trek on to ottawa

The On-To-Ottawa Trek

First, this episode is sponsored by Phil Maynard, a generous patron through my Patreon Account. You can support the show through Patreon as well, for as little as $3 a month, just go to www.patreon.com/canadaehx

The Great Depression was a terrible time for Canadians. Work was hard to find, crop prices were low and drought steeped through the prairies. Unemployment had reached historic levels with one in nine Canadian citizens needing government relief. The government provided relief, but that relief was not free. Under Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, the Department of National Defence was ordered to create work camps where unemployed single men could construct roads and other projects, earning 20 cents per day, or $3.77 a day today. There were also restrictions on what the men could do in their free time.

With these incredibly low wages, and poor living conditions where the workers often didn’t have adequate clothing, the men of the camps decided to unite in 1933, creating the Workers’ Unity League, led by Arthur Evans, also known as Slim. This organization would then organize the Relief Camp Workers’ Union.

According to one striker, Ron Liversedge, “The Tory government of R.B. Bennett had decided a role for the single unemployed. They were to be hidden away to become forgotten men, the forgotten generation. How naïve of Mr. Bennett. Never were forgotten men more in the public eye.”

In December 1934, the organization held a strike with men leaving the camps and protesting in Vancouver. For two months they protested and occupied a Hudson’s Bay store, the city museum and the library. On May Day, a parade of 20,000 strikers was held, along with supporters, marching to Stanley Park. The strikers would return to their camps after the provincial government and City of Vancouver made the promise of forming a commission to look at the complaints. A commission was never formed, most likely because the government assumed that the problem would go away. With no commission, a second walk-out was organized for April 4, 1935.

With this walk-out, 1,000 strikers then made the decision to travel to Ottawa with a list of demands. They demanded .50 cents an hour, or $9.42 an hour today, for unskilled work, union wages for skilled work, at least 120 hours of work a month, adequate first aid at camps and the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers. They also wanted recognition of their democratically elected workers’ committees, and the right to vote in elections for workers in camps. They also wanted the government to remove the Department of National Defence as the overseer of the camps.

Throughout Canada, the strikers had immense support from regular citizens, many of whom were dealing with poor economic conditions themselves. Among the governments, the municipal governments pushed blame to the provincial governments, while provincial governments pushed blame to the federal governments.

On June 3, the men boarded box cars and headed west in what would be known as the On-To-Ottawa Trek, making stops in Calgary, Medicine Hat, Swift Current and Moose Jaw. In Calgary, 300 men joined the Trek. By the time they reached Regina, some estimates put the number of protesting men at 4,000.

On the Trek through the Prairies, the leaders of the Trek put down strict rules forbidding any panhandling or drunkenness. The entire group of protesters were organized into companies and sections, like an army would be, to ensure that no one got out of hand and each group elected their own leaders. The trekkers were also clean-shaven and well-behaved, which impressed those they met along the way out east. People referred to the strikers as “our boys” highlighting their respect and admiration for the well-behaved group.

In Medicine Hat, Calvin Cavan would relate his memory of seeing the strikers.

“I remember witnessing the historic trek to Ottawa when that train load of men went through Dunmore to see Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in Ottawa. It was unbelievable. They were so numerous that they were like flies on a jam pail.”

Eleven days later, the protesters reached Regina and on orders from the federal government, the railways refused to allow further travel on their trains. On June 17, the strikers met with Robert Manion and Robert Weir, two federal cabinet ministers. The ministers said that eight elected representatives, with Evans serving as the leader, could come to Ottawa to meet with the prime minister. The condition put forward was that the rest of the protesters would stay in Regina. The protesters stayed in the stadium at the Regina Exhibition Grounds, with food supplied by the provincial government and the people of Regina.

The decision to keep the protesters in Regina came from Bennett himself, who did not want them to reach Winnipeg, which he felt was, in his words, “notable for labour radicalism.” It was in Winnipeg that the Winnipeg General Strike, the largest strike in Canadian history, had been held a decade and a half prior. You can listen to me relate the history of that strike on an earlier episode of the podcast.

In fact, as soon as the Trek was announced in British Columbia, a local support committee was set up in Winnipeg with the leader of the Co-operative Farmer’s Federation, S.J. Farmer, serving as the chair and local Communist James Litterick serving as the vice-president. The organizers had plans for feeding the men when they arrived, as well as the estimated 1,000 men who would arrive from the Manitoba relief camps.

For Premier Gardiner of Saskatchewan, he was not happy the trek had been allowed to proceed and then stopped in Regina. He was also not happy that the RCMP were being ordered by Ottawa without any reference to the province. The federal government was able to do this because they invoked the Railway Act, which allowed them to oversee the law enforcement of the province, while stopping the train from traveling any further. Gardiner would point out that the trekkers could not be called trespassers by the CPR and CNR because they had provided them with train cars to ride on, whether they realized it or not, to that point.

As for the eight men, they would reach Ottawa and have a June 22 meeting with Bennett. It did not go well. Bennett accused Evans of being an embezzler and Evans called Prime Minister a liar. The delegation was then escorted out of the building and to the street. They would return to Regina on June 26. The On-To-Ottawa protesters attempted to travel east by car, truck and train but were stopped by the RCMP. It was decided that they would head back to the west coast since they could no longer head east, but the federal government insisted that the group disband on their terms, which involved going to a holding facility where the men would be processed. The leadership of the strikers did not want to do this and they turned to Premier Gardiner and his cabinet for assistance.

In the evening of July 1, 1935, while the provincial cabinet was meeting to discuss the proposal, a public meeting was held in Market Square, ironically where the Regina City Police Station is now located, to update the public on the progress of the movement. Only 300 On-To-Ottawa Trekkers were there, but the crowd numbered over 1,500 people.

A poster for the rally would state, “hear the reply of the authorities to Strikers delegation requesting immediate relief and opening of negotiations on counter-proposals to Bennett Government’s offer on Concentration Camps.”

On three sides of the square moving trucks were parked and behind those trucks were RCMP riot squads. Regina police were in the garage of the police station as well. At 8:17 p.m., a whistle was blown and the police charged into the crowd with batons from all four sides. The people, who were caught off guard by the sudden appearance of the police, fought with sticks and stones. According to one person at the rally, “they opened the door and out they come beating the hell out of us. They chased us all over town.” Another witness would say, “A shrill whistle blasted out a signal. The backs of vans were opened and out poured the Mounties, each armed with a baseball bat. In less than four minutes, Market Square was a mass of withering, groaning forms, like a battlefield.”

The citizens and protesters were driven from the square but with the RCMP blocking the way back to the stadium, a street battle would begin and last for the next six hours. According to some Regina residents, who testified afterwards, some police had continued to club already unconscious men on the ground.

During the street battle, police fired their guns above and into groups of people while tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups of people that had gathered together. During the battle, glass windows in stores were broken, but only one store was actually looted. The stores were burned to the ground through.

The Regina Rifles, while not involved in the riot directly, were made available to guard vital points such as the Legislative Building.

In order to counter the tear gas, many people wore wet handkerchiefs on their face and would barricade the street with cars to protect themselves. Over the course of the six hours, the protesters would make their way back to the stadium individually or in small groups, joining the rest of the larger group of protesters who had stayed at the stadium.

Over 140 protesters and citizens were arrested by the end of the riot, and Charles Miller, a policeman in plainclothes and Nick Schaak, a protester, would die from injuries sustained in the riot. Hundreds of residents and protesters were injured as well. Any protesters or residents who went to hospitals were arrested.

The police stated that 39 of their men had been injured, and they denied any protesters had died. The police also stated they did not use guns, even though 17 civilians had gun shot wounds, while no police officer was shot. Protester leaders Arthur Evans and George Black who spoke at the rally were arrested as well.

The day after the riot, a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area where the protesters were staying on the exhibition grounds and news of the riot had reached across Canada.

In Regina, the Leader-Post had the headline “Chaos On Streets For Three Hours, Policemen stoned and strikers shot in heart of city.” Another headline on that same page said, “caught when mad riot starts, women, children trampled in stampede.”

Saskatchewan Premier Gardiner agreed to meet with the protesters but the protesters were arrested as they left the area, only to be released soon after for their meeting with the Premier.

Only eight people, all strikers, would be convicted on charges of rioting and sentenced to prison.

Premier Gardiner, after speaking with the protesters, wired the prime minister and stated that the police had created the riot and that the men should be fed where they are and sent back to their camps and homes as they had requested. He was unhappy that the federal government had invaded into provincial jurisdiction as well. Bennett, believing the had put down a communist revolt, agreed, while Gardiner seemed happy to have the protesters out of the province. The Saskatchewan government did provide free transportation back to British Columbia for the protesters as a gesture of peace.

While Hugh Guthrie, the Minister of Justice, would state on July 2 that the protesters had fired shots at the police, to which the police responded, no evidence was ever found to show the protesters had shot at police. The RCMP, who stated they believed that the protest was a plan for armed revolution, were exonerated of all charges by the investigating Royal Commission. The Royal Commission, chaired by Chief Justice J.T. Brown, stated in its report that the federal government and RCMP should be exonerated and that the living conditions and food at the work camps was satisfactory. All blame for the trek and the riot was put on communists. The commission took the testimony of 359 people, who provided 53 volumes of testimony, most of whom put the blame on the police. As we see, that was ignored.

Bennett, who was very behind the times with The Great Depression, would say of the riot that it was “not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government”

The Trek and the Regina Riot would not bode well for Bennett, who would see his support in the 1935 federal election plummet from 135 seats to 39, costing him his position as Prime Minister. Following the election defeat of Bennet, bringing William Lyon Mackenzie King back to power, the camps would be dismantled and replaced with seasonal relief camps run by the provinces, with the men earning slightly more than before.

While the entire Trek did not reach Ottawa, its demands would be met over time as the public support for the protesters spread across Canada, helping to set up the social and welfare initiatives that would follow the Second World War.

For some of the trekkers, their lives would change in other ways thanks to the trek and riot. Bessie Noble would relate that she was on her summer holidays in 1935 when she travelled to Regina to visit her Aunt Bell and Uncle Bert. It was there she met Joe McKeown, who was one of the trekkers. McKeown had been a seamen on the Great Lakes before losing his job. When the riot broke out, Bessie’s aunt took Joe into her home to take shelter. It was there he would meet Bessie and the two would marry in December of that year. Their son, also named Joe McKeown, who would become a Regina City Councillor and put forward a proposal for a peace fountain out front of City Hall where citizens could gather to successfully and peacefully settle conflicts.

At the Fredrick W. Hill Mall in Regina, a plaque highlighting the historic protest and riot can be found. On the plaque, there is little mention of the police storming the crowd, or the reasonable demands of the protesters. Instead, it focuses on the failure of the relief projects for unemployed single men.

“A defining event of the Great Depression, the On-To-Ottawa Trek has become a poignant symbol of the working class protest. In 1935, over 1,000 angry unemployed men left federal relief camps in British Columbia and boarded box cars to take their demand for work and wages directly to Ottawa. As the number of protesters increased, the federal government resolved to stop the movement. The police arrested its leaders at a meeting on July 1, sparking the Regina Riot. Although it never reached Ottawa, the Trek marked the failure of the Depression-era work camps as a solution to widespread unemployment.”

If you would like to support Minnesota Freedom or Black Lives Matter, I will have links in the show notes.

Information comes from Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia, Canadas History, the Regina Leader Post, CBC, Parks Canada, Regina Before Yesterday, Up The Johns The Story Of The Royal Regina Rifles, Alberta A New History, Let Us Rise A History Of the Manitoba Labour Movement, Plains Trains and Wagon Wheels, Regina Cemetery Walking Tour, Saskatchewan A History, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, The Mackenzie Papineau Battalion.

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On-to-Ottawa Trek

by Betty Feb 24, 2023

In the depths of the Great Depression, when the Canadian economy was in shambles and one in nine citizens were surviving on relief, a group of unemployed single men in federal relief camps took a stand against the government's unfair policies. The Bennett government had established work camps, where these men were paid a paltry 20 cents per day to construct public works. Living conditions were appalling, and wages were insultingly low. It was no surprise then that the men decided to unite and form the Workers' Unity League (WUL) in 1933.

In December 1934, the men organized a strike, leaving their various camps and marching to Vancouver to protest. After a two-month protest, they returned to the camps when the government promised to appoint a commission to investigate their complaints. But when the commission was never established, the men approved a second strike, and on April 4, 1935, a walkout was called.

Their demands were not unreasonable: fair wages, worker's compensation, abolishment of military control, democratic committees in every camp, noncontributory unemployment insurance, the right to vote, and the repeal of oppressive laws.

Undeterred by the lack of action, about 1,000 strikers decided to take their grievances directly to Ottawa in what became known as the "On-to-Ottawa Trek." But the government, at municipal, provincial, and federal levels, shirked responsibility and played hot potato with the issue. The strikers, however, did not lose their spirit, and public support for them was massive.

As they boarded boxcars, they were like a moving force of nature, a wave that would not be stopped. They were driven by a sense of injustice and an unyielding belief in their cause. It was a perilous journey, one that would change their lives forever. And yet, they persisted, fueled by their passion for justice and their yearning for a better life.

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a defining moment in Canadian history, a testament to the power of collective action, and a reminder that even in the darkest of times, hope and resilience can triumph.

Meeting in Ottawa

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a dramatic event in Canadian history, a journey full of twists and turns that captured the imagination of the country. It was a time of economic hardship and political turmoil, and the trek represented the hopes and dreams of the working-class people who had been hit hardest by the Great Depression.

The trek was a march of the unemployed, a journey of more than 3,000 kilometers across the vast expanse of Canada, from Vancouver to Ottawa. The trek was led by Arthur "Slim" Evans, a charismatic labor organizer who had gained a reputation as a champion of the underdog.

The trek was not without its challenges. The protesters faced opposition from the government at every turn, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police constantly on their heels. But despite these obstacles, the protesters persevered, and by June 14, they had reached Regina, Saskatchewan.

It was there that the protesters received an invitation to meet with two federal cabinet ministers in the government of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, Robert Manion, and Robert Weir. The meeting was a chance for the protesters to air their grievances and make their case for economic justice.

But the meeting in Ottawa on June 22 turned into a shouting match, with Bennett accusing Evans of being an "embezzler," and Evans calling the Prime Minister "a liar." The delegation was escorted out of the building and onto the street, their hopes of a peaceful resolution shattered.

Despite this setback, the trek was not in vain. The journey had raised awareness of the struggles of the working-class people, and it had put pressure on the government to take action. The trek had also shown that ordinary people could come together to fight for their rights and make their voices heard.

In the end, the On-to-Ottawa Trek was a powerful symbol of the human spirit, a testament to the courage and determination of those who refused to be silenced. It was a journey that would go down in history as a reminder of the power of collective action and the importance of standing up for what you believe in, even in the face of adversity.

Regina Riot

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a momentous event in Canadian history, representing a struggle for workers' rights and social justice during the Great Depression. The Trek was a journey by unemployed and homeless men from Vancouver to Ottawa, with the goal of bringing attention to the plight of the unemployed and the need for government intervention to address the crisis. However, the Trek was met with resistance from the government, and tensions boiled over in the Regina Riot of July 1, 1935.

The scene was set with the arrival of eight delegates back in Regina on June 26, with attempts to travel east by car or truck or train being thwarted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A public meeting was called for July 1, in Market Square in Germantown, with only 300 Trekkers in attendance. Three large moving trucks were parked on three sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads, with Regina police in the garage of the police station in Market Square. At 8:17 p.m., the police charged the crowd with batons from all four sides, catching the people off guard before their anger took over. The battle continued in the surrounding streets for six hours, with police firing revolvers above and into groups of people and tear gas bombs thrown at any groups that gathered together.

Despite considerable property damage, stores were not looted, they were burned, and people covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. When it was over, 140 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested, and two people died - a plainclothes policeman and a Trekker - with hundreds injured. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protesters had been killed in the melee; the hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.

The city's exhibition grounds were surrounded by constables armed with revolvers as well as automatic firearms, and a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area the next day. News of the police-instigated riot was front-page news across Canada, and the Trek leaders telephoned Saskatchewan Premier Gardiner, who agreed to meet their delegation the next morning, which the RCMP apprehended them for interrogation but eventually released them in time to see the premier.

Premier Gardiner sent a wire to the Prime Minister, accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers. He also stated his government was prepared to "undertake this work of disbanding the men." An agreement to this effect was subsequently negotiated. Bennett was satisfied that he had smashed what he believed was a communist revolt, and Gardiner was glad to rid his province of the strikers.

The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot serve as a reminder of the struggles faced by workers and the disadvantaged during the Great Depression and the importance of fighting for social justice and workers' rights. The government's response to the Trek and the violence that erupted in the Regina Riot highlights the need for systemic change and government intervention to address societal issues.

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a historic event in Canadian history that left a deep impact on the country's political landscape. It was a movement that emerged in the midst of the Great Depression, when the Canadian government was grappling with the economic crisis that had engulfed the nation. At the time, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett's government was struggling to address the needs of the unemployed and underprivileged masses who had been hit hardest by the crisis.

The Trek was a bold attempt by the unemployed men of British Columbia to draw attention to their plight and demand better living conditions and employment opportunities. They organized themselves into a formidable force and marched across the country towards Ottawa, with the hope of meeting the Prime Minister and presenting their grievances. However, their journey was cut short when they were met with opposition from the government and law enforcement agencies.

The government's response was swift and brutal. They arrested the Trek leaders and charged them with rioting and assault. This move not only discredited the government but also sparked public outrage, leading to a sharp decline in the Conservative Party's popularity. In the 1935 federal election, the party's seat count fell from 135 to just 39.

Despite failing to reach their destination, the Trek had far-reaching effects on Canadian society. The Saskatchewan government provided free transportation for the men to return home as a peace gesture. The camps set up by the Trekkers were dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces, which paid the men slightly more for their labor than the earlier camps.

The Trek also had a lasting impact on the country's social and welfare provisions. Many of the demands made by the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the movement set the tone for the postwar era's social and welfare policies.

In conclusion, the On-to-Ottawa Trek was a defining moment in Canadian history that marked a turning point in the struggle for workers' rights and social justice. It was a reminder of the power of the people to effect change, even in the face of adversity. Its impact continues to be felt to this day, as Canada strives to build a fairer and more equitable society for all its citizens.

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On-to-ottawa trek national historic event.

• On-to-Ottawa Trek  (Designation Name)

Importance: Culmination of failure of Canada's depression-era relief projects for unemployed single men

A defining event of the Great Depression, the On-to-Ottawa Trek has become a poignant symbol of working class protest. In 1935, over a thousand angry unemployed men left federal relief camps in British Columbia and boarded boxcars to take their demand for work and wages directly to Ottawa. As the number of protesters increased, the federal government resolved to stop the movement. The police arrested its leaders at a public meeting on July 1st, sparking the Regina Riot. Although it never reached Ottawa, the Trek marked the failure of the Depression-era work camps as a solution to widespread unemployment.

The Regina Riot

During the Great Depression, more than a thousand single homeless unemployed men rode the rails in an organized protest that led to a bloody clash.

In early April 1935, hundreds of dissatisfied, disillusioned men walked out of Department of National Defence relief camps throughout British Columbia and descended on Vancouver in a bold attempt to reverse their dead-end lives and bring about some kind of “work for wages” program.

The walkout, coordinated by Communist-affiliated Relief Camp Workers’ Union, was a direct challenge to the R.B. Bennett Conservative government and its handling of the single homeless unemployed during the Great Depression.

For the first few weeks in Vancouver, the strikers eked out a hand-to-mouth existence, while the federal and provincial governments wrangled over responsibility for the men.

As the stalemate dragged on and strikers began slipping away, it was suggested that the men take their grievances to Ottawa and directly confront the Bennett government. This bold idea galvanized the strikers’ flagging spirits.

This short documentary by Ben Lies of Badlands Productions explains some of the factors that led to what became known as the On-To-Ottawa Trek.

The trek was a bigger gamble than the walkout. Ottawa was more than 3,000 miles away, and the strikers would have to travel there atop boxcars.

An estimated 1,000 On-to-Ottawa trekkers left Vancouver by freight train in early June 1935. No attempt was made to stop them. Police and government authorities confidently assumed that the resolve of the men would melt away like the snow in the interior mountains.

Even Prime Minister Bennett, convinced that the strikers had misplayed their hand, announced that his Conservative administration would simply watch from the sidelines.

Despite many hardships, the men made it through the mountains. By the time the men left Calgary, the trek had taken on the aura of a crusade. More men joined the trek and many communities welcomed the trekkers like modern-day folk heroes.

What began as a strike against federal relief camps had been transformed into a popular movement against the federal government’s handling of the Depression.

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As the trek grew in popularity, police, military, and government authorities, decided it had to be stopped.

On June 11, Regina-based RCMP Assistant Commissioner Wood personally advised Saskatchewan Premier James Gardiner that a decision had been made to stop the trek in Regina.

Despite Gardiner’s protests of the federal decision, the Mounties moved to arrest the ringleaders at a peaceful public rally at Regina’s Market Square on Dominion Day.

The raid quickly degenerated into a pitched battle between the police and trekkers and citizens, which spilled over into the streets of downtown Regina.

Order was not restored until the early hours of the next day, but only after the city police emptied their guns directly into a crowd of rioters.

The toll from the riot was two dead, hundreds injured, and thousands of dollars of damage to the city.

Sadly, Premier Gardiner’s earlier warning — that stopping the trek would result in a riot — had come true.

Hearings held later by the Regina Riot Inquiry Commission absolved police of wrongdoing.

At Canada’s History, we highlight our nation’s past by telling stories that illuminate the people, places, and events that unite us as Canadians, while understanding that diverse past experiences can shape multiple perceptions of our history.

Canada’s History is a registered charity. Generous contributions from readers like you help us explore and celebrate Canada’s diverse stories and make them accessible to all through our free online content.

Please donate to Canada’s History today. Thank you!

A more-detailed article was published in the August-Septemeber 2016 issue of Canada’s History .

Bill Waiser is a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan and the author of more than a dozen books, including All Hell Can’t Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot .

Themes associated with this article

• Peace & Conflict
• Politics & Law
• Prime Ministers
• National Politics
• Provincial/Territorial Politics
• Social Justice

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Canada’s biggest riot – Canada day, 1935

On July 1, 1935 thousands of people were on the streets of Regina, not to mark their country’s birthday, but to support a group of workers who were protesting against high unemployment, income insecurity and unfair working conditions. When the RCMP charged in to break things up, it caused the biggest riot in Canadian history (so far).

The “On To Ottawa Trek” was a worker protest against unfair treatment and government austerity that captured public support, contributed to the defeat of the Conservative federal government of R.B. Bennett later that year, and paved the way to the establishment of a national unemployment insurance plan.

In the 1930s, “ The Great Depression ” had crippled the Canadian economy and resulted in massive unemployment. In response, the Federal Government created “ relief camps ” where thousands of men lived and worked at a rate of twenty cents per day.

By 1935, people had had enough. In April that year, following a two-month protest in Vancouver over the dismal and unfair working conditions in the camps, more than a thousand unemployed workers boarded – or rather jumped on top of – railway box cars in what became to be known as the “ On‑to‑Ottawa Trek .” Their goal: to meet as a group with the Conservative government of the day and demand better conditions and a fairer way to address unemployment.

The Prime Minister eventually agreed to meet, but only with a handful of representatives, not all of the workers. While those representatives travelled to Ottawa, the hundreds of other trekkers “waited” in Regina (they were actually being held in place by the RCMP).

The meeting went badly, with the Prime Minister accusing the trekkers of being radicals leading an insurrection. When the workers’ representatives returned to Regina with news of their meeting, nearly 2000 people joined 300 trekkers as a show of protest and solidarity for workers’ rights.

The police charged the crowd, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city’s centre. People fought back with sticks and stones while police used tear gas and fired bullets above and into groups of people.

Damage to property was considerable and personal injuries were many; one trekker and a plain clothed policeman died while hundreds of injured local residents and trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. The police proceeded to arrest those in hospital, along with over 100 others.

The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protesters had been killed in the melee. Hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.

Later that year, in reaction to public support for a better deal for the unemployed, the federal government passed the   Employment and Social Insurance Act   and the country’s first national unemployment plan.

Eventually, the government was  defeated , and its hastily-crafted law struck down in the courts. But, the bold attempt at reform paved the way for the establishment of a national unemployment insurance program under the new government, led by W.L.M King, in 1940.

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• Introduction
• 1. Beginnings
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• 23. The Golden Tree and Fighting for Workplace Safety
• 24. The Struggle Continues
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography

No era in Canadian history is as well-defined as the Depression. Even the dates are precise, from the spectacular Wall Street crash on October 29, 1929, to the beginning of World War II on September 3, 1939. The bottom fell out of the economy, inflicting untold misery and poverty on millions of Canadians—whether ill-fated Saskatchewan farmers, eastern factory workers or labourers in BC’s once humming woods and mines. By the time it ran its course, the Depression had shown once and for all the inadequacy of an unregulated free market and the need for government action to ensure a decent life for ordinary people.

The ten lost years were characterized by government indifference. There was nothing like the New Deal of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt that did so much to limit the plight of millions of hard-hit Americans. Instead, those unable to find work in Canada were provided with extremely meagre relief payments if they had a family—or if single, forced into work camps for a pittance. Both R.B. Bennett and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the country’s two prime ministers during the 1930s, were more concerned with balancing the budget than helping citizens in desperate need. Those who protested were more often than not clubbed or thrown into jail. “The image of a policeman’s truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees was to become familiar,” wrote Pierre Berton in his angry book The Great Depression .

The Depression seemed to come out of nowhere. As the Roaring Twenties neared their end, prosperity continued its multi-year roll. Investors were making fabulous riches on paper from the ever-rising stock market, financing their wealth by loans and buying on margin. Production was at record highs. But consumers couldn’t buy everything. Worrisome stockpiles of unsold products began to accumulate. Then in the fall of 1929, the stock market’s Black Thursday, October 24, was followed by the even more catastrophic Black Tuesday of October 29, and the house of cards collapsed. Billions of dollars were lost in a single day. The Great Depression was on, triggered at its most basic level by overproduction, under-consumption and a sea of credit based on expectations of endless growth.

Products moving through BC’s formerly busy ports declined nearly 60 percent. Lumber production, critical to the province’s economic health, fell 30 percent. A scourge of horrendous poverty and unemployment fell over the land, never seen before or since. By 1933 one-third of all eligible wage earners, 1.5 million Canadians, were without work, many with no social safety net. For hundreds of thousands of mostly young Canadians, riding the rails, occupying jungle camps, visiting soup kitchens and bumming a meal became part of the rhythm of daily life. Large numbers of Prairie families driven from their land by dust storms, drought and plagues of grasshoppers added to the desperation.

Before long, with its relatively mild climate, Vancouver became the unemployment capital of Canada. In the fall of 1931, Andrew Roddan, minister of the First United Church, told a visiting federal cabinet minister that his church’s bread lines were feeding more than 1,200 people a day. Hundreds were sleeping in shacks made of bits of tin and wood, while others slept outside, often in the rain, among rats “as big as kittens,” Reverend Roddan reported. When a local restaurant began handing out bags of bread crusts at the end of the day, a hundred men would show up every evening for the scraps.

As most labour unions focused on their own members, and politicians with no answers tried to pass responsibility to other levels of government, the country’s Communist Party (CP) came to the fore. From its founding at a 1921 clandestine meeting in an Ontario barn, where the twenty or so delegates slept in the hayloft, the party had grown in influence during the 1920s. Although ever subject to the policy whims of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), the CP had developed a base of skilled, committed organizers, who found the country’s hard-pressed industrial workforce and hordes of single unemployed men tailor-made for action. Ordered by the Comintern to abandon its previous policy of working within established unions, the CP established its own radical federation in early 1930, just as the Depression hit. The Workers’ Unity League (WUL) was to hold its red banner high for the next five years and play a major role in confronting authorities and the forces of capitalism.

A union of the unemployed affiliated with the WUL was soon leading regular protests and hunger marches demanding, with some initial success, better relief. Still, assistance remained barely above subsistence levels and predominantly restricted to families. For the masses of unemployed single men, many of whom washed up on the West Coast, there was nothing but charity. The WUL’s involvement in organizing the unemployed made authorities nervous. “Communist agitators,” they feared, were stirring up revolution among the throngs of jobless hanging around Vancouver and other cities.

To get them off the streets and away from the clutches of the Workers’ Unity League, the federal government devised a network of relief camps, perhaps the most mean-spirited of all the country’s responses to the ravages of the Depression. Most were wilderness work sites far from the city, where single unemployed men received bare-bones accommodation, skimpy food and paltry compensation in return for their labour. The first camps provided $1.15 a day. The men worked building roads, parks and other public facilities. A year later, pay was down to $7.50 a month. A year after that, all relief camps were taken over by the Department of National Defence. The daily stipend was further reduced to the derisory sum of twenty cents, and the trouble began.

Rather than squelching unrest, the camps proved fertile ground for communist organizers. While few camp workers had any interest in Stalin, they appreciated efforts to improve their lot and fight back against the camps’ harsh military-like rule. The Relief Camp Workers’ Union, a direct charter of the Workers’ Unity League, became a force in all eighty-three BC camps. Braving blacklists, camp residents staged numerous strikes and protests to demand better conditions, keeping abreast of activities in other locations through the union’s popular, surreptitious newsletter, the Relief Camp Worker . Much of the successful organization could be attributed to the efforts of one driven individual: Arthur H. “Slim” Evans.

Novelist of the Depression

There is no Canadian equivalent to John Steinbeck’s powerful Depression novel The Grapes of Wrath . But British Columbia did have Irene Baird and Waste Heritage . Her stark, uncompromising account of...

In short order, Evans would become a household name across Canada and a red flag to governments, police and the courts wherever he led a fight on behalf of workers or the unemployed. Fiercely committed to working-class struggle, the lean carpenter in his mid-forties had already been wounded once and jailed three times for his role in union battles, including most recently in Princeton. There, a miners’ strike provoked cross burnings and frightening threats by a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, violent attacks on peaceful pickets, a late-night vigilante attack on a local union leader and the kidnapping of Evans himself. Yet it was Evans who went to prison, serving more than a year in jail on a charge of advocating the overthrow of the Canadian government during the strike. When he rejoined the relief camp protests in late 1934 as district organizer of the Workers’ Unity League, protests began in earnest.

Responding to growing strife in the camps, Evans and the Relief Camp Workers Union declared a strike on April 4, 1935. Their rallying cry, “Work and Wages,” was to resound for the rest of the Depression. Nearly fifteen hundred camp workers answered the summons to Vancouver, pouring into the city by rail, road and foot. The presence of so many young, restive unemployed men with no money and nothing to do, under the leadership of communists, unnerved civic leaders. Flamboyant mayor Gerry McGeer bombarded Ottawa with demands that they be rounded up and sent back to the camps.

But organizers displayed an astounding ability to feed and billet the strikers, keep them occupied and, most importantly, maintain order and discipline. In defiance of civic ordinances, they raised funds with regular tag days. Men wearing sashes that read “When Do We Eat?” worked four-hour shifts at busy street corners, holding out tin cans for donations. A sympathetic public showered them with cash. On one bumper Saturday, tin-canners brought in a record-breaking $5,500. With a sense of mischief, Evans, who had been up for forty-eight hours organizing the all-out blitz, asked police to safeguard the tidy sum until the banks opened Monday morning. When two officers arrived to carry off the money, he told them it was “Moscow Gold.”

Little was left to chance. The men were organized into four divisions, each with its own leader. There were committees for just about everything. All reported to the central strike committee headed by Evans. “We couldn’t slice a loaf of bread into five bologna sandwiches without appointing a committee to see it was done according to plan,” division leader Steve Brodie joked later. Hunger marches, demonstrations, tin-canning, large public rallies and boisterous snake dances through downtown streets became as familiar to Vancouverites as the North Shore mountains. May Day produced the largest parade in the city’s history.

Mother’s Day was even better. The Mothers’ Council, a broadly based, left-wing women’s group that was formed to muster sympathy for “our boys,” led a large Mother’s Day march to Stanley Park. There, they formed a giant heart around the young relief camp workers. That night, mothers across the city invited strikers to their homes for a meal. It was, said one event planner, “something of real value instead of the usual bourgeois, maudlin sentimentalism associated with Mother’s Day.”

The only trouble occurred during an impromptu snake dance through the aisles of the Hudson’s Bay Company on April 23. When police arrived to evict the protesters, a large glass display case was shattered and merchandise strewn about. Hundreds then marched down Georgia Street to the Victory Square cenotaph, where squads of RCMP, provincial police and city police surrounded them in a tense stand-off. A delegation of strikers was dispatched to the mayor’s office to try to defuse the situation. The twelve-member delegation got nowhere with the bullheaded Gerry McGeer. As they left his office, all but one was arrested for vagrancy. McGeer proceeded to a corner of Victory Square for a much-ridiculed reading of the Riot Act.

Six weeks into the strike, however, despite waves of public sympathy, there was no sign of either the city or Ottawa granting relief, providing “work and wages” or forcing them back to the camps. Running low on food, the stalemated strikers needed something different. On May 18, their four divisions marched off in different directions. Two headed to local department stores, one went to the West Vancouver ferry depot, while the fourth followed a familiar route toward Main and Hastings. But this time, catching police off guard, they strolled into the city library on the corner, headed up the spiral staircase of what is today the Carnegie Centre and began occupying the civic museum on the third floor. Barricading the door, they posted a large sign on the window: “When Do We Eat?”

Large, supportive crowds gathered in the streets below. Well-prepared, the men lowered baskets on a string. Citizens filled them with bread, pies and pastries from neighbourhood bakeries, jugs of coffee, cigarettes, chocolate and sweets. The bounty proved too much for some, who hadn’t eaten well in days. Bottles of pills were sent up to ease their stomach discontent. As police fumed, jubilant snake dances took over Hastings Street, accompanied by lusty renditions of the strike’s rallying song, “Hold the Fort.” (“Hold the fort/ For we are coming,/ Union men be strong./ Side by side keep pressing onward,/ Victory will come.”) For the first and only time in the protracted protest, Gerry McGeer gave in. By phone from the Vancouver Yacht Club, he agreed to have the city feed and lodge the fifteen hundred strikers over the weekend. The occupiers emerged from the library in triumph.

The tactic was typical of Slim Evans. He had a genius for maintaining momentum. “You can’t go on marching and singing and begging with tin cans,” he would say. “You’ve got to do something new.” Two weeks later, as the passage of time began to thin ranks, sap morale and cut into public support, Evans hit the strategic mother lode. At a mass meeting called to discuss the future of the faltering strike, someone put forward the idea of taking the protest to Ottawa. Evans seized on the idea. When the proposal was endorsed, the strikers nearly took the roof off the joint with their roars of approval. It was as if a huge jolt of electricity had revitalized their flagging spirits. They had a mission once again.

The ensuing On-to-Ottawa Trek remains one of the defining events of the Depression in Canada. It caught the fancy of the country in a way that not even Slim Evans could have foreseen. The journey came to epitomize everything that was wrong with the federal government’s hard approach to those brought low by forces beyond their control. The public saw it that way too. The farther the young BC trekkers travelled on top of swaying boxcars—many attaching themselves with belts or ropes—in their quest for a fair deal, the more they were embraced by Canadians as doing the right thing.

The idea was mad to begin with, of course. With a mere four days to prepare, little money and scant arrangements along the way, more than a thousand men had to be supplied and kept together for a three-thousand-mile journey to the lair of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. Certain that it would quickly fall apart, governments and police could barely stifle a yawn when the trek was announced. But the relief camp strikers were charged with excitement by the sheer audacity of the plan. “Suddenly there was a new level of struggle. It was as if everything we had done up to that point was preparing for [this],” said trekker Willis Shaparla. Half a century later, Shaparla, a veteran of the D-Day landing, considered his participation in the On-to-Ottawa Trek the highlight of his life.

Yet no one knew what lay ahead the night of June 3, 1935, as hundreds of men clambered atop a line of CPR freight cars by the Vancouver waterfront and headed off into the darkness. Crowds had gathered to see them off. More than 800 left on the first train, another 200 boarded a later Canadian National Railway freight, and 350 more moved out the next evening.

The trek had a rough beginning. In Kamloops, the strikers’ first stop, civic officials were unfriendly, and many men grumbled over the poor arrangements. At the small mountain community of Golden, however, things turned around. Sooty, begrimed, exhausted and hungry after a chilly night ride through the Selkirk Mountains and smoke-filled Connaught Tunnel, men staggered down from their perches and marched toward a local auto park. “I was so cold, I could have fallen off the roof of the box car,” remembered Red Walsh. As dawn broke, there waiting for them was a bathtub suspended over a fire and a grey-haired woman stirring its contents—a vast beef stew—with a three-foot-long ladle. Other stew-filled washtubs were nearby. “Good morning, boys,” she hailed them. It was a stew the men never forgot. Long tables laden with bread and eggs added to their wonderful breakfast.

On they went to Calgary, passing a handful of relieved provincial police at the BC–Alberta border, who gave them a cheery wave. The swirling, acrid smoke that filled the many Rocky Mountain tunnels blackened faces, stung the eyes and made breathing difficult. But Calgarians cheered from their housetops as the sooty trekkers marched to the city’s exhibition grounds. Thumbing their nose at the city’s refusal to grant them a permit, they raised $1,300 in a tag day. And when authorities denied them temporary assistance, they occupied the provincial relief office until the government gave in.

New recruits arrived on boxcars from Edmonton. One of them was Phil Klein, father of future Alberta premier Ralph Klein. (During a fiftieth-anniversary re-creation of the trek, Ralph Klein, who was mayor at the time, welcomed surviving trekkers to Calgary and formally guaranteed them safe passage through the city. He then invited them to lunch.) Fulminations by politicians that the men were being led by communists cut less and less ice. “To be quite frank, we don’t care very much,” said an editorial in the Calgary Albertan . The public saw the protest as just, and the protesters as disciplined young men who wanted a better deal, not revolution. Before leaving Calgary, they were feted at picnics and flooded with food and clothing. Hundreds gathered to say goodbye.

Back in Ottawa, Bennett was stunned by the trek’s growing popularity. Over five hundred more men had joined the venture since Vancouver. Bennett determined that it must be stopped. He chose Regina. As communities continued to bend over backward to feed and lodge the eighteen hundred men on their overnight stops, the RCMP began drawing up a battle plan. Having learned of Bennett’s plans, the trekkers held a mass meeting attended by three thousand people in Moose Jaw. The mood was defiant. “If they attack us, we are not going to lay down and take it,” warned twenty-four-year-old Matt Young. That determination quickened their departure to Regina on the next evening freight.

The overnight journey was terrible. A violent prairie storm replete with thunder and lightning lashed the men all night. But the strikers maintained their discipline. Arriving just after dawn on June 14, they made their way down from the boxcars, lined up in their divisions and proceeded in good order, four abreast, to the local exhibition grounds. Later that morning, they put on a show for the welcoming citizens of Regina, parading in a long line down Eleventh Avenue. “On to Ottawa” was chalked on the back of many flimsy jackets, and the men chanted, “Where are we going? Ottawa! Who’s going to stop us? Nobody! ”

The RCMP had other ideas. Despite opposition from Premier Jimmy Gardiner and strong backing for the trekkers from the citizens of Regina, the Mounties moved hundreds of reinforcements into the city with the intent of stopping the boxcar cavalcade and arresting the leaders. Bennett leaned on the railways to no longer accommodate the trekkers. They were trespassing on private property, he reminded them. Nevertheless, Evans set June 17 for their departure to Winnipeg, where hundreds more single unemployed men were waiting eagerly to join up.

But Bennett put the trek on hold with a cagey invitation to the leadership committee to meet with him in Ottawa; in the meantime, the government promised the trekkers a week’s worth of meal tickets. Although Bennett’s invitation was clearly a delaying tactic to help the RCMP prepare, Evans felt they had no option but to accept. The meeting was a stage director’s dream. Dressed in their worn, rumpled clothes of the road, Evans and his committee sat opposite the corpulent R.B. Bennett, wearing a swallow-tailed coat and winged collar, with a diamond stick pin in his tie. It quickly degenerated into a bout of schoolyard name-calling. Bennett began by charging that the trekkers’ goal was not work but the overthrow of the government. If he believed that, Evans retorted, Bennett wasn’t fit to be leader “of a Hottentot village.” Furious, the prime minister shot back that Evans was an embezzler of union funds. Evans snapped that Bennett was a liar. “You are not intimidating me one bit.” The meeting came to a quick close. The verbal donnybrook between the two men was headline news across the country, setting the scene for the tragedy that followed.

By the time Evans and the delegation returned to Regina on June 26, the city was full of police with riot sticks. Their ranks included seventy-five Mounties freshly arrived from taking part in a bloody crackdown against striking dock workers in Vancouver. The trekkers were trapped, followed by police wherever they went. Assistant RCMP Commissioner Stuart Wood warned that any citizen assisting the trekkers would be subject to arrest. Donations dried up. Access to the radio airwaves ended. When only a sparse crowd turned out for a Saturday picnic on June 29, Evans realized there was no way forward.

He began to negotiate a resolution with Premier Gardiner, who was furious with Bennett and the RCMP for proceeding with no regard for the wishes of the province. The men were prepared to call off the trek and return west, Evans said, but they would not go to an alternate work camp in Saskatchewan as Bennett insisted. There matters stood on the Dominion Day holiday, July 1. In the circumstances, no one thought much about a rally scheduled that night for the city’s vast Market Square. The resulting Regina Riot remains one of Canada’s most widely known civil disturbances.

At 8:17 p.m., as a modest crowd of fifteen hundred listened to the rally’s first speaker, two loud blasts from a police whistle split the early evening air. Within seconds, police were charging through the terrified crowd, clearing a path to the speakers’ platform by knocking over anyone in their way with truncheons. Willis Shaparla called the sudden whistle and police charge “the most fearful moment of my life.” As people desperately took flight to escape the riot sticks, Evans and co-leader George Black were quickly collared and taken to jail. After a brief lull, the fracas turned into a riot.

The unprovoked attack on a peaceful gathering released an outpouring of bottled-up rage from the trekkers and equally angered citizens. Rocks, bricks and other projectiles rained down on police. A few attacked isolated officers with clubs and other weapons. Plainclothes city detective Charles Millar was struck and killed, his assailants never identified. The battle continued in Regina’s darkened downtown streets. Police advanced with tear gas, billy clubs, gunfire and fierce charges on horseback. Nick Schaack, an unemployed farmhand, received several blows to the head. He died in hospital three months later. Despite their numbers and firepower advantage, police did not manage to secure an edgy calm until 11 p.m. The city’s two hospitals treated more than a hundred victims, including some police and at least a dozen patients with gunshot wounds.

The next morning, outraged by the RCMP onslaught, Premier Gardiner wrested control of the situation from police and the federal government by arranging the strikers’ orderly departure. After their frustrating three-week stay in Regina, trekkers began to register for the trip home. All told, 1,358 men accepted the offer to leave—this time inside the trains and “on the cushions.” Two-thirds were from British Columbia, half from Vancouver. Although falling twenty-six hundred kilometres short of its goal, the On-to-Ottawa Trek, hatched in Vancouver, is remembered today as one of the country’s most inspiring protests. Sixty-six years later, at the age of ninety-two, trekker Harry Linsley told an interviewer, “All we ever wanted was work and wages.”

Two years after the trek ended, a number of participants were fighting in Canada’s Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion as part of the international contingent of volunteers against Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Two who died, Peter Neilson and Paddy O’Neil, had been members of the trekkers’ delegation that met with R.B. Bennett in Ottawa.

Search On the Line

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a 1935 social movement of unemployed men protesting the dismal conditions in federal relief camps scattered in remote areas across Western Canada . The men lived and worked in these camps at a rate of twenty cents per day before walking out on strike in April 1935. After a two-month protest in Vancouver , British Columbia , camp strikers voted to travel east to Ottawa and bring their grievances to the federal government. The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. [ 1 ] The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government ordered the Department of National Defense to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The poor working and living conditions led to general unrest in the camps and facilitated the work of communist agitators, who organized the men into the Relief Camp Workers' Union . A walkout was called on April 4, 1935 and about 1600 strikers headed for Vancouver. [ 2 ] The strikers– demands included the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen–s Compensation Act to include camp workers, the repeal of Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada , and that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in federal elections . Public support for the men was enormous and they decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men boarded boxcars headed east in what would become known as the –On-to-Ottawa Trek.–

[ edit ] Meeting in Ottawa

The protesters reached Regina, Saskatchewan on June 14 and met with two federal cabinet ministers in the government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett on June 17. Robert Manion and Robert Weir invited eight leaders of the protest (including Arthur "Slim" Evans ) to Ottawa to meet Bennett on the condition the rest of the protesters stay in Regina, where a large RCMP contingent was located. The protesters who remained in Regina, meanwhile, continued to stay in the stadium located on Regina Exhibition Grounds, eating meals in local restaurants.

The June 22nd Ottawa meeting turned into a shouting match, with Bennett attacking the group as radicals and accusing Trek leader Arthur "Slim" Evans of being an extortionist. Evans in turn called the Prime Minister a liar before the delegation was escorted out of the building.

[ edit ] Regina Riot

The eight delegates arrived back in Regina on June 26. Attempts of the Trekkers to leave Regina by car or truck were thwarted by RCMP road blocks. A public meeting was called for July 1, 1935, in Market Square in Germantown (now the site of the Regina City Police station) to update the public on the progress of the movement. It was attended by 1,500 to 2,000 people, of whom only 300 were Trekkers. Most Trekkers decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.

Three large vans were parked on the sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police were standing by in a nearby garage. At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown and the police charged the crowd, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city's centre. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then charged into the crowd and attacked with clubs. Driven from the Square, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for four hours. Trekkers Arthur Evans and George Black who were on the speakers' platform were arrested by plainclothes police.

Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.

When it was over, 120 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Millar, a plainclothes policeman, had been killed, and Nick Shaack, a Trekker, would later die in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. Hundreds of injured local residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protesters had been killed in the melee; the hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.

The city's exhibition grounds were surrounded by constables armed with revolvers and machine guns. The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. The Trekkers in the stadium were denied any food or water. News of the police-instigated riot was front page news across Canada. About midnight one of the Trek leaders telephoned Premier Gardiner , who agreed to meet their delegation the next morning. The RCMP were livid when they heard of this and apprehended the delegates for interrogation but eventually released them in time to see the premier.

Premier Gardiner sent a wire to the Prime Minister , accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers. He also told the prime minister the "men should be fed where they are and sent back to camp and homes as they request" and stated his government was prepared to "undertake this work of disbanding the men." An agreement to this effect was subsequently negotiated. Bennett was satisfied that he had smashed what he believed was a communist revolt and Gardiner was glad to rid his province of the strikers.

The Federal Minister of Justice Hugh Guthrie made the false statement in the House of Commons on July 2 that "shots were fired by the strikers and the fire was replied to with shots from the city police." During the long trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as "not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government." Official reports claim that the riots were caused by a lack of sturdy cardboard boxes in which the vagrants could sleep.

[ edit ] Effects

The events helped to discredit Bennett's Conservative government, and in the 1935 federal election , his party went from holding 134 seats to just 39. It also increased the notoriety of the Communist Party of Canada , which was behind the organization of the Trek. After the Trek, the government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the camps. The camps were soon dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces and that paid the men slightly more for their labour than the earlier camps. Although the Trek did not reach Ottawa, its political reverberations certainly did. Several demands of the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the Trek set the tone for the social reforms and welfare provisions of the postwar era.

[ edit ] See also

• Great Depression in Canada
• Canadian Cities in the Great Depression
• History of Regina
• Estevan Riot

[ edit ] References

• ^ Zuehlke, Mark (1996). The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 . Vancouver: Whitecap Books. ISBN   1-55110-488-1 .  
• ^ Waiser, Bill (2003). All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot . Calgary: Fifth House.  

[ edit ] External links

• On-to-Ottawa Trek - video dramatization (narrated by Trek participants, with historical footage)
• The On-to-Ottawa Trek
• On to Ottawa Historical Society

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• MLA 8TH EDITION
• Howard, Victor. "Unemployment Relief Camps". The Canadian Encyclopedia , 17 March 2015, Historica Canada . www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/unemployment-relief-camps. Accessed 28 September 2024.
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Unemployment Relief Camps

Article by Victor Howard

Updated by Julia Skikavich

Published Online February 22, 2009

Last Edited March 17, 2015

"Royal Twenty Centers"

In October 1932, at the end of the third year of the Great Depression, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett sanctioned the creation of a nationwide system of camps to house and provide work for single, unemployed, homeless Canadian males. The camps were established on the recommendation of chief of the general staff Maj-Gen A.G.L. McNaughton and were placed under the Department of National Defence in consultation with the Department of Labour. They were staffed with civilians.

Men voluntarily entered the camps through the Employment Service of Canada; they were free to leave at any time. In return for bunkhouse residence, three daily meals, work clothes, medical care and 20 cents a day, the "Royal Twenty Centers," as the occupants were called, laboured at 44-hour work weeks clearing bush, building roads, planting trees and constructing public buildings.

Controversy

The camps were controversial. Critics attacked the federal government for choosing to establish the camps instead of creating a program of reasonable work and wages. The most dramatic demonstration of this resentment occurred in April 1935, when 1,500 men from various British Columbia camps went on strike, demanding improved living conditions in the camps as a temporary measure, and also new work programs from Ottawa. After two months' of public protest and agitation in Vancouver, the strikers then set forth on the On To Ottawa Trek , to bring their demands to Parliament . The strikers failed to convince Bennett's government to change its camps policy, and they eventually retreated to Regina , where their protest ended in violence during the Regina Riot of 1 July.

By the time the camps closed in June 1936, 170,248 men had lived and worked in them, providing 10,201,103 man-days of relief.

See also Social History , Working-Class History .

• unemployment
• R.B. Bennett
• Great Depression

External Links

The Report on Unemployment and Relief in Western Canada An informative thesis that examines R.B. Bennett’s handling of Charlotte Whitton’s report on the unemployment crisis that Bennett had originally commissioned. Also provides glimpses of the lives of ordinary Canadians during the Great Depression. From the University of Victoria.

On to Ottawa Trek An extensive multimedia website about the protest movements initiated by downtrodden unemployed Canadians during the Great Depression.

Recommended

Child Labour

The study of working class history.

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On-to-Ottawa Trek Facts & Worksheets

The year 1935 saw the rise of a social movement known as the on-to-ottawa trek in which a number of workers protested the unjust and poor conditions in federal relief camps established in remote areas throughout western canada., search for worksheets.

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Table of Contents

The year 1935 saw the rise of a social movement known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek in which a number of workers protested the unjust and poor conditions in federal relief camps established in remote areas throughout Western Canada. These camp workers were only paid twenty cents per day, which eventually led to a national labour demonstration in April of that year. After two months of protesting in Vancouver , the strikers decided to head east to Ottawa to take their demands directly to the federal government.

See the fact file below for more information on the On-to-Ottawa Trek or alternatively, you can download our 22-page On-to-Ottawa Trek worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

Leading to ottawa.

• In the 1930s, the Great Depression widely affected the economy of Canada , which resulted in the unemployment of more than one-third of the labour force and a sense of public despair.
• In 1932, an estimated 1.8 million Canadians were left on welfare. The lack of unemployment insurance made the situation worse. Employers continued to cut wages and increase work hours without any benefits.
• Moreover, one in nine citizens was dependent on relief that the federal government provided at the time. However, the relief was not free.
• The RB Bennett Government directed the Department of National Defence to set up work camps in isolated areas across Western Canada in which single unemployed men were hired to build roads and similar public works for only twenty cents a day.
• Four years later, approximately 100,000 young Canadians worked and lived in the relief camps, which were managed by the military forces. In addition to the low wages, the workers did not receive proper food or accommodation.
• The poor working conditions in the relief camps eventually led to social unrest. Following this, communist agitators organised the men into the Relief Camp Workers Union (RCWU).
• The camp strikers demanded fair wages, a five-day working week, unemployment insurance, the inclusion of camp workers in the Workers’ Compensation Act, the abolishment of Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada, suffrage, and the removal of the camps’ authority from the army.
• On April 4, 1935, an estimated 1,600 camp inmates went on strike and travelled to Vancouver, British Columbia . They organised large demonstrations, parades, and protests with their slogan “Work and Wages”.
• The gathering in Vancouver lasted for two months through the assistance of labour unions in the city and sympathisers who provided the protesters with food and money.
• This local strike swiftly escalated into a national labour demonstration. Following the rejection of the strikers’ call for federal help, they took their grievances to the capital of the country. They were supported by the public.
• On June 2, 1935, about a thousand unemployed men left Vancouver and boarded CPR freight trains heading east, which would become known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek.
• Arthur “Slim” Evans, a veteran trade union leader, labour activist, former Wobbly, and Communist, led the protesters.
• The Trek passed through the cities and towns of Kamloops, Revelstoke, Golden, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Swift Current, and Moose Jaw. An advance party, which included Regina’s Matt Shaw, scavenged food for the group of unemployed men. The Trekkers spent nights in parks or in baseball fields.
• On June 14, 1935, Prime Minister RB Bennett instructed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to prevent the 2,000 Trekkers from entering Ottawa, fearing that they might ignite a revolution.

REGINA RIOT

• Within two weeks, the Trekkers reached Regina, the capital of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan . They took shelter in barns and show houses at the Regina Exhibition Grounds, with meal tickets for nearby lunch counters and cafes. Regina residents also donated food for the strikers.
• Consequently, federal cabinet ministers Robert Manion and Robert Weir invited an eight-member delegation from the RCWU, including Slim Evans and Doc Savage, to travel to Ottawa and raise their concerns to Prime Minister Bennett himself.
• The meeting invitation, however, came with a condition. The rest of the strikers had to remain in Regina, where the RCMP forces were already established.
• The meeting, which took place on June 22, 1935, only ended in a yelling match after the Tory prime minister accused Evans of extortion and the rest of the group of being radicals. Evans called Bennett a liar.
• On July 1, 1935 (Dominion Day), when the strikers and Regina residents organised a large meeting in the downtown area, the RCMP violently attacked them and arrested the Trek leaders, thus resulting in a riot.
• Hundreds of local residents and strikers were injured, including the death of a Trekker named Nick Shaack. About 120 protesters were arrested. The police, on the other hand, insisted that they had 39 injuries, including the death of an officer, but denied that they killed any of the strikers, and altered hospital records to hide the protesters’ real cause of death.

END OF THE TREK

• The Trek was eventually halted, but the protesters sustained their unity and were able to return to their homes via railway passenger cars.
• In the fall of that year, the Bennett government was overwhelmingly defeated after the general elections. The relief camps were abolished later on.
• The federal government also began to create an unemployment insurance system and provided social assistance to single unemployed citizens.
• Former Trek leaders became involved in a number of post-Depression labour unions, including Doc Savage in the Canadian Seamen’s Union, Harry Linsley in the Packinghouse Workers, and Bob Jackson and George Edwards in the Woodworkers.
• Even though the Trekkers were not able to reach Ottawa, the national demonstration brought significant changes to Canada and helped shape the labour movement in the country. In the following years, the federal government could no longer disregard the exponential rise of unemployment.

On-to-Ottawa Trek Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the On-to-Ottawa Trek across 22 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use On-to-Ottawa Trek worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about the rise of a social movement known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek in which a number of workers protested the unjust and poor conditions in federal relief camps established in remote areas throughout Western Canada. These camp workers were only paid twenty cents per day, which eventually led to a national labour demonstration in April of that year. After two months of protesting in Vancouver, the strikers decided to head east to Ottawa to take their demands directly to the federal government.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

• On-to-Ottawa Trek Facts
• Locating Ottawa
• Find the Words
• Fill in the Blanks
• Regina Riot
• Notable People
• Quote Analysis
• Primary Source Analysis
• On-to-Ottawa Trek Impact
• Significance of the Strike
• In a Nutshell

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Link will appear as On-to-Ottawa Trek Facts & Worksheets: https://kidskonnect.com - KidsKonnect, June 10, 2021

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Learning Resources

Learning Expectations:

Historical Inquiry : to use the historical inquiry process when analyzing the impact of the On-To-Ottawa Trek, and when exploring the role of media, the organized labour movement, and historians in the development of the Trek’s narrative.

Social, Economic, and Political Context : to assess the significance of the Relief Camps strike and of the On-To-Ottawa Trek for the organized labour movement, workers and Canadian citizens in general.

Communities, Conflict, and Cooperation : to analyze what changes resulted from the interactions between the strikers, the federal government, and the communities along the trek route.

Identity, Citizenship, and Heritage : to explain how the On-To-Ottawa Trek contributed to the development of Canadians’ views on universal welfare benefits.

Format (resources per section) :

• Discussion Guide (introduction and questions for discussion)
• Activities : i.e. online quiz
• Calls to action : ideas on how to keep the legacy of the trekkers alive

Target Audience:

• Youth (high-school students | Ontario Curriculum – Grade 10, Canadian History)
• Adults (union members and general audiences)

Destination Canada names Ottawa-Cornwall-Montreal as 'cycling tourism corridor'

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Destination Canada, a Crown corporation wholly owned by the Government of Canada, has announced a project called "Cycle Ontario and Quebec" as part of its Tourism Corridor Strategy Program.

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"Tourism contributes to the wealth and wellbeing of all of Canada and community is at the heart of the Tourism Corridor Strategy Program. Alongside our regional partners, we work directly with local, grassroots organizations to create long-term destination development strategies, and identify the products, services, workforce, access, infrastructure and experiences required to both delight visitors and enrich the lives of locals," said Destination Canada president and CEO Marsha Walden in a news release.

"To stay competitive, Canada needs exceptional travel itineraries and experiences that reflect the essence of our country. To create them, we must attract strategic investments — from the private sector and all levels of government — that grow tourism in alignment with the interests of travelers and communities' broader goals."

The program aims to connect existing cycling routes in Ottawa, Cornwall and Montreal and to develop new routes that highlight popular tourist destinations, such as the Rideau Canal in Ottawa.

"Cycle Ontario and Quebec will connect local businesses, artisans, and Indigenous groups, ensuring the benefits of tourism reach everyone involved," Destination Canada says. "The corridor will offer accessible year-round routes, bike-friendly amenities, and opportunities for physical activity, all while promoting mental wellness and reducing environmental impact."

The Tourism Corridor Strategy Program began in 2023 with projects in Atlantic Canada, northern Canada and the prairies. Tourism corridors, Destination Canada says, connect clusters of tourism assets together and provide motivation for visitors to travel through an area. Wine regions such as Niagara or the Napa Valley are examples of tourism corridors.

Three other tourism corridors have been identified for the 2024-25 program: the "Field to Fork Agritourism Corridor" in Saskatchewan and Manitoba; the "Juan de Fuca Corridor" in British Columbia; and the "Northern Sky Corridor" in Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

Destination Canada will fund the development of the strategy, implementation plan, and investment plan up to a maximum of $250,000 (inclusive of taxes) by contracting industry experts and consultants for each corridor project, it says.

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Almost 200 pages of research on the B.C. Conservative Party, which sources within BC United confirm were compiled by their party before it dropped out of the British Columbia election campaign to support its former rival, have come back to haunt the new alliance.

Vancouver Island

Vernon home receives 'significant damage' in early morning fire

Fire crews in Vernon, B.C., responded to a large house fire early Saturday morning.

'Don't know where the animals came from': Runaway pigs rounded up in West Kelowna, B.C.

A pair of runaway pigs are in the custody of an animal sanctuary in the Okanagan after evading police and volunteers for hours earlier this week.

Video shows historic bridge in Kamloops, B.C., collapsing after fire

The Red Bridge, a historic landmark in Kamloops, B.C., was completely destroyed by fire early Thursday morning.

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