The Royal Twenty Centers & Relief Camps

And we are right back into our blog post writing after the holidays (it’s actually been a few weeks since Christmas, but it seems like just yesterday)! It’s been a couple of weeks that we have been back in class, and, once again, our assignment was to create an inquiry question to dig deep into, that links to Canada’s Roaring Twenties, or the 1930’s Great Depression (well actually this post was meant to be written a couple of weeks ago, and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet, but it’s here now)! We have sped through events such as the Stock Market Crash, Prime Minister Mackenzie King coming to power (then coming out of power), the Winnipeg General Strike and other protests, and the On To Ottawa Trek. Upon learning about these events and how the Depression was effecting our country so drastically, I was fascinated by how close they actually occurred to nowadays, I mean 80 years is not that far in the past at all! I was also left thinking about one of the “trends” that began in October of 1932, three years into the Great Depression.

During the depression, there was an estimated 70,000 unemployed single men by 1932, due to factories slowing and shutting down, and Dust Bowls occurring in Canada’s interior. And with all of these young, hungry, frustrated men, there was an automatic distrust and nervousness that spread around the places where these people were loitering. The Canadian Government was nervous that there would be a spread of riots from the homeless drifters in the big cities, so, as a response to overcrowding and discomfort, the newly appointed Prime Minister R.B. Bennett created a number of Unemployment Relief Camps, located in in Canada’s far northern towns. They were far out of the way, where no one could be “bothered” by the poor men looking for jobs.

These camps were voluntary, but those who decided against them risked being arrested for vagrancy. The camps were run by the Department of Defence, and offered desperate men 20 cents per day, food, and housing, in exchange for intense manual labour. The men soon became known as “The Royal Twenty Centers”. They cleared forests and bush, built roads, planted trees, created public buildings, and dug ditches. These don’t sound too bad, considering that they received all the necessary means to live… Right? Wrong! The conditions turned out to be much worse: The men weren’t allowed to vote, the food they were provided with was terrible, there were countless injuries due to the hard labour with no doctors to treat them, there were 40-80 men per small housing unit (more like a shed), and the pay was hardly a living.

So, in this post I mainly focussed on how the Unemployment Relief Camps had an impact on Canada, and how they effected the lives of jobless, and homeless Canadians of the time period. I decided I would make a newspaper article that briefly summarizing how the camps impacted Canada.

These harsh conditions were, no doubt, building hatred within all of the men that attended the camps, towards the Canadian Government. Trade unions, such as B.C.’s Relief Camp Worker’s Union (RCWU), lead by Arthur Evans, began working hard to influence and convince men that it was impossible to live off 20 cents a day, and immediate action was necessary in order to earn fair wages for the work they were doing. In 1935, Anger and frustration kept building until almost all of British Columbia’s relief camps went on strike, which then lead to protests and strikes being held in downtown Vancouver. When the government refused to negotiate with the strikers, despite the strong public support, strikers voted to take their protests and grievances to Ottawa.

The plan was to trek to Parliament Hill by train, protesters being added to the expedition at each stop the tracks came to. But the trek fell short of Ottawa and ended up being stopped in Regina, Saskatchewan, as R.B Bennett decided enough was enough. He ordered the Regina Police and RCMP to attack a mass of roughly 1,500 protestors. when a very violent meeting occurred between police forces and the protesting unemployment camp workers. By the end of July 1 1935, one person was left dead, and hundreds were badly injured.

As time passed after this fateful day in Regina, the workers’ trek was broken up, and even later, when it came to Canada’s general election day, citizens of the country voted Bennett’s conservatives out of the government. The Unemployment Relief Camps were shut down for good, influencing and encouraging a new welfare system, including unemployment insurance. The Unemployment Camps were the creation of a nervous government that was under immense pressure due to the depression Canada was facing. They were a poor excuse of a problem solver, with horrible conditions and even worse wages. The camps lead to some of the most fateful days in Canada’s history, and ultimately to many social advances in the future of the time period.

Sources:

http://www.ontoottawa.ca/trek/trek_hungry.html

http://www.canadahistory.com/sections/eras/crash%20depression/Relief.html

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/unemployment-relief-camps/