City in depression : the impact of the years 1929-1939 on Greater Victoria, British Columbia
Date
1969
Authors
Gallacher, Daniel Thomas
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Abstract
This M.A. thesis written at the University of Victoria during 1968-69 seeks to determine the causes, nature and effects of the Great Depression of 1929-1939 on the important Western Canadian metropolitan centre of Greater Victoria, British Columbia. Comprised of four municipalities -Victoria City, Esquimalt, Oak Bay and Saanich - Greater Victoria had an image of itself as an affluent, conservative, geographically isolated urban centre. Furthermore, the capital city region had, from the turn of the century, become less and less important in relation to its larger, burgeoning sister, Greater Vancouver; which in turn provided a perfect opportunity for life in the Island community to become even more insular than it had before.
As the critical decade of the 1930's began, however, events forced Victorians to discard their protective cocoon in order to survive as a city. Compounding their difficulties, the city's overall economic decline was broad and swift; while recovery, when it finally did occur between 1933 and 1939, was slow and sporadic. In the early years of the Depression, however, many citizens in the area still tended to regard their fundamental economic and social problems as local ones; and therefore, attempted to marshal local resources in the forms of charities, municipal governments, and service organizations so as to bring a measure of relief to everyone. Yet their efforts were not enough. Sometimes, as in the case of Victoria City for example, there were insufficient economic and financial resources on hand.
Thus Victorians, together with their neighbours elsewhere in British Columbia, turned towards higher levels of government for immediate assistance and an overall solution to the economic crisis. In the 1933 provincial election and in the 1935 Canadian general election, the pattern of their voting shifted to the left. Nor were the voters to be disappointed, for, the new provincial government, under the capable and imaginative leadership of T. D. Pattullo, pressed forward with a series of social and economic reforms as well as major employment-creating programmes, which, coupled with the general upswing in the provincial economy, ultimately brought Greater Victoria and other centres out of the worst levels of depression by 1938.
But the activities of the provincial government were to have an even more profound effect on the capital city region: as government grew in importance and strength in the Thirties, so did Greater Victoria grow in its influence as a metropolitan centre. Moreover, because the 1930's were in reality the beginning of what was to become the phenomenal presence of government in the lives of British Columbians through the next three decades, Victoria forever left behind its position as a relatively weak and minor urban centre when contrasted to Vancouver. Still, the Depression had hurt the capital city region - despite its obvious windfall shown above. Ten years of underdeveloped municipal growth combined with untold social misery had to have a severe effect. Yet of all the larger urban centres in Western Canada, Greater Victoria probably suffered least in this instance too.
A subject such as this one was relatively easy to research in that a remarkable amount of primary source material was available through the British Columbia Provincial Library and Archives; the four municipal halls, offices of local institutions, and through the writer personally interviewing a score of persons who had lived through the Depression in the area. Organizing the thesis, however, presented a few difficulties since it was to be both a socio-economic study of an important urban centre in a time of its greatest crisis which extended over a full decade, as well as an attempt to discover the significance that the lowest level of government - the municipality - had in the events of that time. Basically this has been accomplished by dividing the thesis into two major time periods: decline, 1929-1932; and recovery, 1933-1939. In each of these, three chapters are devoted to the economics, the politics and the social effects on the area. Extensive statistical tables, an outline of the city's historical growth, a discussion of the Depression in Canada, and a comparison of Vancouver and Victoria in 1929 are provided in four appendices.