The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  Gardiner, who had bounced back into power the previous year, was furious. Highly partisan by nature, he had no love for the Bennett government. He was short (five feet, four inches), barrel-chested, and tough. He had worked as a labourer, a farmer, and a schoolteacher, perfecting his oratory by remaining after classes to address empty desks. Since 1914 he’d been a hard-nosed politician and a champion of prairie interests.

  The last thing he wanted was fifteen hundred or more jobless men – angry, now – dumped on his doorstep with no place to go. He shot off a blunt wire to Mather pointing out that the trekkers could scarcely be called trespassers since the CPR had supplied cars for their use. He added that they’d done nothing in his province to warrant police action. But they didn’t belong in his province, Gardiner said: move them out.

  Gardiner was even angrier at Bennett’s high-handed methods. The attorney general of Saskatchewan hadn’t asked for help, as Bennett had always insisted he must before Ottawa could move. The RCMP was paid by the province and was supposed to take orders from the province. Yet here was Bennett issuing orders to the RCMP. As of June 12, the province of Saskatchewan lost control of its police force.

  The trekkers, now two thousand strong, reached Regina on June 14, eleven days after the first lot left Vancouver. The province had already agreed to allow them to bed down in the Exhibition Grounds and to give each man two meal tickets a day. Here, too, the citizens were heavily on the side of the newcomers. A hastily formed Citizens’ Emergency Committee, incorporating a dozen organizations from the CCF to the Ministerial Association, pledged “to make the stay for the boys as comfortable and pleasant as possible.…”

  The trek was scheduled to leave Regina on the evening of Monday, June 19. Mass rallies, picnics, and the arrival of another three hundred men from the camp at Dundurn had raised morale. Ottawa wanted to prevent a potentially dangerous confrontation with the police at the rail yards, especially with both citizens and strikers in their present mood. Besides, Bennett’s plan was to delay – to keep the trekkers in Regina long enough to cool them down. A series of stalling tactics would, he hoped, tire everybody out until the movement collapsed.

  To that end, he sent two Cabinet ministers to Regina to “negotiate” with Evans and his committee. R.J. Manion, Minister of Railways, and Robert Weir, Minister of Agriculture, arrived on Monday morning, and a long wrangle followed in the basement of the Saskatchewan Hotel. The two ministers found Evans and his associates far more tractable than Premier Gardiner, whose attitude “was very ugly and not very helpful.” Gardiner pooh-poohed the idea of a revolution. It wasn’t the first march on Ottawa, he told Manion: a thousand Saskatchewan farmers had invaded the capital in 1910 and three thousand in 1922, and there’d been no revolution. If the men boarded the train that night and a riot ensued, he would call out the local police and arrest both the RCMP and the trekkers, since, in his view, both would be equally guilty.

  When Evans presented the trekkers’ demands, all of which had been publicized over the past six months, Manion insisted with a straight face that he’d never heard of them before. Since he could not let the trek proceed, he made a counter offer. If Evans would head a delegation to Ottawa to present those demands to Bennett, the federal government would provide the army of men with three meals a day – at twenty cents, not fifteen – while they waited in Regina for the outcome of the meeting.

  Evans knew at once that he’d been outmanoeuvred. He could not reject the offer. The press and the public would turn on him, for he had been demanding just such a meeting for months. But the delay would be demoralizing. When he put the proposition to a volatile mass meeting that afternoon, the trekkers damned the offer as a ruse; there was no possibility that Bennett would meet those demands. But they knew they had no choice but to accept. That evening eight thousand people gathered outside the Saskatchewan Hotel while the negotiators ironed out the final details. The trek was temporarily sidetracked, to the relief of Colonel Wood of the RCMP, who did not yet have enough men in Regina to prevent two thousand trekkers from forcing their way aboard a train.

  The eight delegates selected to go to Ottawa (the group included Evans, Savage, Walsh, and Cosgrove) left on June 18, travelling first class – “on the cushions,” to use the current phrase. Red Walsh noted with astonishment that the dining-car waiter laid three sets of cutlery before them. In the Ottawa hotel where the delegation stayed, he saw his first bathtub in five years.

  They met with Bennett and Perley on June 22 in a room so small that Doc Savage (who took his nickname from a popular magazine) likened it to a janitor’s closet. A curtain was drawn over one corner and Savage always maintained he could see a pair of Mountie boots sticking out from under it.

  The scene that followed resembled an old and oft-remembered play of which everybody has memorized the script. Bennett’s New Deal did not include any negotiating with men he considered to be dangerous revolutionaries. Evans again outlined the trekkers’ demands. Bennett shot them all down. “Work and wages,” he declared, were beyond the capacity of the country. Food and shelter at the camps were adequate; there was no compulsion to join and no discipline. The daily twenty cents wasn’t a wage, it was a gift. The real problem was agitators “representing … Communism, which we will stamp out in this country.” He hit out at the strike leadership: “You have not shown much anxiety to get work.… What you want is this adventure in the hope that the organization which you are promoting in Canada may be able to overawe the government and break down the forces that represent law and order.”

  Shortly after that an acrimonious exchange took place between Bennett and Evans.

  “I come from Alberta,” Bennett said. “I remember when you embezzled the funds of your union and were sent to the penitentiary.”

  To that Evans angrily replied, “You are a liar!” He had been charged with converting funds, not embezzling them. “I used the funds for hungry people, instead of sending them to Indianapolis to a bunch of pot-bellied business agents,” Evans said. As for Bennett, he declared in a burst of anger, he wasn’t fit to run a Hottentot village.

  The meeting was a waste of time, for neither side budged an inch. The delegation left Ottawa on June 23, making a series of platform speeches before reaching Regina on the twenty-sixth. There Evans learned that Ottawa intended to open a temporary camp at Lumsden, Saskatchewan, to house the trekkers until they went back to the camps or to their homes.

  Evans now realized that the strike of the relief camp workers, which had begun on April 4, was virtually at an end. They had, in fact, come much farther than anyone had expected, but that did not lessen the disappointment. He put on a bold face when he addressed an enthusiastic meeting of citizens that evening. If the strikers couldn’t go by rail, he announced, the trek would continue by road. He appealed to people with vehicles to come forward to take the men to Winnipeg. This was sheer bravado. The Trans-Canada Highway was not completed. The farthest east any motorcade could get would be Kenora, near the Manitoba-Ontario border.

  But Ottawa had no intention of letting the trek move on by any method, even if that meant bending the law. Two days before, Colonel Wood had received a telephoned command from his superior, MacBrien, that all motor cars, buses, or trucks carrying relief camp trekkers east were to be stopped by the police and the drivers and passengers arrested. If worst came to worst, the government would proclaim a national emergency.

  This was a remarkable order. Ordinary citizens were to be denied the use of the King’s Highways. There were no legal grounds for it, although MacBrien, as an excuse, used the “peace, order and good government” clause in the Relief Act to justify the action.

  Wood told Gardiner that the directive had been approved by order-in-council. That wasn’t true. There never was such an order; in fact, the Cabinet couldn’t pass one while the House was in session. A web of confusion was now woven around the police instructions. T.C. Davis, the province’s attorney general, was led to believe that the non-existent order
prevented the citizens from rendering assistance of any kind to the trekkers. Wood, apparently, believed this himself, for he told the Regina Leader-Post that anyone in Regina or its neighbourhood who assisted the trekkers was liable to prosecution – and that included offering food and shelter.

  None of this was correct; but it was believed, and it killed any chance for Evans’s demonstration convoy on the twenty-seventh. On that afternoon, when the motorcade was supposed to move the strikers east, only one truck and two automobiles turned up. The sad little contingent set off bravely toward the Manitoba border, led by Reverend Samuel B. East, a tall, lithe, and energetic United Church minister, like Woodsworth a follower of the Social Gospel. East was popular with his congregation but was looked on with some distaste by the church hierarchy because of his pronounced left-wing views. Communism, the sixty-two-year-old minister had once declared, was “one divine, far-off event, towards which all creation moves.”

  East was a leading member of the Citizens’ Emergency Committee. The night before he had been a principal speaker at the trekkers’ rally. “Bennett,” he had cried in his best pulpit voice, “wants to be [the] Mussolini of Canada. Shall we let him?” Now, with the crowd’s enthusiastic “No!” echoing in his ears, he was off to do his bit for the cause. “We’re heading east with East” was his slogan. In less than an hour, he found himself in jail.

  The tiny convoy, followed at a discreet distance by some five hundred cars crammed with onlookers, encountered a cordon of steel-helmeted police barring its way on the outskirts of town. In vain, East produced a permit from the highways department, giving him the right to use trucks on the roads. Another hundred police arrived, scooped up everybody in the convoy, and rushed them to RCMP headquarters. East was never charged and was released later that night. The others were held under the all-purpose Section 98 of the Criminal Code that was the only legislation the police could properly use.

  Events were now moving towards a climax. In Winnipeg, fifteen hundred relief camp workers announced their own trek to Ottawa. In Regina, the men refused to go to the government’s camp at Lumsden, believing it was a concentration camp where anything could happen to them. Their funds were low; there was only enough money left to feed the men one meal. Donations had dried up because the citizens had been misled into believing they would be arrested if they helped the trekkers. Evans himself was searching for a face-saving solution that would allow the men to return to their camps or their homes with some semblance of honour.

  R.B. Bennett, however, was in a state of panic. Manion had warned him that “this Communistic crowd … are determined to stir up what would be practically a revolution.” Strong measures, he insisted, would be needed to curb it. “Somehow the leaders should be got at and if possible got out of the position of leading these unemployed.”

  Bennett took that advice. On June 28, Colonel Wood received his orders. The government wanted the strike leaders arrested – urgently. Once again that handiest of all sections of the Criminal Code, No. 98, was to be invoked. Under it, all trekkers could be considered Communists and thus subject to arrest.

  Wood was in an unenviable position. As head of the provincial police force in Saskatchewan, he was used to taking his instructions from the provincial attorney general and also having the benefit of his advice. Now, at this moment of crisis, he no longer had the opportunity to consult with the civil authority. Ottawa had taken that away and was calling the shots by remote control – the long-distance telephone from the capital, hundreds of miles removed from the scene of the trouble.

  Wood did not have enough local evidence to charge anybody, and said so. As far as he was concerned, the trek leaders had done nothing while in Saskatchewan to warrant arrest. Ottawa replied that John Leopold, the man who had fingered Tim Buck and his comrades, would be arriving post-haste on July 1. (In fact, not one of the trekkers was ever found guilty under Section 98.)

  Meanwhile, Evans was still trying to achieve peace with honour. On July 1, he approached C.P. Burgess, the local representative of the federal Department of Labour, to suggest that the trekkers be allowed to disband and return voluntarily to their camps or their homes. He also asked for amnesty for everybody but himself. The federal government, having fought the trekkers to a standstill, now had a chance to cool the situation and, in victory, to be magnanimous. But Evans’s plan was rejected. Ottawa insisted that everybody go to the Lumsden camp to be processed before going back to Regina to board the trains.

  It was Monday, July 1, the Dominion Day holiday, the end of a long weekend. Communication with Ottawa had been maddeningly slow. Now the trekkers tried to reach Premier Gardiner. He was finally located at his farm outside Regina and persuaded to come back into town for a meeting. Again Evans was trying to get permission for his organization to handle the dispersal. Failing that he would have preferred to have the Saskatchewan government oversee the task rather than federal authorities. He also attempted one more meeting with Burgess and Wood. That was unproductive. Burgess refused to meet with Gardiner. Wood claimed that Evans was trying to get his men back to Vancouver to join the longshoremen’s strike.

  The holiday conspired to frustrate the most obvious of solutions. Gardiner did not reach his office until four that afternoon and, with most of his colleagues still out of town, scheduled a Cabinet meeting for eight. Those members of the Cabinet who could be reached were still gathering for the meeting – Attorney General Davis had not yet arrived – when the news came just after eight o’clock that a riot had broken out in Market Square.

  5

  The Regina Riot

  Barring the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the Regina Riot of July 1, 1935, is probably the best-known civilian disturbance in Canadian history. But unlike the Winnipeg strike, which had a purpose and a meaning, the events in Regina’s Market Square that evening had neither objective nor reason.

  The riot shouldn’t have happened, didn’t have to happen, and almost didn’t happen. It was fuelled by fear, suspicion, stubbornness, pride, and, at the end, implacable fury.

  The federal government under R.B. Bennett must bear the greatest share of blame. Bennett’s pathological fear of bloody revolution provoked, in the end, bloody violence. Ottawa’s stubborn insistence on running affairs in Retina at long distance and its equally stubborn refusal to make any concessions to Evans contributed. The trekkers’ innate suspicions of the Lumsden camp and Evans’s insistence on saving face by pretending that a victory of sorts had been achieved didn’t help. And finally, there was the effect of the holiday weekend, which slowed down negotiations until they were outdistanced by the rush of events. Had Jimmy Gardiner been in his office that Monday, had the members of his Cabinet been at their desks, a solution would almost certainly have been found and the trek peacefully disbanded, for Gardiner did not share Bennett’s unyielding antagonism to Evans and his followers.

  One can only sympathize with Colonel Wood, the veteran Mountie, who was under continual pressure from Ottawa to arrest the leadership of the trek immediately. Although Evans and his colleagues could have been apprehended at any time or place in Regina, Wood wanted to move when he could take them all at once and without inciting an uproar among the trekkers. But Ottawa insisted they be arrested without delay.

  Wood was surprised to find that the two government lawyers charged with preparing indictments against seven trek leaders had warrants ready for serving by the time he got back to his headquarters at five o’clock after his meeting with Evans and the trek leaders. He still doubted that there was enough evidence to justify issuing warrants, and as it turned out he was right. Nonetheless, he did not dare wait. In short, the RCMP, a supposedly independent police force, was bowing to political pressure. Equally incredible was Wood’s failure to disclose his intentions to the Saskatchewan government. Later, he claimed he did not know that Evans was meeting with the Premier to suggest a way out of the impasse. As it was, neither Gardiner nor his attorney general had any intimation of what was about to happ
en.

  The question was, where and when should the men be arrested? Certainly not at the Exhibition Grounds, surrounded by their followers. But a mass rally was planned that evening at Market Square, where several speakers were to make a final plea for funds. According to the plan, the police would go to the Unity Centre, the trek headquarters on the edge of the square, and try to make the arrests there. If their quarry wasn’t present – and at seven o’clock that night the police found no one – the move would be made at the rally.

  This was a dangerous decision. Regina’s chief constable, Martin Bruton, who sat in on the strategy session with the Mounties, clearly had his doubts. Was it really advisable to try to take men into custody at a packed outdoor meeting? he asked. Bruton registered his disapproval, but after pointing out the seriousness of the move went no further. Wood apparently thought he had no choice.

  The assistant commissioner would testify to the commission that later investigated the riot that he did not expect trouble. But he acted as if he did. The arrests would be made by a flying squad of RCMP and city plainclothesmen. Three big moving vans loaded with one hundred steel-helmeted Mounties would be stationed on three sides of the square. Twenty-nine uniformed city police armed with lead-tipped batons and sawed-off baseball bats would be hidden in the police garage on the south side. A troop of mounted RCMP officers would also be positioned to the south at Twelfth and Osler.