Pierre Berton On Canada In The Depression of 1929

Pierre Berton, The Great Depression 1929-1939

(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc.: 1990), p. 19.

ʻFor most people, the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties came to a dead stop.

Yet those fevered October days were no more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.

ʻThe germs were already there in the hot, dry summer of 1929, when the crops began to fail on the southern prairies and the boom ran wild and out of hand and the country continued to overbuild on borrowed funds.

The Great Depression was beginning and nobody knew it.

The Great Repression was already under way but nobody cared.

One did not need to visit Munich to see dissidents beaten to the ground. It was happening here.

ʻIn the decade that followed the hungry, the dirty, the sad, shameful, mean-spirited thirties the image of a policeman's truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees would become familiar. Human rights and civil liberties were of no more concern to the average Canadian, struggling to make ends meet, than to the average German. It is appalling to recall that under the vagrancy laws it was a crime to be poor and homeless in 1929.

But scarcely anybody gave that a thought; in those heady days, anybody who wanted a job could get one.

If you didn't work you were a bum, and if the police caught you and hauled you off a freight train, you went to jail and good riddance. But the day was coming when two million people would be bums, when the freight trains would be jammed with homeless men, when the jails would be bursting with “vagrants,” and when some who protested these conditions would be branded dangerous subversives and packed off to the penitentiary. That day, in fact, had already arrived. . . .ʼ

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