On-to-Ottawa trek (1935)

In early June 1935 about 1,000 striking relief-camp workers in Vancouver took their demand for “work and wages” directly to Ottawa. By the time the On-to-Ottawa trek, as it was called, reached southern Alberta and rolled towards Saskatchewan, picking up recruits at every stop along the way, it had come to epitomize all that was wrong with the federal government’s handling of the single, homeless unemployed during the depression. Conservative prime minister Richard Bedford Bennett decided to stop the protest march in Regina by force. The trek did not need to end the way it did, with a Dominion Day riot in Regina.