In the early part of the Dirty Thirties, the Canadian prairie city
was a relatively safe haven. Having faced recession before the Great
War and then again in the early 1920s, municipalities already had
relief apparatuses in place to deal with poverty and unemployment.
Until 1933, responsibility for the care of the urban poor remained with
local governments, but when the farms failed that year, and the
Depression deepened, western Canadian cities suffered tremendously.
Recognizing the severity of the crisis, the national government
intervened. Evolving federal programs and policies took over
responsibility for the delivery of relief to the single unemployed,
while the government simultaneously withdrew financing for all public
works projects.
Setting municipal relief administrations of the 1930s within a wider
literature on welfare and urban poor relief, Strikwerda highlights the
legacy on which relief policymakers relied in determining policy
directions, as well as the experiences of the individuals and families
who depended on relief for their survival. Focusing on three prairie
cities—Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg—Strikwerda argues
that municipal officials used their power to set policy to address what
they perceived to be the most serious threats to the social order
stemming from the economic crisis. By analyzing the differing ways in
which local relief programs treated married and single men, he also
explores important gendered dynamics at work in the response of city
administrators to the social and economic upheaval of the Depression.
Probing the mindset of local elites struggling in extraordinary
circumstances,
The Wages of Relief describes the enduring
impact of the policy changes made in the 1930s in the direction of a
broad, national approach to unemployment—an approach that ushered
in Canada’s modern welfare system.
