Great Depression

The Great Depression was a period of worldwide economic collapse in the early 1930s.

By 1933 unemployment in Canada had reached 27 per cent of the workforce, as high as in the United States. On the prairies drought, crop failures, and soil erosion continued, turning especially southern Saskatchewan into a dust bowl. The government’s budgetary deficit stood at $150 million, and more than a million and a half Canadians were dependent on direct relief. The work camps for unemployed single men that had been set up in 1932 under the aegis of the Department of National Defence were becoming hotbeds of discontent. Everywhere established institutions seemed to be under threat. Prime Minister Richard Bedford Bennett lamented to the former prime minister, Sir Robert Laird Borden, “that we are subject to the play of forces which we did not create and which we cannot either regulate or control.”