Part 7 - The Depression and The 'Canada of Tomorrow'
Part 7 - The Depression and The 'Canada of Tomorrow'
The outbreak of the Great Depression proved to be monumentally destructive to Canada, with its industrial output tumbling by over 30% between 1929 and 1932, its overall GDP by nearly 25% and prices for primary resources industries such as mining, forestry and farm crops dropping dramatically, with the Dust Bowl making things worse still. As with the devastated prairies in the South-Central United States, soil conditions in the Western Provinces made the situation worse, and the fear of the unknown resulting in the loss of business confidence made the problems worse. By late 1930, some sections of Canada had over half the population living on government assistance, and the situation in the West and some other areas (particularly Northern Ontario) wasn't much better. The sudden and massive drop in demand for pretty much everything left more than a few smaller communities with no economic lifeblood, forcing many to move to seek better lives someplace else. The images of people moving to seek better lives in any way they could, including whole families riding freight trains together (which by mid-1930 neither CNR or CPR were even trying to stop) and vehicles driving across the Prairies, particularly to the big cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver seeking anything better than what they had left was a powerful pusher, but such was the scale of the mess that even the most public-spirited of entrepreneurs couldn't fix it. This didn't stop valiant efforts by more than a few, but even a lot of who had been Canada's elite were ruined by the Depression, and the only response seemed to be available from governments.
The response to the problems was made rather worse by the reaction of Canada's government views of the day, with Prime Minister King being one of those who claimed that the depression was not really as bad as it seemed (in large part owing to his belief that Conservative Premiers, who led eight provinces at that point, were making it look worse to try and hurt him politically), leading him to make his infamous "One Red Cent" comment about relief. King's beliefs by late 1930 were clearly not accurate, and this tactical screwup made the Conservatives to almost be giddy with the possibility of Mackenzie King's arrogcane causing a mess for the Liberals in the expected elections in 1931. Led in that election by Richard Bedford Bennett, they proposed measures to try and end the Depression, including a long list of tarriff measures meant to restore Canada's industry and "blast" Canada's way into world markets, proved popular measures. Despite this, the Liberals continued to have sufficient support that the Conservatives were forced to have the confidence of Thomas Crerar's Progressives to maintain power, which in the 1931 elections he had little trouble getting. The combined party wasn't short of a mandate at all, and Bennett swept into power with his party and their allies ready to fight back.
Bennett, however, would be little short of a disaster as Prime Minister. Facing calls for expansive relief efforts, Bennett's government's attempt at Imperial Preference trade policies fell flat on its face, and they simply didn't have a plan B. Making things worse was the Bennett government's harsh stance on Communism - Communist ideology was not believed on any wide scale in Canada, but Bennett's persecution of it under Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada ended up a public embarassment when Communist leader Tim Buck was arrested and, during a prison riot, numerous shots were fired into his cell. Worse still, the lassiez-faire economic inclinations of the Conservative Party not only failed to end the suffering, but the harsh conditions of relief camps in some cases made the problem worse.
The seriousness of the situation first came to a head on November 25, 1931, in Toronto. An agit-prop play put on at the Standard Theatre was shut down by police during the performance, to the anger of the crowd, who openly argued with the police and then started fighting them. That situation petered out quickly with no lives lost (though dozens of injuries), but the police arrested the writers of the play, charging them with Sedition. The trial, however, turned into an public embarassment when Buck was allowed to testify at the trial and relate what exactly had happened in open court. The writers of the play were acquitted, but the day after they were released on June 10, 1932, one of them was struck and killed by a truck on Yonge Street in Toronto, the truck then racing away from the scene. Assuming it had been an assassination, over 75,000 protestors took to the streets of Toronto on a hot June 16, 1932, and were met by police and army reserve officers. The attempt to break up the strike ended with RCMP officers firing into the crowd of protesters, killing 17 and wounding over 100. That action caused multiple rounds of animosity between the RCMP and unemployed Toronto residents, leading to multiple other incidents of trouble in Toronto and areas around it in the Summer of 1932. On July 27, 1932, the second mess of the Great Depression broke out in Calgary with a similar situation, with police raiding a large rally of Socialist Party of Canada supporters at the Stampede Grounds. That heavy-handed police action turned an already-angry group of people into a full-blown riot which took five days to get under control, a riot which officially killed 55 people (many say the number was far higher than that) and did over twenty million dollars in property damage. The battles in Toronto and the Calgary Riots blew clear into the open just how ugly the mood in the nation was, and as if that was not bad enough, the On-To-Ottawa trek by workers in the relief camps ended in the Regina Riot on September 20, 1932, where the RCMP and the Trekkers ended up battling in the streets.
The Riots did in the Bennett Government. While being unsympathetic to the Communists, Bennett's response to the On-To-Ottawa Trek was the last straw for the Progressives, and party leader Crerar led the party out of government, calling a no-confidence vote on December 11, 1932. Bennett's desire to avoid this was completely destroyed when two of his MPs were arrested on spurious charges by the RCMP in November. While they were quickly released, Crerar came out of that situation loudly saying that Bennett had failed Canadians and that the country needed a new government to try and fix the mess created. Despite Bennett's efforts, he resoundingly lost the Confidence vote, and a desperate attempt to convince Progressive and Liberal MPs to support his government through offers of financial support to their ridings was blown open by the Calgary Herald and the Mail and Empire, which both considered it little more than organized bribery. But both the Conservatives and Liberals were not prepared for what came in the early 1933 elections - the Progressives, despite not running a candidate in every riding, came out with just eight seats shy of a majority government, running on policies that took far more than a little inspiration from President Roosevelt's New Deal south of the border. Bennett went so far to try and avoid this that he proposed a coalition government with Mackenzie King to stop what he called "The Socialist Menace". King, however, was completely unsympathetic to this, and his members had little difficulty embracing many element's of Crerar's policy proposals, which he labeled the 'Canada of Tommorrow'. Recognizing the concerns others might have, Crerar did come to an informal agreement with Mackenzie King, who broadly approved of the plans brought forward by Crerar.
While Mackenzie King and Bennett were more liberal financially, Crerar as Prime Minister knew that the country had real issues, and while also proposing many similar elements to the American New Deal such as banking and securities reform, getting off of the gold standard (which Crerar had fought with Bennett on repeatedly) and enacting bank stabilities along with closing down seriously insolvent ones. The fact that this effectively expanded the reach of Canada's biggest banks did not go unnoticed, but more than a few people felt that government-arranged expansions in return for major law changes which reduced their management freedom was an acceptable trade-off. But where Crerar really got down to work was in Relief programs.
Far from the small and sporadic efforts of the Bennett Government, Crerar's asked of the provinces to provide plans and projects that could be funded by Ottawa specifically to reduce unemployment and then tasked both private interests and public agencies to build them. The National Economic Recovery Act, passed in May 1933, made Crerar's desires a reality - and as there were tons of projects that had been planned in the booming 1920s that had been stopped cold by the Depression, those who could develop such plans quickly did just that, and in a few cases Washington and Ottawa co-operated on things, including the biggest single project of them all - the St. Lawrence Seaway and the reconstruction of the Erie Canal.
The building of the St. Lawrence Seaway had been proposed by Canadian industrial and some transport interests (though naturally opposed by the railroads) for many years, and these interests had in the mid-1920s funded a construction study which included detailed planning to build a Seaway system which would allow ships of slightly bigger than Panamax-size to move into and out of the Great Lakes, the building of the Welland Canal, which would be the first section of the Seaway completed, reflected this. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal was planned for rebuild on the American side to somewhat smaller dimensions owing to concerns about water supplies in the canal regions. Roosevelt, Crerar and Mackenzie King all knew of the proposals, and with the NERA in Canada and the PWA in the United States, they could do it. The St. Lawrence Seaway, completed and opened in May 1938, was built to address many of these issues, and the Erie Canal's rebuild, completed in April 1941, added to the ability of shippers to use the Lakes. Built to big dimensions - Seawaymax is 1175' length, 138' beam and 41' draft, along with 175' air draft - the Seaway's ability to handle large vessels was shown clearly by the fact its first ships through, fittingly enough, were American battleship USS Maryland, the flagship of the Royal Canadian Navy HMCS Canada and British battleship HMS Rodney, none of which had ever made any attempt at moving so far into fresh water bodies before. (The American battleship made a tour of Canadian Great Lakes ports while there, while the Canadian and British vessels did the same with American ports.) The Seaway would prove itself invaluable during WWII, allowing repair and construction of vessels far from the Atlantic. The Erie Canal was built rather smaller - Eriemax is 815' length, 110' beam and 36' draft - but the project provided a vast number of jobs in the region and allowed the Hudson River to be used for transport that had before then mostly been lost to railroads. The old Erie Canal west of Baldwinsville, NY, wasn't rebuilt as part of the process - the new canal used the Oswego Canal to access Lake Ontario, saving hugely on costs - but the rest of the canal would be revived by New York State in the 1950s.
Beyond the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Canadian efforts also included the first dams of Ontario Hydro's Ontario North and Hydro-Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric projects, with the first Ontario North dam (Albany River-1) finished in May 1937 and the first of the James Bay Project (Le Grande-1) finished in September 1937. Three Ontario North dams and two James Bay Project dams were finished before the outbreak of war, and while initial problems with power transmission did exist, the development of HVDC power lines, the first of which began transmission in Quebec in 1955, all but eliminated the problem and ushered in an era of cheap electricity in Ontario and Quebec, which would rapidly followed by dams and hydroelectric systems in British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland in the post-war era. Also built as a result of this was the three dams built on the Columbia River, the largest of which was the mammoth Grand Coulee Dam, which began producing electricity in 1941. BC Hydro and the Bonneville Power Authority worked hand-in-hand for many years starting in the 1930s to manage water and power supplies in the region, and it showed in the co-operation. Likewise, the rivers that connected the Great Lakes also were dammed and channeled for hydroelectric power in a number of cases, providing a welcome boost to the power supplies of the region.
In addition to the large infrastructure actions, lots of other tasks got done. The Trans-Canada Highway, a priority of the Act, was completed in 1937, with the Lions Gate Bridge completed in 1935 as part of the projects, helping link Vancouver's busy northern suburbs with the city itself. Toronto and Montreal got new subway lines, Calgary and Edmonton got above-ground public transport, Canadian National Railways built the Confederation Bridge-Tunnel between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick between 1934 and 1940 (an engineering marvel in its own right) and rural electrification was stretched practically everywhere. In the smaller projects, better transportation, water conservation, sanitation and flood control were prioritized at first, but as those problems got fixed, the focus shifted to public facilites - schools, hospitals, libraries, armories and parks and recreational facilities. High Park and the Toronto Islands in Toronto, Stanley Park in Vancouver, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Glenmore and Riverside Parks in Calgary, the Confederation Parks in Ottawa, Discovery Park and Seward Park in Seattle and hundreds of other spaces got rebuilt or refurbished. Montreal got its immense new hockey arena, the Montreal Forum, while Vancouver and Seattle also got immense new stadiums - British Columbia Place for Vancouver and the Exhibition Stadium for Seattle - while many smaller sports arenas were built.
All of the work was immensely costly, but it had the effect it was supposed to - it gave a massive boost to the Canadian economy, and both working on the projects and supplying them became a major undertaking. The Welfare Capitalism ideas that had been shelved amidst the chaos of the Great Depression came roaring back after the NERA, with the government effectively using its financial muscle to direct projects to which a vast segment of the country's industry supplied them. The NERA also forced many companies to rebuild and advance their own infrastructure on their dime - over two dozen cement plants were needed to supply the massive construction projects (making huge income for cement firms), steel plants were revived and upgraded, along with the mines and quarries that supplied them, CNR and CPR engaged in something of a rivalry towards locomotive sizes with CPR's 4-6-6-4 'Selkirk' types running a rivalry with CNR's 'Superpower' 4-8-2+2-8-4 Garratts, several companies (including Robinson, Massey-Harris, Russell-Evans, Prevost, Bombardier, Sterling and Western Auto) all fought for the market in trucks and construction vehicles and several companies used the opportunity presented by the St. Lawrence Seaway construction to build vessels big enough to properly use it. GM of Canada and Westland-Reynard soon began to see a big spike in demand for their products, as did Ford of Canada and lots of importers, many of whom set up assembly plants in Canada to accomodate demand. Both government agencies and private development interests took to the task of rebuilding the country's housing stock, forming the genesis of development titans Olympia and York, Brookfield and Tremblay-Gauthier. The need for raw materials sent many who had left the mining and forestry towns headed back to them, only in most cases to far higher wages and safer working conditions. It was a good sign, and it said much that tens of thousands of new companies came to pass, creating a whole new generation of business titans, particularly among French Canadians and Native Canadians - Montreal's long English-dominated business community began to be challenged by French-speaking businessmen during the late 1930s, and after the war these men would challenge the old elite for control of the business community in Quebec and Canada in general.
Crerar and Mackenzie King's efforts made them beloved among the Canadian population and brought a new progressivism to light. The Progressive Party, well-established federally but with little provincial infrastructure, allied itself with the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation from its foundation in 1932 (as the CCF was vocally anti-communist, this didn't bother too many people) and sought to define itself as the more liberal side of Canadian politics, while the traditional Liberals themselves began to establish themselves as centrists who tended to lean left, with the Conservatives, whose traditional values had been shattered by the Bennett era's spectacular flameout, sought to create a new identity for itself. It was a political re-alignment that would last for decades to come. The 1937 elections handed a dominant victory to the Liberals and Progressives, but it put Mackenzie King back in the Prime Minister's Office....but knowing of Crerar's work, the Liberal-Progressive accord remained and Crerar and eight of his caucus members were part of King's 1937 cabinet. The Conservatives found inspiration from the more-pragmatic efforts in several provinces (particularly Ontario) to begin a long rebuilding process during World War II, but would find themselves largely shut out of federal political power until the late 1950s. The harder ideological tones of many of the conservatives of the past had been burned badly by Bennett and then by the highly-successful efforts of Crerar and Mackenzie King to revive Canada's economy.
Having followed heavily along the lines of the New Deal, Ottawa and Washington began to see each other as one of its most dependable allies, which contributed heavily to Canada's willingness to focus its armed forces on expeditionary work. The Royal Canadian Navy got four seaplane carriers built between 1933 and 1936, and the building of the Montreal-class light cruisers between 1937 and 1940 (the first Canadian-designed cruisers, which used Canadian diesel engines and drew substantially from American design practice but still used British gun and electronics designs) and the RCN's big destroyer fleet was done with Washington's knowledge and approval, and the Americans provided Canada's destroyers with SG surface search radars, despite all of them also using British fire control radars and all Canadian larger warships being fitted with the latest in RN radar by 1941. Washington by the outbreak of World War II saw Canada as the big ally to the north, and Canadian warships (including HMCS Canada) were frequently invited to participate in American fleet exercises, and they did so frequently. (It was at one of these just before the outbreak of war that the USN learned just how good the British Type 284 radar was, thanks to the accurate shooting of HMCS Canada during the exercise.) Tarriffs between the two nations tumbled significantly during the New Deal and NERA eras, and when war broke out the oil supplies of Western Canada became an invaluable supply to both the Americans and the British Empire.
Canada's inclusiveness of immigration policy would indeed be tested by the 1930s. Neither Mackenzie King, Bennett or Crerar made any real attempt to restrict immigration more than already existed - far fewer people traveled during the Depression - but Canada did, however, see major differences in policy from other nations, primarily with regards to Jewish immigration.
While anti-Semitism was by no means unheard of in Canada, the exclusionary laws passed in stages by Nazi Germany starting in 1933, while largely ignored by other European nations, was regarded by many Canadians as being at the very best truly barbaric. Indeed fascism was looked down upon more in Canada than communism was even before the outbreak of war, and Canada's small Jewish community found it hard to stay quiet. But the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 changed the equation. News of it spread worldwide rapidly, and both Crerar and Mackenzie King found themselves hearing calls to allow Jews fleeing Nazi persecution a safe haven in Canada. Those calls had been heard since Hitler's rise to power, but by 1935-36 the calls were incredibly loud, and by the winter of 1935-36 one of the racial biases so commonly used to justify anti-Semitism - that they controlled international finance - became an asset.
It started in Toronto, where aldermen David Scott and William Sebastian both wrote in a Toronto Star editorial in July 1935 that the Nuremberg Laws were "the gift that has been given to any nation that has the courage to take it" as any country could "instantly, and with nearly any terms they desire, take in a whole class of people who are far more educated than the norm, and thanks to Hitler, far more dedicated to their new homes than most". It called upon "Men of Honour" to speak up for the Jews, and that if Hitler truly wanted them out of Europe that badly, that Canada should take them on. The latent anti-Semitism that existed in Canada made sure that it turned into a spirited debate, but one where there was a substantial problem - while French-Canadians were as divided as any other group about it, Native Canadians weren't - and they had been more disgusted by Hitler than anyone else, having in their not-too-distant past been on the receiving end of such hatred, were absolutely on the sides of allowing Jews into Canada. A key turning point was a public debate in the House of Commons in February 1936, when Frederick Blair attempted to make the case to Ottawa that allowing in the Jews would antagonize other nations, leading John Lightfield, an Ojibwa member of the Parliament for the Progressives, to demand "who, exactly, are we going to be antagonizing, Mr. Blair? Hitler? He wants them gone anyways. Other Europeans? They don't want them either. So, tell me again, who would we be antagonizing by taking in people whose home doesn't want them?" Lightfield wasn't finished there, speaking again a week later to a gathering in Toronto "Are we the Men of Honour or not? Are we the nation that allows those to come to build a better life, or are we going to just say to people who are being hated because of their religion, you can't come because we fear the Jews? More to the point, how do you fear people who are fleeing their would-be murderers in Europe?" Lightfield was not the only MP who felt this way, and by late 1936, things had shifted with Canada's immigration policy. Jews were allowed into Canada if they had a certain amount of assets to bring with them, but that limit was made lower and lower as more news of Nazi barbarism came out.
On September 11, 1936, Canada tossed out its Jewish exclusionary laws at the order of Cabinet, and Frederick Blair's attempts to hold this up saw him fired in February 1937. Lightfield personally organized help committee for arriving Jewish refugees, and he organized the ad-hoc "Men of Honour" committee which fought for equality for refugees. By mid-1937, Toronto in particular was taking in Jewish refugees at bigger than expected numbers, and no sooner than they had gotten their assets organized in Canada then they began making loud public statements about improving Toronto's urban environment, a situation mirrored in Montreal, Halifax, London and Winnipeg where more than a few of them congregated. The violence of Kristallnacht stopped just about all forms of objection to the openly-allowing policy of Jews, and several ships who had left Europe with Jewish passengers who were seeking asylum, including the famed MS St. Louis and SS San Sebastian, were among those that docked in Canada. Canada took in over 150,000 Jews between 1936 and 1939 and between 1945 and 1948 as Holocaust survivors. After the war, over fifty of the "Men of Honour" were given the status as "Righteous Among The Nations" and those who had so loudly advocated for the Jews to come to Canada quickly gained recognition, and notable anti-Semites (Frederick Blair most famously) found themselves almost ostracized from Canadian society. When John Lightfield was appointed Canada's ambassador to Israel in 1954, he was personally greeted at his arrival by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and one of the youngest of the 1930s Men of Honour, 26-year-old legal apprentice Michael Howland, would go on to also be one of the chief negotiators of the Ottawa Treaty, and when he died in 1995, Israel's Ambassador to Canada offered Howland's family a place for him on the Mount of Olives. (They respectfully declined this.) Israel and Canada would have a very good relationship after the war, a relationship which would ultimately culminate in the Ottawa Treaty.
The outbreak of the Great Depression proved to be monumentally destructive to Canada, with its industrial output tumbling by over 30% between 1929 and 1932, its overall GDP by nearly 25% and prices for primary resources industries such as mining, forestry and farm crops dropping dramatically, with the Dust Bowl making things worse still. As with the devastated prairies in the South-Central United States, soil conditions in the Western Provinces made the situation worse, and the fear of the unknown resulting in the loss of business confidence made the problems worse. By late 1930, some sections of Canada had over half the population living on government assistance, and the situation in the West and some other areas (particularly Northern Ontario) wasn't much better. The sudden and massive drop in demand for pretty much everything left more than a few smaller communities with no economic lifeblood, forcing many to move to seek better lives someplace else. The images of people moving to seek better lives in any way they could, including whole families riding freight trains together (which by mid-1930 neither CNR or CPR were even trying to stop) and vehicles driving across the Prairies, particularly to the big cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver seeking anything better than what they had left was a powerful pusher, but such was the scale of the mess that even the most public-spirited of entrepreneurs couldn't fix it. This didn't stop valiant efforts by more than a few, but even a lot of who had been Canada's elite were ruined by the Depression, and the only response seemed to be available from governments.
The response to the problems was made rather worse by the reaction of Canada's government views of the day, with Prime Minister King being one of those who claimed that the depression was not really as bad as it seemed (in large part owing to his belief that Conservative Premiers, who led eight provinces at that point, were making it look worse to try and hurt him politically), leading him to make his infamous "One Red Cent" comment about relief. King's beliefs by late 1930 were clearly not accurate, and this tactical screwup made the Conservatives to almost be giddy with the possibility of Mackenzie King's arrogcane causing a mess for the Liberals in the expected elections in 1931. Led in that election by Richard Bedford Bennett, they proposed measures to try and end the Depression, including a long list of tarriff measures meant to restore Canada's industry and "blast" Canada's way into world markets, proved popular measures. Despite this, the Liberals continued to have sufficient support that the Conservatives were forced to have the confidence of Thomas Crerar's Progressives to maintain power, which in the 1931 elections he had little trouble getting. The combined party wasn't short of a mandate at all, and Bennett swept into power with his party and their allies ready to fight back.
Bennett, however, would be little short of a disaster as Prime Minister. Facing calls for expansive relief efforts, Bennett's government's attempt at Imperial Preference trade policies fell flat on its face, and they simply didn't have a plan B. Making things worse was the Bennett government's harsh stance on Communism - Communist ideology was not believed on any wide scale in Canada, but Bennett's persecution of it under Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada ended up a public embarassment when Communist leader Tim Buck was arrested and, during a prison riot, numerous shots were fired into his cell. Worse still, the lassiez-faire economic inclinations of the Conservative Party not only failed to end the suffering, but the harsh conditions of relief camps in some cases made the problem worse.
The seriousness of the situation first came to a head on November 25, 1931, in Toronto. An agit-prop play put on at the Standard Theatre was shut down by police during the performance, to the anger of the crowd, who openly argued with the police and then started fighting them. That situation petered out quickly with no lives lost (though dozens of injuries), but the police arrested the writers of the play, charging them with Sedition. The trial, however, turned into an public embarassment when Buck was allowed to testify at the trial and relate what exactly had happened in open court. The writers of the play were acquitted, but the day after they were released on June 10, 1932, one of them was struck and killed by a truck on Yonge Street in Toronto, the truck then racing away from the scene. Assuming it had been an assassination, over 75,000 protestors took to the streets of Toronto on a hot June 16, 1932, and were met by police and army reserve officers. The attempt to break up the strike ended with RCMP officers firing into the crowd of protesters, killing 17 and wounding over 100. That action caused multiple rounds of animosity between the RCMP and unemployed Toronto residents, leading to multiple other incidents of trouble in Toronto and areas around it in the Summer of 1932. On July 27, 1932, the second mess of the Great Depression broke out in Calgary with a similar situation, with police raiding a large rally of Socialist Party of Canada supporters at the Stampede Grounds. That heavy-handed police action turned an already-angry group of people into a full-blown riot which took five days to get under control, a riot which officially killed 55 people (many say the number was far higher than that) and did over twenty million dollars in property damage. The battles in Toronto and the Calgary Riots blew clear into the open just how ugly the mood in the nation was, and as if that was not bad enough, the On-To-Ottawa trek by workers in the relief camps ended in the Regina Riot on September 20, 1932, where the RCMP and the Trekkers ended up battling in the streets.
The Riots did in the Bennett Government. While being unsympathetic to the Communists, Bennett's response to the On-To-Ottawa Trek was the last straw for the Progressives, and party leader Crerar led the party out of government, calling a no-confidence vote on December 11, 1932. Bennett's desire to avoid this was completely destroyed when two of his MPs were arrested on spurious charges by the RCMP in November. While they were quickly released, Crerar came out of that situation loudly saying that Bennett had failed Canadians and that the country needed a new government to try and fix the mess created. Despite Bennett's efforts, he resoundingly lost the Confidence vote, and a desperate attempt to convince Progressive and Liberal MPs to support his government through offers of financial support to their ridings was blown open by the Calgary Herald and the Mail and Empire, which both considered it little more than organized bribery. But both the Conservatives and Liberals were not prepared for what came in the early 1933 elections - the Progressives, despite not running a candidate in every riding, came out with just eight seats shy of a majority government, running on policies that took far more than a little inspiration from President Roosevelt's New Deal south of the border. Bennett went so far to try and avoid this that he proposed a coalition government with Mackenzie King to stop what he called "The Socialist Menace". King, however, was completely unsympathetic to this, and his members had little difficulty embracing many element's of Crerar's policy proposals, which he labeled the 'Canada of Tommorrow'. Recognizing the concerns others might have, Crerar did come to an informal agreement with Mackenzie King, who broadly approved of the plans brought forward by Crerar.
While Mackenzie King and Bennett were more liberal financially, Crerar as Prime Minister knew that the country had real issues, and while also proposing many similar elements to the American New Deal such as banking and securities reform, getting off of the gold standard (which Crerar had fought with Bennett on repeatedly) and enacting bank stabilities along with closing down seriously insolvent ones. The fact that this effectively expanded the reach of Canada's biggest banks did not go unnoticed, but more than a few people felt that government-arranged expansions in return for major law changes which reduced their management freedom was an acceptable trade-off. But where Crerar really got down to work was in Relief programs.
Far from the small and sporadic efforts of the Bennett Government, Crerar's asked of the provinces to provide plans and projects that could be funded by Ottawa specifically to reduce unemployment and then tasked both private interests and public agencies to build them. The National Economic Recovery Act, passed in May 1933, made Crerar's desires a reality - and as there were tons of projects that had been planned in the booming 1920s that had been stopped cold by the Depression, those who could develop such plans quickly did just that, and in a few cases Washington and Ottawa co-operated on things, including the biggest single project of them all - the St. Lawrence Seaway and the reconstruction of the Erie Canal.
The building of the St. Lawrence Seaway had been proposed by Canadian industrial and some transport interests (though naturally opposed by the railroads) for many years, and these interests had in the mid-1920s funded a construction study which included detailed planning to build a Seaway system which would allow ships of slightly bigger than Panamax-size to move into and out of the Great Lakes, the building of the Welland Canal, which would be the first section of the Seaway completed, reflected this. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal was planned for rebuild on the American side to somewhat smaller dimensions owing to concerns about water supplies in the canal regions. Roosevelt, Crerar and Mackenzie King all knew of the proposals, and with the NERA in Canada and the PWA in the United States, they could do it. The St. Lawrence Seaway, completed and opened in May 1938, was built to address many of these issues, and the Erie Canal's rebuild, completed in April 1941, added to the ability of shippers to use the Lakes. Built to big dimensions - Seawaymax is 1175' length, 138' beam and 41' draft, along with 175' air draft - the Seaway's ability to handle large vessels was shown clearly by the fact its first ships through, fittingly enough, were American battleship USS Maryland, the flagship of the Royal Canadian Navy HMCS Canada and British battleship HMS Rodney, none of which had ever made any attempt at moving so far into fresh water bodies before. (The American battleship made a tour of Canadian Great Lakes ports while there, while the Canadian and British vessels did the same with American ports.) The Seaway would prove itself invaluable during WWII, allowing repair and construction of vessels far from the Atlantic. The Erie Canal was built rather smaller - Eriemax is 815' length, 110' beam and 36' draft - but the project provided a vast number of jobs in the region and allowed the Hudson River to be used for transport that had before then mostly been lost to railroads. The old Erie Canal west of Baldwinsville, NY, wasn't rebuilt as part of the process - the new canal used the Oswego Canal to access Lake Ontario, saving hugely on costs - but the rest of the canal would be revived by New York State in the 1950s.
Beyond the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Canadian efforts also included the first dams of Ontario Hydro's Ontario North and Hydro-Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric projects, with the first Ontario North dam (Albany River-1) finished in May 1937 and the first of the James Bay Project (Le Grande-1) finished in September 1937. Three Ontario North dams and two James Bay Project dams were finished before the outbreak of war, and while initial problems with power transmission did exist, the development of HVDC power lines, the first of which began transmission in Quebec in 1955, all but eliminated the problem and ushered in an era of cheap electricity in Ontario and Quebec, which would rapidly followed by dams and hydroelectric systems in British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland in the post-war era. Also built as a result of this was the three dams built on the Columbia River, the largest of which was the mammoth Grand Coulee Dam, which began producing electricity in 1941. BC Hydro and the Bonneville Power Authority worked hand-in-hand for many years starting in the 1930s to manage water and power supplies in the region, and it showed in the co-operation. Likewise, the rivers that connected the Great Lakes also were dammed and channeled for hydroelectric power in a number of cases, providing a welcome boost to the power supplies of the region.
In addition to the large infrastructure actions, lots of other tasks got done. The Trans-Canada Highway, a priority of the Act, was completed in 1937, with the Lions Gate Bridge completed in 1935 as part of the projects, helping link Vancouver's busy northern suburbs with the city itself. Toronto and Montreal got new subway lines, Calgary and Edmonton got above-ground public transport, Canadian National Railways built the Confederation Bridge-Tunnel between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick between 1934 and 1940 (an engineering marvel in its own right) and rural electrification was stretched practically everywhere. In the smaller projects, better transportation, water conservation, sanitation and flood control were prioritized at first, but as those problems got fixed, the focus shifted to public facilites - schools, hospitals, libraries, armories and parks and recreational facilities. High Park and the Toronto Islands in Toronto, Stanley Park in Vancouver, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Glenmore and Riverside Parks in Calgary, the Confederation Parks in Ottawa, Discovery Park and Seward Park in Seattle and hundreds of other spaces got rebuilt or refurbished. Montreal got its immense new hockey arena, the Montreal Forum, while Vancouver and Seattle also got immense new stadiums - British Columbia Place for Vancouver and the Exhibition Stadium for Seattle - while many smaller sports arenas were built.
All of the work was immensely costly, but it had the effect it was supposed to - it gave a massive boost to the Canadian economy, and both working on the projects and supplying them became a major undertaking. The Welfare Capitalism ideas that had been shelved amidst the chaos of the Great Depression came roaring back after the NERA, with the government effectively using its financial muscle to direct projects to which a vast segment of the country's industry supplied them. The NERA also forced many companies to rebuild and advance their own infrastructure on their dime - over two dozen cement plants were needed to supply the massive construction projects (making huge income for cement firms), steel plants were revived and upgraded, along with the mines and quarries that supplied them, CNR and CPR engaged in something of a rivalry towards locomotive sizes with CPR's 4-6-6-4 'Selkirk' types running a rivalry with CNR's 'Superpower' 4-8-2+2-8-4 Garratts, several companies (including Robinson, Massey-Harris, Russell-Evans, Prevost, Bombardier, Sterling and Western Auto) all fought for the market in trucks and construction vehicles and several companies used the opportunity presented by the St. Lawrence Seaway construction to build vessels big enough to properly use it. GM of Canada and Westland-Reynard soon began to see a big spike in demand for their products, as did Ford of Canada and lots of importers, many of whom set up assembly plants in Canada to accomodate demand. Both government agencies and private development interests took to the task of rebuilding the country's housing stock, forming the genesis of development titans Olympia and York, Brookfield and Tremblay-Gauthier. The need for raw materials sent many who had left the mining and forestry towns headed back to them, only in most cases to far higher wages and safer working conditions. It was a good sign, and it said much that tens of thousands of new companies came to pass, creating a whole new generation of business titans, particularly among French Canadians and Native Canadians - Montreal's long English-dominated business community began to be challenged by French-speaking businessmen during the late 1930s, and after the war these men would challenge the old elite for control of the business community in Quebec and Canada in general.
Crerar and Mackenzie King's efforts made them beloved among the Canadian population and brought a new progressivism to light. The Progressive Party, well-established federally but with little provincial infrastructure, allied itself with the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation from its foundation in 1932 (as the CCF was vocally anti-communist, this didn't bother too many people) and sought to define itself as the more liberal side of Canadian politics, while the traditional Liberals themselves began to establish themselves as centrists who tended to lean left, with the Conservatives, whose traditional values had been shattered by the Bennett era's spectacular flameout, sought to create a new identity for itself. It was a political re-alignment that would last for decades to come. The 1937 elections handed a dominant victory to the Liberals and Progressives, but it put Mackenzie King back in the Prime Minister's Office....but knowing of Crerar's work, the Liberal-Progressive accord remained and Crerar and eight of his caucus members were part of King's 1937 cabinet. The Conservatives found inspiration from the more-pragmatic efforts in several provinces (particularly Ontario) to begin a long rebuilding process during World War II, but would find themselves largely shut out of federal political power until the late 1950s. The harder ideological tones of many of the conservatives of the past had been burned badly by Bennett and then by the highly-successful efforts of Crerar and Mackenzie King to revive Canada's economy.
Having followed heavily along the lines of the New Deal, Ottawa and Washington began to see each other as one of its most dependable allies, which contributed heavily to Canada's willingness to focus its armed forces on expeditionary work. The Royal Canadian Navy got four seaplane carriers built between 1933 and 1936, and the building of the Montreal-class light cruisers between 1937 and 1940 (the first Canadian-designed cruisers, which used Canadian diesel engines and drew substantially from American design practice but still used British gun and electronics designs) and the RCN's big destroyer fleet was done with Washington's knowledge and approval, and the Americans provided Canada's destroyers with SG surface search radars, despite all of them also using British fire control radars and all Canadian larger warships being fitted with the latest in RN radar by 1941. Washington by the outbreak of World War II saw Canada as the big ally to the north, and Canadian warships (including HMCS Canada) were frequently invited to participate in American fleet exercises, and they did so frequently. (It was at one of these just before the outbreak of war that the USN learned just how good the British Type 284 radar was, thanks to the accurate shooting of HMCS Canada during the exercise.) Tarriffs between the two nations tumbled significantly during the New Deal and NERA eras, and when war broke out the oil supplies of Western Canada became an invaluable supply to both the Americans and the British Empire.
Canada's inclusiveness of immigration policy would indeed be tested by the 1930s. Neither Mackenzie King, Bennett or Crerar made any real attempt to restrict immigration more than already existed - far fewer people traveled during the Depression - but Canada did, however, see major differences in policy from other nations, primarily with regards to Jewish immigration.
While anti-Semitism was by no means unheard of in Canada, the exclusionary laws passed in stages by Nazi Germany starting in 1933, while largely ignored by other European nations, was regarded by many Canadians as being at the very best truly barbaric. Indeed fascism was looked down upon more in Canada than communism was even before the outbreak of war, and Canada's small Jewish community found it hard to stay quiet. But the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 changed the equation. News of it spread worldwide rapidly, and both Crerar and Mackenzie King found themselves hearing calls to allow Jews fleeing Nazi persecution a safe haven in Canada. Those calls had been heard since Hitler's rise to power, but by 1935-36 the calls were incredibly loud, and by the winter of 1935-36 one of the racial biases so commonly used to justify anti-Semitism - that they controlled international finance - became an asset.
It started in Toronto, where aldermen David Scott and William Sebastian both wrote in a Toronto Star editorial in July 1935 that the Nuremberg Laws were "the gift that has been given to any nation that has the courage to take it" as any country could "instantly, and with nearly any terms they desire, take in a whole class of people who are far more educated than the norm, and thanks to Hitler, far more dedicated to their new homes than most". It called upon "Men of Honour" to speak up for the Jews, and that if Hitler truly wanted them out of Europe that badly, that Canada should take them on. The latent anti-Semitism that existed in Canada made sure that it turned into a spirited debate, but one where there was a substantial problem - while French-Canadians were as divided as any other group about it, Native Canadians weren't - and they had been more disgusted by Hitler than anyone else, having in their not-too-distant past been on the receiving end of such hatred, were absolutely on the sides of allowing Jews into Canada. A key turning point was a public debate in the House of Commons in February 1936, when Frederick Blair attempted to make the case to Ottawa that allowing in the Jews would antagonize other nations, leading John Lightfield, an Ojibwa member of the Parliament for the Progressives, to demand "who, exactly, are we going to be antagonizing, Mr. Blair? Hitler? He wants them gone anyways. Other Europeans? They don't want them either. So, tell me again, who would we be antagonizing by taking in people whose home doesn't want them?" Lightfield wasn't finished there, speaking again a week later to a gathering in Toronto "Are we the Men of Honour or not? Are we the nation that allows those to come to build a better life, or are we going to just say to people who are being hated because of their religion, you can't come because we fear the Jews? More to the point, how do you fear people who are fleeing their would-be murderers in Europe?" Lightfield was not the only MP who felt this way, and by late 1936, things had shifted with Canada's immigration policy. Jews were allowed into Canada if they had a certain amount of assets to bring with them, but that limit was made lower and lower as more news of Nazi barbarism came out.
On September 11, 1936, Canada tossed out its Jewish exclusionary laws at the order of Cabinet, and Frederick Blair's attempts to hold this up saw him fired in February 1937. Lightfield personally organized help committee for arriving Jewish refugees, and he organized the ad-hoc "Men of Honour" committee which fought for equality for refugees. By mid-1937, Toronto in particular was taking in Jewish refugees at bigger than expected numbers, and no sooner than they had gotten their assets organized in Canada then they began making loud public statements about improving Toronto's urban environment, a situation mirrored in Montreal, Halifax, London and Winnipeg where more than a few of them congregated. The violence of Kristallnacht stopped just about all forms of objection to the openly-allowing policy of Jews, and several ships who had left Europe with Jewish passengers who were seeking asylum, including the famed MS St. Louis and SS San Sebastian, were among those that docked in Canada. Canada took in over 150,000 Jews between 1936 and 1939 and between 1945 and 1948 as Holocaust survivors. After the war, over fifty of the "Men of Honour" were given the status as "Righteous Among The Nations" and those who had so loudly advocated for the Jews to come to Canada quickly gained recognition, and notable anti-Semites (Frederick Blair most famously) found themselves almost ostracized from Canadian society. When John Lightfield was appointed Canada's ambassador to Israel in 1954, he was personally greeted at his arrival by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and one of the youngest of the 1930s Men of Honour, 26-year-old legal apprentice Michael Howland, would go on to also be one of the chief negotiators of the Ottawa Treaty, and when he died in 1995, Israel's Ambassador to Canada offered Howland's family a place for him on the Mount of Olives. (They respectfully declined this.) Israel and Canada would have a very good relationship after the war, a relationship which would ultimately culminate in the Ottawa Treaty.
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