Canada's Response To The Great Depression

Canadians mostly responded ineffectively to the challenges of the Great Depression. The Canadian government didn’t do much at all to help all of the jobless Canadians. The prairie region also didn’t respond well to the Depression, but there wasn’t much that they could do about it. However, the new political parties responded well to the Depression. They used it as an opportunity to gain the votes of the Canadians that lost so much during the time of hardship. In the 1930’s, the newly elected Prime Minister, R.B. Bennett, had just came into power during the great depression and promised to fix the major issue of unemployment. Even though the R.B. Bennett made such bold promises about how he was going to fix Canada’s economy, the five years he was prime
Overall, the government during the great depression was not very helpful to all the Canadians suffering without a job. During the great depression, new Canadian political parties had arisen that appealed to many Canadians. The three parties that got the most momentum were the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the Social Credit Party and the Union National. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was the most successful political party in its reign. They believed that the Depression was caused by capitalism. They believed that the solution to the problem was to let the government control the economy so that not just a single group of people would benefit. The Social Credit Party believed that if the government gave everyone money and they all spent it, it would boost the economy. Their solution was to give the poor Canadians twenty five dollars a month to spend on necessities. Meanwhile, the Union Nationals were a Quebec nationalist party that thought that the English were to blame for their poor economy, due to the fact that they controlled it. The region that suffered the most in Canada during the Depression was the