Parliament should decriminalize heroin, says a federal report. “We are exploring all options,” said Health Minister Patricia Hajdu: “It is not a moral issue.”
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra says a re-elected Liberal cabinet will draft regulations banning unvaccinated travelers from domestic flights and VIA Rail trains by October 31. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau eight months ago called mandatory vaccinations an “extreme measure.”
The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates: “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love, if not money: “It wasn’t anything like that,” he muttered. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.”
The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty.
Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways’ last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society,’ whatever one took that to mean.”
McCallum details British Columbia’s descent into chaos. In Kamloops, so many vagrants gathered the mayor sent an urgent petition to the legislature. “The town is being overrun by beggars and panhandlers,” he wrote; “Where is it all going to end?”
In Vancouver one Christmas headline in the Province read: “Man Starves To Death Here.” Ratepayers were overwhelmed by the cost of food for the jobless. The welfare budget peaked at a staggering $1.1 million by 1935, divvied up by 25¢ meal tickets. City Council telegraphed the Prime Minister: “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control.”
In Victoria, the city launched a desperate boondoggle to put vagrants to work chopping firewood. Officials bought a campsite for $900, then provided $613 worth of saws, hired a cook and offered jobless men $1 a day to chop a cord of wood with room and board provided. Of 229 men who registered, a quarter couldn’t cut wood anyway. Victoria ratepayers were stuck with a stockpile of 2,000 cords trucked to market – that cost another $3.50 a cord – and saw the wood sold at a loss, 75¢ a cord.
“It is in every way easier for most North Americans to imagine the complete and utter destruction of the planet we currently inhabit than to envision the end of the capitalist order,” says McCallum. That is precisely what B.C. faced in the 1930s. The result was a kind of madness.
The number of transients in Vancouver was estimated at 12,000. They gathered in hobo jungles cobbled from cardboard and the city’s waste. “Grounds are filthy and covered with decaying garbage, with open toilets,” the city’s medical officer of health wrote in 1931 following a typhoid outbreak. “Flies swarm over everything and then on all open food.”
Hobohemia is meticulously researched. Professor McCallum is a gifted writer. The story is raw and compelling. To read it is to learn why children of the 1930s could never, ever waste tin foil or see their memories of gnawing despair transformed into a TV drama of joy amid poverty.
By Holly Doan
Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver; by Todd McCallum; Athabasca University Press; 319 pages; ISBN 9781-9268-36287; $29.95
Senator Sarabjit Marwah (Ont.) is refusing comment over his close ties to Scotiabank while serving on the Senate banking committee. Marwah would not answer numerous requests for confirmation he kept a Bay Street office at Scotiabank and used a Bank email address even as a senator.
The Department of Transport yesterday approved a $2.87 million Covid grant to private shareholders operating the taxpayer-owned Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. Bridge operators were already scheduled to receive billions in subsidies under a 35-year lease: “Here is a living, breathing example of risk-free investment for a corporation.”
Commissioner of Elections Yves Côté faces a Charter challenge on free speech after penalizing a book publisher for alleged campaign advertising. Rebel News Network Ltd. last January 22 was fined $3,000 for a book promotion the Commissioner said was too political: “Books are and have historically been critical instruments to express opinions.”
Cabinet yesterday said a bill legalizing bookmaking will take effect in two weeks’ time. “I can’t wait,” said the president of a Unifor local representing casino workers: “August 27 is the day. There is nothing else that has to be done.”
New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday proposed billions in new taxes on corporations and top one percent income earners. “No other party is willing to say those words,” Singh told reporters in detailing his election platform: “We are the only ones.”
The Department of Health yesterday would not discuss terms of a contract that saw it pay more than $138,000 apiece for Covid ventilators never used to treat pandemic patients. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland boasted the contractor that received the multi-million dollar order was in her home riding: “This is considered commercially confidential information.”
Elections Canada yesterday said it has purged thousands of foreigners from the national voters’ list and referred hundreds of cases of suspected illegal voting for further investigation. The clean-up of the National Register Of Electors follows checks on immigration records first undertaken prior to the 2019 campaign: “Elections Canada is confident it has the necessary tools.”
Paul Hellyer, 98, last surviving member of the Louis St. Laurent cabinet, will be buried Saturday. Hellyer in his last visit to Parliament Hill in 2019 warned of “Ponzi scheme” deficit spending: “You have to get the money somewhere.”
The Department of Transport yesterday proposed a new tax on boaters to pay for recovery of wrecks abandoned in the nation’s lakes and harbours. Taxpayers should not carry the cost, said staff: “It’s not fair to put that load on the taxpayer.”
An insurer’s cancellation of coverage for a homeowner who reported growing legal medical marijuana plants will go to a human rights hearing. A British Columbia woman complained cancellation of her longstanding policy by Canadian Northern Shield Insurance Co. was discriminatory: ‘When her mortgage holder learned she did not have home insurance her costs went up by $300 a month.’
Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department refuses to name publishers awarded nearly $61 million in pre-election “emergency relief.” The grants were to ensure readers receive “timely information they require from their government,” Guilbeault wrote in a letter to MPs: “Reliable news is perhaps more important than ever.”
You cannot ask jurors if they’re vaccinated, says a British Columbia Supreme Court judge. The ruling issued yesterday came as one MP protested any attempt to force public employees to take Covid shots: ‘It is private and personal.’
