Protest

 

   This past February hundreds of truckers drove into the Canadian capital of Ottawa to protest mandates that they be vaccinated in order to cross the U.S. border. They roamed the streets of Ottawa in their trucks for three weeks until patience wore thin and the Mounties chased them away. They did not accomplish their goal, except to show the world that Canadians could be as feisty as Americans.

   Back in the early thirties there was a similar protest in Canada among unemployed single men who had been sent to construction camps in the western provinces. They were paid twenty cents a day and lived in decrepit camps under military discipline.

   In December, 1934 the men went on strike and traveled to Vancouver to protest. After two months of demonstrations and meetings, the government promised to appoint a commission to look into conditions in the camps. When nothing happened, another strike was called, and on this day in 1935, about 1,000 workers boarded trains headed for Ottawa.

   The workers demanded pay of fifty cents per hour, a thirty hour work week, free health insurance, and improved conditions in the camps. The protesters got as far as Regina, Saskatchewan where they met with two federal cabinet ministers. Eight representatives of the strikers went on to Ottawa to met the prime minister while the rest remained in Regina. 

   The meeting in Ottawa turned into a shouting match. The prime minister, R.B. Bennett was the Canadian version of Herbert Hoover, who believed any concessions to the strikers would allow socialism into the country. He was a well meaning leader when an FDR was needed. The strikers representatives returned to Regina to organize the men waiting there for a March on Ottawa. The Mounties were ordered to break up the march and a riot ensued. There were two deaths, stores were burned (but not looted), and scores of protesters were arrested.

  Prime Minister Bennett called the strikers communists, but public sympathy was on the side of the strikers. Bennett and his government were defeated that fall and the new government established their own version of the New Deal which provided for the unemployed until the economy improved.

If only we had semis.