than any one man could solve.

The prairies became a desolate wasteland. A catastrophic, decade-long drought turned fertile topsoil into fine dust. When the winds came, they whipped up monstrous 'black blizzards' that buried homes, choked livestock, and blotted out the sun for days. Plagues of grasshoppers descended, devouring anything that managed to grow. Wheat prices collapsed from $1.60 a bushel to a mere 38 cents. Families who had built their lives on the promise of the land were forced to abandon their farms, becoming climate refugees in their own country.

In the cities, the situation was just as desperate. By 1933, national unemployment soared to a staggering 30%. Men who had once built automobiles and skyscrapers now stood for hours in breadlines for a piece of bread and a bowl of thin soup. 'Hobo jungles' sprang up near railway yards, makeshift camps for the thousands of homeless men who illegally rode freight trains, crisscrossing the country in a desperate, fruitless search for work. To deal with this army of single, unemployed men, the Bennett government created relief camps. Run by the Department of National Defence, these camps provided men with food, shelter, and back-breaking labour for a pittance: twenty cents a day. The conditions were demoralizing, the future nonexistent.

By 1935, the anger in the camps boiled over. Thousands of men in British Columbia boarded freight trains in a bold act of protest, the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Their goal was to travel across the country, picking up more men along the way, to confront Prime Minister Bennett in the capital and demand real work and fair wages. The trek was orderly and gained public sympathy as it moved eastward. But Bennett saw it as an insurrection. He ordered the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to stop the protest in Regina, Saskatchewan. On July 1st, 1935, the 'Regina Riot' erupted as police and protestors clashed. The city's market square became a scene of chaos, tear gas, and bloody street fighting. One policeman was killed, a trekker later died of his injuries, and the protest was brutally crushed. The On-to-Ottawa Trek failed in its immediate goal, but it exposed the raw desperation of the Canadian people and sealed the fate of Bennett's government.

The Depression's crucible forged new political movements. On the prairies, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was born, a socialist party that would one day become the NDP. In Alberta, the charismatic radio evangelist 'Bible Bill' Aberhart swept to power with his strange Social Credit theory. And from the ashes of the Bennett years, lasting national institutions like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Bank of Canada were created to better unify and stabilize the country. As the 1930s drew to a close, the economy was slowly, painfully beginning to heal. But across the Atlantic, the sound of marching boots grew louder. A new, far larger conflict was brewing, one that would finally end the Great Depression, but at the cost of pulling Canada onto the world stage once more.