How Canadians Lived Through The Depression Years (dirty thirties).

Both the government and civilians used different types of methods to deal with the Great Depression of Canada, but it was apparent that none of the methods were very effective. To begin with, Prime Minister Bennett raised tariffs hoping to protect and encourage homeland industries and transferred large sums of funds to the provinces as relief. Unfortunately those did little to alleviate the economic crisis. Those were only temporally "treatment", and were not long time solutions. To ease the Depression, the government also gave out relief in forms of vouchers which could be exchanged for basic necessities of life such as food or rent. In spite of this, the relief was not adequate. One Manitoba judge described the relief as "it's not quite enough to live on, and a little too much to die on". Furthermore, not everyone was entitled to receive relief at that time, such as widows or unmarried mothers. Relief camps were also set up by the government across the country, which provided single unemployed men over ages eighteen with food, clothing, shelter and a daily pay of 20 cents in exchange for hard labor. However, many considered the pay no better than a slave's pay. Thousands of men in British Columbia relief camps were so fed up of the camps, they actually boarded a train to Ottawa to protest. Other civilians too tried to find methods to ease the Depression. Unemployed people drifted from town to town looking for jobs, but not many were successful. Some people abandoned their farms, while others left the cities and went back to farm. To deal with the depression, many people remade new clothes from old clothes, and used cheaper substitutes for coffee, butter and other foods. Some individuals even wrote letters to the Prime Minister about their hardships, but the most they got from writing these letters were some temporally cash. During this time period, new political parties emerged such as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Social Credit formed. Their actions may not have benefited Canadians during the Depression, but on the long run it did. Their ideas persuaded the Liberals and the Conservatives to develop a better healthcare and social welfare system for Canada. In conclusion, there were many methods that were used to deal with the Depression, such as introducing high tariffs, relief camps, government relief and day to day things men and women did to ease or counteract the depression. However, none of the methods really did much. In fact, it was the outbreak of World War Two that put an end to Canada's Great Depression of the dirty thirties.