The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The drought, she considered, was a different problem, a temporary one that would not be a drag on the public purse for very long. In a remarkably optimistic passage, she wrote that “there is every anticipation of early emergence from dependence on public aid, as soon as uncontrollable circumstances cease. Furniture, home and other resources have not been dissipated, nor faith lost in the possibility of future self-support. There is hope, determination, and full co-operation in regard to the future, and frequently a definite plan for repayment of relief extended.…” Those who had moved out of the drought areas were not eligible for relief but might be helped by “colonization aid” in their new communities.

  “The Breed” (Whitton’s name for the mixed bloods and Métis) had always been a problem, her report noted, “and a menace both to the Indian and white races, with whom they mingle.” Since they had already suffered from a low standard of “living, health and morality” they should not be given the dole. Money should come out of another federal pocket and it should be “consistent with their normal needs and habits.” It was “inexcusable” to issue supplies such as sugar, coffee, canned goods, bacon, butter, corn syrup, dried or tinned foods and so on if these had never formed part of the staple diet. The implication here was that the dole should not be used to change the status quo. Those who were traditionally deprived must not be given an allowance that would help them escape from the cycle of poverty.

  Whitton’s attitude to “foreigners” also reflected the general public view. There were too many on relief, she believed, and they were troublesome. “Language difficulties, their tendency to segregate, their corporate loyalties, their susceptibility to seditious propaganda, their known proclivity to hoard money, and the consequent difficulty of ascertaining their need of relief all greatly complicate an already difficult job.…”

  Her solution to the problem of jobless hordes riding the freights was blunt, though not original: again, the federal government must assume responsibility; the military should take over. Every transient should be forced to register and carry a registration card in the nature of a passport. Homeless boys under eighteen would be placed in homes or given provincial relief along with young men between eighteen and twenty-five, with Ottawa paying half. Those over twenty-five were to be confined in what Whitton called “concentration camps” – a word that Adolf Hitler had yet to redefine. Anyone who left these camps without permission would be denied relief; if he was found “riding the rails,” he would be handed over to the police. That was one of the few recommendations of the Whitton report that came into being, though the impetus was from another source.

  What Whitton had actually recommended was that Ottawa should pare down the cost of the dole by throwing a good many relief expenditures on the provincial and municipal authorities she appeared to despise. Her report emphasized waste and extravagance at the lower levels of government, but there was precious little in it about human suffering. The effect on the Prime Minister was the very opposite of what she wanted. The report confirmed Bennett’s worst fears. The provinces were wasting Ottawa’s money, therefore Ottawa would give them less. But Bennett still had no intention of taking responsibility for the distribution of the dole, let alone hiring more social workers. He didn’t need that burden. Whitton had simply confirmed his own social and political philosophy – that it was time individual Canadians took responsibility for maintaining themselves. A balanced budget and a sound dollar – those were R.B. Bennett’s priorities. Massive relief expenditures were not part of his program.

  2

  Shovelling out the unwanted

  The squeeze was being felt at every level that year. The federal government squeezed the provinces, the provinces squeezed the municipalities, and the municipalities squeezed the people. In January, for instance, Manitoba’s Minister of Public Works warned the city of Winnipeg that it must pare down its direct relief spending; if not, the province would start cutting back its share of the expenses to a third. Faced with that threat, the city made all recipients sign a note promising to pay back any funds they’d been given.

  In Sudbury, one of several communities that urged the immediate deportation of all “undesirables,” civic workers had their wages cut, residence qualifications for relief were increased to a year, couples who had been married for less than six months were cut off, and any person who could be shown to be domiciled elsewhere was denied aid.

  Nobody wanted to pay for the rising cost of relief. On the one hand, the provinces were pleading with Bennett to increase Ottawa’s share of relief payments. On the other, many of his own supporters were urging him to decrease them. These penny-pinchers resorted to the outworn argument that relief sapped the spirit of enterprise. A special report prepared by a committee of the Canadian Bar Association deplored the encroachment of the state in the sphere of individual activity. The lawyers, meeting in Calgary in September, were told that unemployment was a problem for the private sector and that “the attempt to shift the burden to governments is bound to prove expensive to industry and to the public generally.”

  The easiest way, and the most popular, to cut relief costs was to get rid of the foreigners and troublemakers. “Bohunks” and “Polacks,” to use the common expressions, were seen to be taking food from the mouths of the native born. Red agitators were stirring up trouble and threatening traditional Canadian values.

  Bennett lived in terror that peace, order, and good government would be disrupted by a Soviet-style revolution. The extraordinary precautions he took before meeting a delegation of unemployed on March 3 illustrates a distrust bordering on paranoia. The meeting took place not in his office but on the steps of the Parliament Buildings, and, as always, its outcome was foreordained. Bennett, however, treated the encounter as he would have a military invasion. He actually had an armoured car circling Parliament Hill. He had armed policemen everywhere: fifty city police marching up and down Wellington Street in front of the Parliament Buildings, thirty-five more in a state of readiness at the police station, a detachment of the RCMP – a hundred strong – guarding the East and West blocks, another detachment of twenty-six RCMP on horseback held in reserve behind the Centre Block, and dozens of plainclothesmen mingling with the crowd. There he stood at the top of the stairs, a pugnacious figure – Bennett, the champion of law and order – ready to face his enemies and not give an inch. The outcome of this “Chicago-like flaunting of firearms,” as the Ottawa Journal called it, was anti-climactic. The jobless men presented their demands, Bennett bluntly refused them, and the delegation left peacefully.

  Bennett’s view – that radicals and “foreigners” should be sent back to Russia, or wherever it was they came from – was the view of the majority. In the worst years of the Depression from 1930 to 1935, Canada deported more than twenty-eight thousand men and women either because they were radicals or because they made the mistake of asking for relief. Unless they were naturalized citizens they had no chance; they were hustled aboard steamships leaving for the old country, often secretly and with no right of appeal.

  The Communists were the easiest to deport. The party’s leaders had been jailed following the 1931 trial, and most Canadians didn’t care what happened to the rank and file. A notorious case was that of Arvo Vaara of Sudbury, the Finnish-Canadian editor who had been jailed in 1928 for sedition. Now he was seized by the RCMP, together with his Finnish-born translator, Martin Parker, and driven to Police headquarters on the morning of May 4. Both men were denied phone calls and visitors. To avoid any public demonstration, five plainclothesmen bundled the pair into a car that evening and whisked them to a deserted train station fifteen miles out of town. At midnight the Montreal-bound express made an unscheduled stop to pick them up.

  Guarded by two RCMP constables, they were lodged in cells in Montreal and denied all communication with the outside world. They were then transferred to Halifax – to the steel-and-concrete Melville Barracks, an army post turned into a detention centre. They were locked up with several ot
her deportees, denied bail or visitors, and given little or no exercise. There was no trial, only a secret hearing before an immigration board. On December 17, all the detainees were shipped back to Europe – Vaara to Finland, a country he hadn’t seen for twenty-three years.

  When the press tried to find out what had happened to Vaara, it came up against a blank wall. The RCMP told the Ottawa Citizen that the raid was carried out by the provincial police. The provincial police claimed to know nothing about it. When asked if he had any idea where the men were taken, Inspector Alfred Buddy answered, “Not the slightest. We have no report on them.”

  But the attorney general of Ontario knew. “This man was in trouble three times for statements derogatory to His Majesty,” Colonel Price explained. That, apparently, justified his deportation. Vaara was the man who had been jailed for expressing indifference about George V’s recovery. It was essential, Price indicated, to protect Canadians from such people.

  Vaara was one of ten men swept up by police in six cities following the traditional May Day parades in 1932. Only one – Orton Wade, who had spoken at a May Day demonstration – was able to prove that he was Canadian born, but only when he had already been handcuffed and dispatched to Halifax.

  Danny Chomiki had no such excuse. He had come to Canada with his Polish parents as a child in 1913, a time when the country was luring Eastern Europeans with an unprecedented advertising campaign. Now he had a Canadian name, Holmes, a Canadian wife, and a Canadian-born child. That made no difference. He was spirited away to Halifax without his wife’s knowing what was happening to him. When his lawyer asked to see the warrant for his arrest, he was refused. When J.S. Woodsworth took up the case with the immigration department, the civil servants fobbed him off on the minister, who claimed to have no knowledge of the matter. In December, Danny Holmes was shipped back to Poland – a country he could scarcely remember. When he had left it two decades before, it was part of Austria.

  The government made every attempt to hush up these political deportations. None of these men could afford to bring witnesses in their defence all the way to Halifax, where the ubiquitous Sergeant Leopold was already installed to finger them as members of an illegal party. That, of course, was why Halifax was chosen, although the Minister of Justice, Hugh Guthrie, tried to maintain the fiction that the site was simply a convenient rendezvous with the shipping company. As one Progressive member of the House, Edward Garland, exclaimed, “Who knows that they will get a decent investigation? … I have heard people condemn the Russian OGPU … for the way they secretly hurry people away to Siberia and give explanations afterwards. That was the way these men were dealt with.…”

  Officially, there was no such thing as “political deportation” in democratic Canada. It wasn’t needed. A variety of categories was used to camouflage the real reasons for shipping unnaturalized Canadians out of the country. One convenient charge was “entry by misrepresentation”; it was used to deport Miolaj Dramuta, who had been brought to Canada in 1926 to do farm work. After an RCMP spy described him as a communist, an immigration official combed through his file to discover that he had once worked in an Edmonton meat-packing plant and also as a teacher. Therefore, he wasn’t a farmer and on that basis was thrown out of the country.

  An immigrant could be charged with “unlawful assembly,” as Askeli Panjata was. Panjata made the mistake of marching in a parade of unemployed workers in Port Arthur. He was jailed and packed off to Halifax before his friends were aware of it.

  He could be charged as a vagrant – that useful catch-all that made police work so easy in the thirties – as Sam Langley was. Langley had had a deportation order hanging over him, but not implemented, since 1929, when he’d been arrested under the disorderly conduct section of the vagrancy act during a Toronto free-speech demonstration. Nothing happened for more than two years. Then the order was suddenly reactivated, Langley was picked up in Sudbury, spirited away to Halifax, and deported.

  He could be charged with “entry without inspection,” as Hans Kist was after he deserted his ship in Vancouver in 1930. Kist, who had been involved in a strike at Fraser Mills, B.C., was said by immigration officials to be “saturated with Communist beliefs and revolutionary ideas of a particularly virulent nature.” Hans Kist was deported to his native Germany – an act tantamount to signing his death warrant. The Nazis agreed with the Canadian description of him as “a thorough going troublemaker” and “a dangerous type.” They sent him to a concentration camp and tortured him to death.

  Kist’s fate after leaving Canada is one of the few of which there is record. Another – that of Tomo Cacic – reads like an adventure thriller. Cacic was one of the eight Communists jailed following the 1931 trials and the only one to receive a lighter sentence – two years instead of five. That proved his undoing, because he was released before the Bennett government left office. (Under the Liberals, political deportations came to an end.)

  Cacic, who was deported to Yugoslavia, knew that he faced arrest and probable execution in his native country. He determined to avoid that fate. On the train trip across Europe he managed, with the help of the communist underground, to secure a Soviet passport and a new name. He escaped from his guards and made his way to the Soviet Union. He worked there for three years, fought in the war in Spain, survived two years in a French concentration camp, escaped again, and made his way to Yugoslavia, where he fought with Tito’s partisans. In spite of various infirmities – he suffered from tuberculosis and lost a leg in battle – he survived in his native country until his death in 1969 at the age of seventy-three, a die-hard communist to the end.

  But it was not just die-hard communists who faced deportation from Canada under the Bennett regime. Anyone who had been in the country for less than five years could be deported as a public charge simply by applying for relief. That regulation covered not only the “undesirables” but also thousands of others who had been recruited to come to Canada in the twenties by a business-oriented community looking for cheap labour. The Canadian Manufacturers’ Association had lobbied the government to broaden its immigration policy, and in 1926 the two major railways and the Canadian Bankers’ Association quietly backed the campaign. In fact, until the Depression, Canada had not only welcomed newcomers, it had also wooed them and subsidized them with low rail fares and free land, especially in the West. The immigrants, in turn, had helped make the country prosperous. Now, with hard times returning, the government was callously prepared to throw them out.

  In short, foreigners were wanted only when times were good. Once the economy turned sour, the latent distrust of the stranger, especially the non-British stranger, surfaced. Senator Robertson had echoed the prevailing opinion when he declared that “Russian and other European people who have only been in this country a short time … should not be allowed to work … while hundreds of Canadians are standing in the breadline.”

  By 1932, it had become the unpublicized policy of the Department of Immigration to get all unnaturalized foreigners off the relief rolls by one method or another – to “shovel them out,” in the apt phrase of Barbara Roberts, a student of immigration policies in the thirties, whose book, Whence They Came, recounts many of these horror stories. To soothe public opinion, the department engaged in a hoax. The fiction was that foreigners, including British-born, weren’t being kicked out because they applied for relief but because they were “unemployable” or because, in the department’s view, they were eager to return home.

  Roberts found a concerted effort by the government “to conceal, deny, or justify their practices. Spurious or misleading statements were cooked up and purveyed, editors regaled with letters and rationalizations, statements made in Parliament, in public and in private. In some instances the Department representatives misled; in others they lied.”

  In many cities – Sault Ste Marie was one – immigrants applying for relief had to sign a form requesting voluntary patriation before they could get it. One Manitoba politician actually boast
ed that “in our town [Winnipeg], when those foreigners from across the tracks apply for relief we just show them a blank application for voluntary deportation. Believe me, they don’t come back. It’s simple but it has saved the city a lot of money.” This practice allowed the department to cook its own statistics so that Canadians weren’t made aware of the shovelling out process.

  The department shamelessly stretched and distorted its own definition of “unemployable” and “voluntary.” An immigrant would be told he’d be deported and then asked if he looked forward to seeing friends and family. If he did, he would be listed as a “voluntary deportee.” If he didn’t appeal the deportation ruling, he was again put into the voluntary column. He was “unemployable” if he sounded less than enthusiastic for a certain kind of work or discouraged about his inability to find a job. Roberts dug up one case where the department claimed that an immigrant had refused farm work, when the transcript before the board of inquiry showed the exact opposite. In some cases whole families were ordered deported even if the wife was self-supporting or living apart from her husband.

  In its eagerness to rid the country of jobless immigrants, the department circumvented its own procedures in the interests of speed and efficiency. Lists of names were telegraphed to Ottawa without any supporting evidence. Ottawa then wired back warrants for deportation without any examination of these cases. The documentation came later after the cases were heard by a board of inquiry and deportation ordered. In short, there were no proper administrative proceedings. The men, women, and children who were sent back across the ocean were denied due process.

  They were herded aboard trains, fed cold sandwiches, given unclean blankets, and prevented from moving about freely. At the so-called Montreal Detention Hospital, whole families lived on pork and beans, often slept on the floor because of a shortage of beds, or were crowded together into a large room with nothing more than a curtain to separate the sexes. They were, in truth, in jail; even the fire escapes were locked. There was nothing to do; no arrangements were made for exercise or fresh air, and in winter there was little heat. When the boilers failed for six weeks in 1932, no one could wash properly nor could dishes be sterilized because there was no hot water. Vermin were everywhere, but the department felt it inadvisable “to adopt a policy of delousing every deportee.” There was no segregation; the insane, the tubercular, the syphilitic, and the common criminal were mixed with those who had once been given a shining vision of a promised land, only to find the vision distorted and the promise revoked.