Editorially speaking...
This week’s Chronicle is the conclusion to a four-part series on the historically significant On-To-Ottawa-Trek of 1935. That’s when 1000s of frustrated unemployed single men ‘rode the rails’ from Vancouver, bound for the nation’s capital, determined to meet with Prime Minister R.B. Bennett.
Our narrator is onetime Lake Cowichan resident Ronald Liversedge who wrote his “recollections,” those of an insider of the protest, in the 1960s.
Is his account biased? Of course, it is; how could it be otherwise? Is his account accurate? Sadly...yes.
He forgets some names, very gently gilds the lily when denying any fault on the part of the Relief Camp Workers as these disaffected men called themselves, downplays the leadership role of the Canadian Communist Party, and he exaggerates his crowd numbers.
But, for all that, newspaper reports of the day and studies by eminent historians since confirm that Mr. Liversedge’s version of the Trek is accurate. The real villains in the story—beside the world-wide 1930s Depression itself—were R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government and the RCMP.
Bennett and the national police, who were originally convinced that the Trek would peter out by the time it got to the Rockies, began to view it with alarm when it reached Calgary then Regina. Its next stop, Winnipeg, was known to be a hot-spot of labour and political dissent; should the Trekkers link arms with that city’s several 1000 unemployed, what then?
Having convinced themselves that the eastward Trek was the prelude to a Communist-inspired insurrection, the federal and national police resolved to stop the Trek in Regina with force—mounted police armed with batons, baseball bats then, when these failed, guns.
Of all things, they set their attack—and attack it became when they attempted to arrest the workers’ leaders at a peaceful public rally—for Dominion Day, July 1, 1935. It has gone down in history as Canada’s worst riot: a city police officer and a striker were killed, more than 100 of both sides were injured, 100s of 1000s of dollars damage done to property.
The reason the Relief Camp Workers had called a public meeting in Market Square? To inform Regina citizens that their delegates had just met with Bennett and been harangued as Communists, agitators and criminals, and told that they could expect no relief or assistance from his government.
In short, there was no point in continuing the Trek.
It was at then that police made a coordinated attack on the crowd that included 100s of innocent Regina citizens. Resistance by the Relief Camp Workers, who’d honed their skills in Vancouver streets, went on into the early morning hours with the horrendous results cited above.
Richard B. Bennett is viewed by many if not most historians as Canada’s worst prime minister. He was, in fact, our unluckiest as his Conservative government took power in the first year of what would prove to be the worst economic depression in history. Canada’s thin and widely scattered population with its dependence upon international sales of agricultural goods were among the hardest hit of western nations.
The Conservatives, like other governments, struggled with how to cope with growing unemployment that only ended with the start of the Second World War. Just as the Relief Camp Workers came to be viewed by many struggling Canadians as folk heroes, Bennett, a millionaire bachelor who lived in luxury n a 15-room suite in Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier, came to be viewed as heartless.
Think the price of gas is high because of the crisis in Ukraine? Try this—and take that, Bennett! —www.pinterest.com
Hence the derisive Bennett Buggy—cars pulled by horses because their owners couldn’t afford to buy gas.
Bennett’s political opponent, Liberal leader Mackenzie King, had been disappointed at losing the 1930 election but soon changed his mind. As he later wrote in a personal letter, he’d come to realize that he’d dodged a bullet by not winning office that year.
Thus it was that it was the Conservatives who had to flounder in the uncharted waters of an international depression such as never had been experienced before. Their natural resistance to do anything that smacked of socialism and the debacle of the Regina Riot were their undoing; just months later Canadian voters resoundingly booted them from office.
It was 22 years before there was another Conservative government in Ottawa.
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Which brings me back to the point of this exercise: a comparison of the protests of the unemployed in 1934-5 to the recent occupation of Ottawa by anti-mandate truckers and their supporters. Now it’s reported that some of them are headed to Victoria, expected to arrive by March 14, to begin a two-three-month long siege of our provincial capital.
Are they chafing under the hardships of years-long unemployment with no relief in sight? Of being assigned to government-run, military-style labour camps for 20 cents a day and meals?
No, they’re objecting to continuing anti-pandemic measures such as masking, restricted normal intimate social contact with family, friends and associates—the way of life that we who are fortunate enough to live in Canada have come to take as our due.
Who doesn’t want the COVID mandate to end?
Many of them deny the science of fighting a virus such as COVID with vaccines; some even claim it’s all a conspiracy of Big Brother government and Pharma-Corps.
It’s not necessarily their beliefs that can be criticized, it’s the way many of them have conducted themselves. The occupation of downtown Ottawa impacted on the lives and livelihoods of residents who are now suing for compensation.
The closed border crossings cost the country 100s of millions of dollars in lost trade and compromised us in the eyes of the U.S. government who were already promoting a pro-American buying policy and who have since accused us of being an unreliable trading partner.
How much is that alone going to cost Canada in the future?
A letter from a reader gently chided me for writing that the protesters in Ottawa were removed without police violence, that she chose to get her news from ‘the other side’ rather than the mainstream media. (I should acknowledge that I don’t watch TV and rely for my news on CBC Radio and the Times Communist, as a right-wing friend insists upon calling it).
She thought the protesters conducted themselves well in Ottawa and that if there was any violence it was caused by the police.
I respect her opinion. The bottom line is this: well-conducted public protest is accepted as a legitimate means of expression in our society (except when it inconveniences us personally, of course—you know, whose ox is being gored).
But the line is crossed when it becomes violent and/or destructive, when protesting becomes bullying or borders on criminality, when it denies fellow Canadians their right to go to work or to live in their homes in peace and quiet.
If an individual’s ‘rights’ are paramount to those of society as a whole, where to now, Canada?
Look closer at this photo of a Depression-era soup kitchen used previously in the Chronicles’ On-to-Ottawa Trek series. I didn’t notice, until it was enlarged, that the man caught in the very centre of the camera’s lens hasn’t touched his food. He’s crying. Was this unemployed man so ashamed to have his picture taken at a soup kitchen that he bowed his head and burst into tears? Now that’s real hardship worthy of public protest. —Public Domain
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