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Home » Diets that Work » Yes, times are tough, but let’s not pretend it’s anything like 1929 – Financial Post

The national crisis over the coronavirus has resulted in governments deliberately shutting down much of Canadas economy and throwing millions of people out of work. Some journalists have speculated about whether we are entering another Depression like that which began in 1929, as though they have some recollection of what that was like. In fact, almost no one alive today actually remembers that era. Even those of us who have heard word-of-mouth stories from survivors of the Depression, as I did growing up, are elderly people now.

My father, Thomas Lyman, was born in 1910, the oldest of four brothers, in Dresden, Ont., between London and Detroit. My mother, Antoinette Phelan, the oldest of eight children in her family, was born in 1912 in Mount Forest, two hours northwest of Toronto. They came to adulthood in the early 1930s and survived the Great Depression. There was nothing great about it. It was a nightmare in peoples lives that lasted for over 10 years and did not really end until the Second World War. Today, we know that it was the result of widespread drops in world commodity prices and sudden declines in economic demand and credit, which led to sharp reductions in global trade and rising unemployment. Let me describe that in human terms.

It was a nightmare in peoples lives that lasted for over 10 years

There wasnt a national labour force survey, as there is now, but estimates are that, at times, as many as one-third of working-age people in Canada were unemployed. It was extremely difficult to get a job. If you did, the wages were very low. Employers could basically dictate the terms of employment. My father was lucky to be hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce (a predecessor of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) to work as a bank teller in a small branch in Mount Forest, where he met my mother. My mother worked as a cashier in a five and dime, what today we would call a convenience store, and after business hours she did her chores on a farm. They spent the entire Depression in Mount Forest. The bank, however, prohibited its employees from marrying (they might produce children and ask for a raise) so my mother and father dated from 1930 until 1940 when he enlisted in the Canadian army, married and left for six years in Europe.

Sometime in the 1930s my grandfather lost his farm in Dresden and moved his family to Windsor, Ont. There he got a job working in Detroit for the Detroit Free Press. With no television and no internet, newspapers were almost as fail-safe employers as banks were. Times have changed.

For the most part, though, wages were so low that even employed people could afford only the fewest of non-essentials. There was little entertainment. My father reminisced once that a big night out was when four friends shared the cost of a case of beer and played cards all evening.

The birth rate dropped by a third. Tens of thousands of young men could not find work and were not eligible for even the meagre welfare provided by governments then, so they lived in shanty towns and moved from area to area (often as hideaways on railway boxcars) depending on the season.

Hundreds of thousands of people and businesses went bankrupt. The banks often seized the farms and other property of the people affected, so families were left homeless. Farm production dropped. If you lived on a farm, your main diet was often root crops and rhubarb. Many people got scurvy; almost everyone was hungry much of the time. The poor diets and bad living conditions shortened lives; children often had to leave school after Grade 8 so they could work and help support the family. Both wages and prices dropped throughout the 1930s. In Western Canada, two-thirds of the rural population was forced onto relief, the small support available from governments.

For many, the worst effect of the Depression was the sense of hopelessness it engendered. No one who has ever heard first-hand accounts of what that was like would ever want to experience it.

When people today talk about the possibility of so extending the shut-down of the Canadian economy as to place us on the path to a Depression, they have no idea what that would mean. I hope they never find out.

Robert Lyman was born in 1946, precisely nine months after his father returned from the war. He grew up in Windsor and currently lives in Ottawa.

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Yes, times are tough, but let's not pretend it's anything like 1929 - Financial Post

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Home » Diets that Work » Yes, times are tough, but let’s not pretend it’s anything like 1929 – Financial Post