Massive Western
Canadian Protest Movement .
In the dark days of the 1930s, during
The Great Depression, the western provinces experienced great hardship. A drought, combined with terrible wheat prices, had resulted in a crisis situation. Unemployed men began to wander across the continent,
riding the rails. The
Canadian Government organized hard labour make-work camps for these men. The treatment was greatly resented. It was perceived that Central Canada did not appreciate how the West was suffering.
Communist Union leaders organized a giant cross-Canada protest in 1935. Desperate and unemployed men from all over the
alienated west would travel to
Ottawa to present their case at Parliament. Prime Minister
Richard Bedford Bennett, a wealthy industrialist by trade, was completely unsympathetic to the hungry mens' plight. He ordered the
RCMP to ambush the trek in
Regina and force the men to return to the work camps.
The deeply unpopular Bennett would soon lose the next election; he eventually abandoned Canada for England.