Dirty Thirties: Causes Of The Great Depression

The Great Depression, this period of time was known as “Dirty Thirties”, it was not like the simple economy depression, some examples were banking or financial crisis. This huge financial turmoil which “started in 1929”（Kathy Gill，2016）[ Kathy Gill, “What caused The Great Depression”, ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco.com/great-depression-causes-3367841 (accessed in March 28th 2017 )] swept the whole world, led to millions of people unemployed, hungry and homeless. It affected everyone in some way and if people were caught by this storm, then there was basically no way to escape. A lot of people wanted to find the reason why the Great Depression was happened, but the causes of the Great Depression were very complex, and economists have not yet

Many Canadians of the thirties felt that the enormous 1928 “wheat crop crash was the main reason why the depression was happened, instead of the Wall Street Stock Market Crash” (Porter Creek Secondary School, 2000)[ Porter Creek Secondary School, “Great Depression of Canada”, Yesnet.yk, http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/projects/canadianhistory/(accessed in March 28th 2017)]. However, the collapse of the Wall Street Stock Market caused almost all countries to cut off trade with other countries. As people all know, Canada was an economically country depended on export, if the rest of the countries of the world stopped the World Trade, there was no doubt that Canadian economy would get huge damage. By 1929, the price of Canadian wheat had fallen because of overproduction, “the price of grain dropped from $1.60 a bushel to $0.28 a bushel”(Porter Creek Secondary School, 2000)[ Porter Creek Secondary School, “Great Depression of Canada”, Yesnet.yk, http://www.yesnet.yk.ca/schools/projects/canadianhistory/(accessed in March 28th 2017)]. Due to this, many people were unemployed and money and food began to run low. Thence, this caused under-consumption which meant that increasingly the working classes could not afford to meet the demand for the volume of goods being produced as incomes lagged far behind the availability of new goods. Unfortunately, “the Great Plains were hit hard with both a drought and horrendous dust

During the Great Depression, thousands of young men left their home to find job and reduce the burden on their families, but they could not find anything. So the government of Canada made a lot of new policies to try to weaken these negative effects were brought by the Great Depression, but these policies did not work and even made the situation worse. One of these useless policy was Relief camps, “the camps were established on the recommendation of chief of the general staff Maj-Gen A.G.L.”(Victor Howard, 2015)[ Victor Howard, “Unemployment Relief Camps”, HistoricaCanada, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/unemployment-relief-camps/ (accessed in April 3rd 2017)]. The reason why the government established the camps was that the government of Bennett was afraid these unemployed men rioted. Therefore, the government built these camps for the single, unemployed and homeless Canadian males and it provided the job and house for them. However, the condition of camps was very poor and the camps were located in the remote areas of Canada. “Inmates called these camps ‘slave camps’. They lived on war surplus clothing, bunked in tar-paper shacks, ate army rations and were forced to work six and a half days a week for twenty cents a day” (Porter Creek Secondary School, 2000)[ Porter Creek Secondary School, “Great Depression of Canada”, Yesnet.yk,