The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929–39

Abstract

The concept of "local responsibility" (the centuries-old convention that held local authorities accountable for providing relief to the poor) imposed an onerous burden on prairie cities after 1929. But [Eric Strikwerda] argues that it also gave municipal officials considerable latitude, enabling them to pursue relief polices designed to lessen what they believed were the Depression's most dangerous effects, as well as to cope with the economic crisis more broadly. At the same time, though, this latitude was constrained by these cities' relationships with the provincial and federal governments, local businesses and community organizations, and the unemployed themselves. These both helped and hindered municipal relief administrators' efforts to carry out their responsibilities to the unemployed while at the same time safeguarding their middleclass conceptions of social order and how and to whom relief ought to be provided. In 1929 there was a six-month residence requirement in each of these prairie cities; Winnipeg and Edmonton would soon increase theirs to a year. For those who did meet the residence requirement, married men (with or without children) stood a far better chance of obtaining relief than single men. In the eyes of relief administrators, "the unemployed married man represented stability, maturity and responsibility." The unemployed single man, in contrast, "represented shiftlessness, youthfulness and potential danger; he was restless - riding the rods, living in makeshiftjungles, or begging on back doorsteps." (58) Then, in 1933, the federal government began to assume a larger role in the development, oversight, and administration of relief policy. First it assumed responsibility for single unemployed men; then it refused to continue to fund public works projects that would give real jobs to those who were on relief. The second decision was to have profound consequences for these prairie cities and indeed for all cities in Canada, Strikwerda argues. Under this federal work relief scheme cities had obtained "first-rate infrastructure at cut-rate costs." (178) Although it had not solved the unemployment crisis (or even alleviated it to any serious degree) it had placed the cities at the centre of urban unemployment relief policy making when it came to project selection, the purchasing of materials, and deciding who would get the jobs. Once the last of these projects were completed in the spring of 1933, the cities would be "reduced to mere custodians of their own relief systems." (178)