In the 1920s Canada changed from a predominantly rural to an urban nation; more than half the nation's population was in cities, towns and villages and this urban portion was growing. Change was not only evident in the growth of urban population but also in the physical landscape of the cities, in the alterations to their socioeconomic structure, and in the development of their institutions. Despite these evident changes, a typology of urban Canada in the 1920s would be difficult to elaborate. Few cities were like the others. Each had started in a different place, at a different time and for different reasons. Their subsequent growth and development was, to say the least, uneven. Nevertheless, they were cities and, moreover, they were in the process of change.
In 1929, in the midst of this major change, the cities and the rest of the nation found themselves entering a decade of depression. In many ways the depression of the 1930s was the first urban depression and, apart from the western drought areas, it most ravaged the major centres.
The response of the cities to this combination of secular adjustment and depression crisis was initially chaotic and ultimately fatal. The reponse was chaotic because the cities were ill-prepared for the crisis, especially for its major social phenomenon of unemployment. What little machinery was available varied enormously from place to place. As a result, the cities could neither cope with the crisis on an individual basis nor coordinate their efforts on a cooperative basis. As well, most cities in the twenties had encouraged development in the private sector as their major economic strategy and tended to let economic prosperity be the solvent of most social problems. But in the depression, development and growth as an economic strategy would be abandoned. Its antithesis, economic retrenchment, became universal. Rather than indulge in anarchical competition as a means to prosperity or as a collateral solution to the social problems, the cities engaged in local self-defence and economizing. This, if anything, created more unemployment and, therefore, more unemployed.
By provincial statute or long-standing practice the unemployed were, unfortunately, the reponsibility of the local level of government. In the crisis situation of the depression, local property taxes, which had traditionally been used to enhance the physical environment of the city, were loaded with the additional burden of unemployment relief. Despite sharp cutbacks in expenditure on the physical plant and administration of the cities and subsidies from the senior levels of government, the property tax was not equal to the task. Though most cities had other sources of taxation available to them, such as the income tax, these were little used. To close the gap between exhausted revenues and the growing cost of fulfilling their social and other responsibilities, most cities borrowed.
The persistence of unemployment, its growing cost, and the failure of all efforts to bring a return to prosperity, led in 1934-1935 to the development of urban political radicalism. In city after city across the country there emerged radical municipal leaders. These men promised action, if little else that made much sense. It was these mayors who became party to the fatal error of the cities in the depression. Rather than demand the financial resources and jurisdictional powers to confront the problems of the urban-industrial world that the depression had so cruelly magnified, these men called for repudiation of urban social responsibilities, especially responsibility for the unemployed. They demanded, in effect, federal fiscal control of their budgets.
These urban demands for self-emasculation were ultimately met, but in a rather curious way. The social, economic and other problems of the modern urban society were left in the cities, but the means by which they were to be solved became closely controlled by the various provincial governments, either by direct regulation, by close supervision or through manipulation of the purse strings. As urban populations began to grow once again in the forties and fifties, swollen cities faced the future with shrunken powers and inadequate independent revenues.
Transformation of the Cities
The transformation of Canada from a mainly rural, pre-industrial society to an urban-industrial society was manifested in a wide range of physical and human changes, especially in the cities. The sheer growth of urban numbers was, of course, an important aspect of this transformation. For example, the population of fourteen major Canadian cities grew from 921,687 in 1901 to 2,765,580 in 1931, an increase of some 300 per cent. In the western cities increases of more than 500 per cent in the three decades were common. In 1901, these fourteen cities represented about 17.3 per cent of the Canadian population, in 1931 about 26.7 per cent. During the depression, these cities contained about half the unemployed and absorbed about three-quarters of the relief costs.
Change was equally evident in alterations to the physical face of the city, especially the penetration and elaboration of new technology. Just as important, but perhaps less evident than the physical changes, were the changes in economic organization and social and other institutions. A building technology based on the Otis elevator and the use of structural steel and concrete, had by the twenties given cities their characteristic skylines of "wedding cake" skyscrapers. The Empire State building in New York (completed in 1929) is perhaps the consummate symbol of the era; but Canadian cities had similar buildings on a less monumental scale, for example, the Marine Building in Vancouver (completed about the same time as the Empire State Building). This new building technology gave cities not only their skylines, but also their downtown canyons, and with the explosion of the automobile, their downtown congestion. As a sort of rebound effect, downtown concentration and the automobile produced urban sprawl and its physical symbols, such as the supermarket, a phenomenon of the thirties, and the vast residential development projects.
Explosive development of transportation based on the internal combustion engine was one of the most striking changes in the physical environment of the cities. In the twenties motor vehicles had only just begun to create the problems of congestion, dirt and sprawl which were to become so typical of the modern city. As well, motor vehicles made extraordinary demands on the public purse for roads, bridges and the like. They also created new demands on the nerves in the form of the "rush hour", the contribution made by the automobile to that peculiar urban-industrial phenomenon, the daily migration between place of work and place of residence.
Throughout the early twentieth century, local expenditures rose rapidly. In nine major centres for which figures are available, taxes levied rose from $20.8 million in 1911 to $71.5 million in 1921 and to $92.3 million in 1929. Despite attempted economies and contraction of the tax base, relief costs continued to drive up the local levy in the thirties. For these nine major centres, taxes levied amounted to an aggregated $101.2 million in 1934. Most of the money was derived from property tax, which according to one municipal economist was almost fully exploited by mid-depression. No more money could be wrung out of it. Other sources of potential taxation, such as the income tax, liquor tax and automobile taxes had been progressively taken away from the cities by the provinces in the twenties and the thirties.
Much of the tax revenue was used to pay back money borrowed in the first three decades of the century for financing public works which altered the physical face of the city. In the depression, borrowing for public works was virtually terminated. But rising unemployment forced most cities to continue to borrow to pay the cost of relief. As a result, urban debt either remanined stable in the depression or increased. To complicate matters, the "cheap" money borrowed before 1929 had to be repaid with the "expensive" money of the depression. Cities were thus faced with a widening gap between the revenue they could generate and the expenditures they were required to make. The problem was central to municipal complaints in the thirties. There were, in addition, some human conundrums.
In the depression the casualities of the industrial order - the unemployed - were in need of public funds simply to stay alive, whereas the first call on those funds was to service the debt incurred to create the modern city, a city whose chief advantages redounded to the rich. And finally and again related, the heaping up of technology added to the complexity of urban society and to the vulnerability of the unaided individual. Increasing numbers of people, especially in the event of a crisis, were totally unable to help themselves, even at the elementary level opf procuring food and shelter. They depended on others, at first the charitable rich and ultimately the public sector. Technology added not only to the complexity of physical relationships. Perhaps more importantly, it compounded the complexity of economic and social relationships and, ultimately, the question of the role of government and other institutions to sustain those relationships and to mediate among them.
In the matter of economic relationships, the period before and after the First Great War appears to have been one of major economic reorganization. In the national economy, the twenties especially marked a switch from the wheat staple to pulp, paper and base metals; from coal and wood as an energy source to oil and electricity; and from the railways to the automobile as a means of transport. The period also saw a major expansion in the labour force of service occupations that was particularly pronounced in the cities (See table 1). Increasingly, people were moving into the service sector of the economy creating the so-called "white collar" society that is so much a part of the modern city. The period also witnessed a significant rationalization of manufacturing in the major cities. The number of manufacturing operations in the major centres dropped sharply before and through the twenties and in some cities there were only half as many manufacturing firms at the end of the twenties as there had been at the beginning. The number of workers in manufacturing occupations also declined while invested capital increased (See table 2). That is, factories were getting bigger, probably more mechanized and using fewer workers to obtain greater production. In the twenties there was an almost complete dislocation of wages, prices and production. The result seems to have been the creation of a large pool of marginal, unattached labour - in a sense, victims of the age of mechanization - who were to become in the thirties the chief victims of the depression.
Table 1:
Ratio of Percentages in Various Occupations: Major Cities in Canada
1931/1921
Mfg. Cons. Trans.
Hamilton 890 1.035 1.305
Montreal .793 1.105 1.128
Ottawa 1.058 1.080 .952
Quebec .804 1.111 1.076
Toronto .860 .984 1.142
Vancouver .914 1.042 1.148
Winnipeg 1.018 1.021 .911
Trade Prof. Sr.
Hamilton .945 1.160
Montreal .854 1.000
Ottawa .920 1.300
Quebec .854 .952
Toronto .854 1.225
Vancouver .898 .903
Winnipeg .779 1.107
Pers. Sr. Cl. Labour
Hamilton 1.425 .756 1.045
Montreal 1.462 .886 1.271
Ottawa 1.508 .817 1.005
Quebec 1.451 .942 1.430
Toronto 1.555 .886 1.083
Vancouver 1.110 .797 1.205
Winnipeg 1.478 .803 1.305
An Index of more than 1.000 indicates a relative increase in numbers in that particular occupation in that particular city. An Index of less than 1.000 indicates the reverse. Material suitable for comparison is available only for the seven cities enumerated above.
Table 2: Number of Firms and Capital Invested:
Major Cities of Canada 1920
No. Capital $x10,000
Halifax 315 25,485
St. John 302 15,814
Quebec City 443 42,021
Montreal 2832 471,488
Ottawa 552 49,619
Hamilton 795 144,764
London 464 36,090
Toronto 3383 453,264
Winnipeg 911 100,372
Regina 173 12,934
Saskatoon 173 7,136
Calgary 332 26,151
Edmonton 306 17,754
Vancouver 1065 85,805
Major Cities of Canada 1930
No. Capital $x10,000
Halifax 100 21,049
St. John 126 24,886
Quebec City 243 68,154
Montreal 1825 485,332
Ottawa 208 57,296
Hamilton 439 214,227
London 228 46,839
Toronto 2320 524,162
Winnipeg 519 123,782
Regina 84 35,487
Saskatoon 64 9,529
Calgary 153 35,701
Edmonton 153 24,760
Vancouver 681 128,685
Major Cities of Canada 1936
No. Capital $x10,000
Halifax 94 23,835
St. John 118 18,122
Quebec City 286 46,761
Montreal 2372 389,225
Ottawa 200 33,112
Hamilton 466 176,519
London 237 38,301
Toronto 2762 396,258
Winnipeg 594 71,757
Regina 95 9,709
Saskatoon 66 7,205
Calgary 161 27,497
Edmonton 168 17,489
Vancouver 807 83,199
In the matter of social relationships, a major sorting out process among the people of the cities seems to have been consummated. It was a process that had begun in some of the major centres about the time of Confederation and seems to have been a consequence of growing numbers, the pressures of an urban-industrial order in Canada, and the development of means of intra-urban transportation, especially the horse car and the street car. The smaller urban agglomerations of the "pre-industrial" age had evidenced an heterogenous mixture of peoples and functions close to the heart of the city. Rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, Irish and English tended to be neighbours. In addition, commerical, industrial and residential functions tended to be scrambled together. And finally, people tended to live in or very near their place of business. In the emerging modern city, however, three major changes appear to have occurred. First was the separation of place of work and place of business that resulted in that great twice-daily flow of people from home to work and back again. Second was the elaboration of specialized functional areas within the city: a commercial-retail downtown core; nearby factory-wholesale areas; major areas of ship and rail transport facilties and a number of residential areas. And third, the residential areas segregated themselves according to cultural or income criteria, or some combination of the two to create the North Ends, East Ends, Rosedales, Westmounts, and Cabbagetowns of the modern city.
While it is clear that this sort of segregation - both business and residential - occurred in many Canadian cities, it occurred only partially in some, and in no two cities did it occur according to the same or even a similar pattern. In some cities, like Ottawa, pre-industrial segregation persisted in the new century. The dictates of the new industrial-urban order were modified by the persistence of the old "pre-industrial" environment and social organization. Old patterns, like old buildings, were never extinguished in one period of dramatic change, but rather interpenetrated and were altered over the course of many years. An historical overburden remained to complicate the emerging pattern as did the demographic mix of each centre, its traditional economic functions, and its peculiar physical geography.
The impact of the urban-industrial change - population growth, technological impact, and economic and social reorganization-created problems, some already alluded to. The problems quite naturally set in motion efforts to find solutions and, in the period just before and after the First Great War, there was a veritable explosion of solutions put forward, at first by enthusiastic amateur social reformers and subsequently by professionals of all sorts. It is in this period of Canadian history that we find the emergence of the technocrat, the expert, the specialist, and the planner, typical denizens of the city.
One of the chief techniques to find solutions to urban problems was to make surveys, and the surveys of the early twentieth century provide valuable historical information about what the cities were like and what the surveyors thought they should become. The various planning and social surveys, though mainly concerned with the man-made city, usually remarked on its social conditions. Problems of health and social welfare - including communicable diseases, inadequate sanitation, juvenile delinquency, drunkenness, broken homes, and unemployment - were usually pointed out and the reports never failed to note the coincidence of a noisome physical environment and social or medical problems among the population.
By the First Great War, the investigations and organizational efforts of the social and planning reformers were beginning to crystallize into formal institutions, sometimes in the public sector, but most often in the private. Primitive social and planning organizations were emerging in the twenties in response to the rapid physical and economic growth of the urban centres. But with the crash of 1929 they were overwhelmed, especially by one specific casualty of the urban-industrial age, the unemployed working man.
Where before governments had only dabbled with the relief of the casualties of the modern industrial world, the plight of the unemployed brought them with a vengeance into the area of social service and planning. Public or social welfare departments sprang up or were expanded at all levels of government in the depression that followed the crash and they became fixtures in public bureaucracies. These bureaucracies, along with departments of physical planning, were soon manned by "experts". Many cities hired their first trained social workers and planners in the thirties.
Into Chaos
The changing physical and human environment, and the attempts to cope with the change, were all part of a maturing secular process in Canada in the early twentieth century. Much of that change occurred in the cities of the nation. In the midst of this process, in the late Autumn of 1929, much of the world, Canada included, was precipitated into the depression that came to be known here as the "Dirty Thirties". Canadians had experienced depressions before, but at no other time had economic collapse occurred when so many people were living in so many cities, across so much of the nation and with so little material support in the event of a loss of job.
Canadians were ill-prepared. They had not come to grips with secular change. They had gotten used to industrial prosperity and saw its perpetuation as the solution to most problems. In this respect they were not unlike most industrialized nations. In Canada, as elsewhere, practically the entire social and economic strategy for dealing with the problems of the modern world was predicated on continued expansion. Progress and growth, including technological innovation, was seen as the chief solvent for most material and social problems. What human enterprise could not solve, science and technology would. In the urban centres of Canada, the city fathers had concentrated on developing a physical environment in which business could flourish, and made only the meanest of efforts to rescue the most hapless victims of the new order. The main source of income for such limited ventures was the property tax; and by and large, in prosperous times, it was adequate.
The depression made a shambles of this happy work. It struck down the chief problem-solver of the modern city: Prosperity. And the cities, without either the means or the organizations to deal with a major economic and social collapse, entered perilous waters indeed. Economic crisis, imposed on a major secular change that was incomplete in terms of its social and planning apparatus, created nearly insurmountable challenges.
The first impulse of the city fathers to solve the social problems of the depression was either to write off the unemployed as the result of excessive migration or to convince themselves that the depression was only a temporary recession and would soon go away. Their first reactions, as a result, were to call on the federal government - since it had jurisdiction over immigration - to assume the burden of the unemployed. But the unemployed had been, by statute or long practice, a local responsibility and neither the federal authorities nor the provincial ones would respond to the request of the local governments. It also soon became clear that the unemployed were not the result of excessive immigration and, worse still, that they would not go away. The recession was a real depression. The large numbers of unemployed stubbornly remained and grew even larger. Without help, other than financial, from the senior levels of government, and with the early depression collapse of the private agencies, the local levels of government, especially the cities, faced a problem that was not to be solved by ad hoc and temporary measures.
The initial economic response was even more ill-advised. If anything, it made matters worse. As indicated, the major economic notion of the twenties was to expand and, from the cities' point of view, to compete for a share of that expansion and its consequent prosperity. But in the depression, the conventional wisdom was to do the reverse, that is, to practice economic contraction and retrenchment, and as much as possible to shut off a community from the side effects of the depression. As a result, it became a widespread practice in most cities to economise in every way possible and to keep out unwanted people, mainly the unemployed and competitors of local businessmen. City budgets were trimmed, borrowing for physical improvements was turned off, employees were let go, and salaries cut. Regulations were passed discriminating against non-residents and working women. Public services were reduced where possible, and some cities resorted to turning off every other street light. Worn out equipment was not replaced and new equipment was not purchased. Campaigns were launched to ensure more honest and efficient civic government. These campaigns were followed in time by campaigns to eliminate parasitic activity, like gambling and prostitution rings, and to break up alleged monopolies, especially the so-called milk, coal and bread trusts. Inefficiency, dishonesty and monopoly that could be tolerated in good times were intolerable in bad.
As the depression moved into a second, third and fourth year, it became evident to even the most optimistic that recovery was likely to be a long, slow and painful process, and that efforts would have to be made to ensure security against depression in the future. It became clear that the umemployed were neither responsible for losing their jobs nor for their failure to find new ones. Depression, it seemed, was an inevitable adjunct to prosperity in the new urban order. The consequences of depression were painfully evident in the long lists of unemployed. The potential consequences of ignoring their plight were likewise evident in the not infrequent rallies, riots and memorials of the organized unemployed and other political activists.
Efforts were begun, after a time, in most cities (and in the senior governments) to place the delivery of relief on an organized, rational, comprehensive and possibly permanent basis. It had become clear that the public was going to have to manage relief and pay for it, despite the wisdom of the twenties that the individual should take care of his own welfare and the wisdom of the thirties that governments should cut their expenditures in time of depression. The hard fact of the thirties had to be confonted: the victims of urban-industrial society needed public support or they would starve. The problem ultimately came down to which level of government was going to carry the responsibility for these human casualities of economic collapse and which level was going to pay for it.
As already indicated, local levels of government were deemed to have the primary responsibility of providing and paying for social services of all kinds in the absence of individual or voluntary organizations. But the sheer numbers of unemployed and the enormous cost they incurred overwhelmed first the resources of the private sector and then those of local governments, including the major cities. They had neither the social machinery to cope with all the problems of the unemployed nor did they have the financial resources to do so. They depended on the property tax, a tax already heavily over-exploited in the twenties. In the cities the problem was especially acute. Not only had they tended to expand the most in the twenties, with consequent strain on their financial resources, they were also responsible for the bulk of the nation's unemployed in the thirties. On the one hand were the armies of unemployed who, despite the enormous cost, had to be fed and, hopefully, some day employed. On the other hand were the even larger numbers of employed taxpayers who, in a decade of extraordinary job insecurity, were faced with ever-mounting relief bills.
Responses
It was this tension, uncertainty and insecurity that gave rise to the chief urban political phenomenon of the depression - the radical mayors of 1934-1935. They popped up everywhere at mid-depression, a parallel phenomenon perhaps to what happened at the provincial and federal levels. What they seem to have had in common was a popularity that transcended the differences between the employed and the unemployed, the rich and the poor, the "wasp" and the "ethnic". They also had a certain dynamism that seemed to promise some sort of radical action that would once and for all end the agony of hard times.
Montreal, for example, produced Camillien Houde, a short (five-foot, seven inches), pudgy (267 pounds) "man of the people", who was born on a nameless Montreal street and had risen by the thirties to become both the mayor of the city and leader of the provincial Conservative party. Houde was responsible for forming an embryonic local political "party" in the city early in the depression, whose members were referred to as "Houde's Henchmen". He fought with both provincial and federal leaders over the question of Montreal's autonomy, and blamed much of the depression problem on the decline in human morality that was caused by the growth of the "materialistic" limited liability company. These factors and others, plus a relief crisis in Montreal in 1933-1934, drove Houde into collaboration with other mayors of similar radical style, if not identical beliefs.
Two such men were James Simpson, the mayor of Toronto in 1935, and John Queen, the mayor of Winnipeg. Both were "socialists" associated with the emerging C.C.F. (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) party. Both men, unlike Houde, saw the need for fundamental economic and social reorganization rather than moral rearmament, but like him favoured action of a wholesale order. Also from the Prairies came Cornelius "Rock-Pile" Rink, Mayor of Regina, an adamant believer in the work test-in his case, rock-breaking by reliefees. "Fightin" Joe Clarke, Mayor of Edmonton, attacked the socialist, downtown business and eastern "interests" with equal vigor and appeal for the support of workingmen, retail store clerks and "red-blooded sports fans".
Vancouver produced Gerry McGeer, an "Independent" Liberal, who had scrambled up into Vancouver society from the city's east end, working-class community. McGeer believed in the power of God, the ideas of Abraham Lincoln, and financial experiments similar to those of Social Credit. In his latter days as mayor he believed he was going to be assassinated by international financial conspirators because of his unorthodox monetary policies, just as he believed Lincoln had been.
These urban leaders were clearly unorthodox and different. All were strident activists who had come to power with promises of radical action. Their radicalism rested on an expressed desire to rewrite two contracts of long standing; the British North America Act and the plethora of agreements in Canada between public borrowers and private lenders. That is, the mayors attacked - though indirectly - the sanctity of the constitution and the sanctity of contract in an effort to provide relief for their distressed cities and for the masses of unemployed residing in them. In concrete terms, this attack was expressed in demands for a Dominion conversion loan that would enable them to repay their debts at a lower rate of interest, and in demands for complete federal assumption of the responsibility for the unemployed. The conversion loan would enable the cities to break the burdensome contracts with private lenders and rid themselves of some of the deadweight of local debt. But such a loan also implied a certain amount of federal control over local expenditure. Such control cut right across the jurisdictional responsibility for local government held by the provinces under the BNA Act. Likewise, federal assumption of unemployment relief would cut into provincial jurisdiction for social services under the BNA Act.
