Hey look, I’m back with a new school-based blog post for the first time this year and recently in class, we have been looking into Canada’s pre-WW1 position and what our nation’s role was in the war. For this blog post, we were asked to look into one fragment of pre-war life in Canada, after getting a glimpse into the our country’s timeline leading up to the war.

I knew the moment that we learned about the Social Gospel, that I wanted to base my research on the Protestant Reform group. But this, in itself, was quite a broad topic, so I needed to focus my topic down to a single question. I decided to ask “What was The Social Gospel and how did they affect the Canadian quality of life? Did the Social Gospel’s legacy carry on into and impact modern day Canada?” (That’s sort of two questions but oh well). I have decided to create an Explain Everything, to dig deeper into what the Social Gospel was and how it was formed, and also how it impacted the quality of life for Canadians, or if it even did. But first here’s a bit of a backstory and an introduction to the time period.

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The Backstory:

So, in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, before the stirrings of WW1, Canada was evolving through the means of technology, industry, and immigration. But with all of the change came the good and the bad, the bad being the struggle to maintain a good quality of life.

In this era of change and growth, there was hardly any thought going into healthcare, worker exploitation, poverty, and crime, let alone any effort to fix these problems. Since nothing was being done to prevent this way of life, living and working conditions continued to worsen for those impoverished in Canada.

The Prime Minister of the time, Wilfrid Laurier, was a man of compromise and balance, who wanted to keep the peace between French Canadians and British Canadians. But his “take no immediate action” way of government did little to remedy all the problems that arose as the Canadian Industrial Revolution continued. Since the Prime Minister would do nothing to aid quality of life in Canada, social reform movements, such as the Social Gospel, were born, to bring disease, poverty, and crime into perspective and attempt to mend the Canadian lifestyle.

Enjoy: