Chapter 8 Between the Wars Change and the Depression

1. Chapter 8 Between the WarsChange and the Depression BY: JACOB and BEATRICE

2. In late 1918, a soldier name Arthur Joseph Lapointe returned to his home in Gaspe, Quebec. • Arthur had fought in the bloodiest battles in World War 1. • Arthur’s father told Arthur the terrible news. 3 of Arthur’s brothers, and two of his sisters died from the flu. • The same thing happen across Canada, everyone got sick. Some coughed, sneezed, shivered , and wheezed.

3. Gaspe, Quebec

4. Wheezed • Wheezed means while your breathing, there’s a whistling or rattling sound in your chest.

5. Doctor’s called the sickness/flu Spanish Flu, It was an epidemic that had spread around the world. • Soldiers returned to Canada, and the United States, but they accidentally brought the flu back home with them. • The flu killed young and old people, the government made huge efforts to stop the disease from spreading around. • The sick people were quarantined indoors, and people who went outside wore a doctor’s mask to keep them safe.

6. Epidemic • Epidemic means widespread outbreak of a disease, with many people in a community infected at the same time.

7. Quarantine • Quarantine means to keep sick people away from other people, to prevent the diseases from spreading.

8. Towns and cities, made it illegal for people to shake hands, and even made school and churches close. One quarter of the Canadians got the disease/flu. • Doctors could only do a little bit to stop it, hospitals overflowed with patients. The epidemic lasted until the year 1919. • 50 000 Canadians died, the flu killed more people than World War 1. It was a beginning to this new era of peace.

9. When the war ended, the Canadians hoped to make Canada a country “fit for heroes.” This means that they want Canada to become a country worthy of their brave veterans. Instead Canada faced many problems. • The flu made millions of people sick, jobs were needed for soldiers. Hospitals had to be built for the wounded. Many Canadians were poor. • Meanwhile, in Winnipeg, the biggest strike in Canadian history was about to occur.

10. Veterans • Veterans mean a person who has had a long experience in the field.

11. Strike • Strike means refusal to work, to protest low pay, or bad working conditions.

12. The Statue of Westminster • Not many Canadians would think about celebrating on December 11. Maybe they should, it’s Canada’s Independence Day. • On December 11,1931, the British Parliament passed on an important law. The law was called the Statue of Westminster. • It stated that that British laws would never again apply to Canada unless Canadians wanted them to. • In other words, the Statue of Westminster made Canada independent. the Statue of Westminster was also used in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and New Zealand.

13. The Group of Seven • Canada’s most famous group of painters called themselves the Group of Seven. The members of the group painted pictures in the wilderness of the Canadian Shield. • They also painted scenes of the Rockies and the Prairies. Their colorful paintings of the windswept Canadian outdoors were different from any Canadians had ever seen. • Not everyone liked their paintings at first. Soon the Group of Seven was famous across Canada.

14. Overtime, new member joined the Group of Seven. The last painter to join was Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was called the “painter of the prairies.” • The Group of Seven held their first show in the year 1920, and it’s last show was on the year 1931. Over ten years, these painters changed the way that Canadians thought about art. • Original paintings by members of the group hang in art galleries across Canada. Their art can be also seen in books, calendars, and even on postage stamps.

15. The Winnipeg General Strike • “ This is not a strike,” read the Winnipeg Citizen on May 19,1919. “ It is just plain, ugly revolution. All true citizens must join together to defeat the Revolution. • The Winnipeg General Strike began on May 15,1919. That day, more than 30 000 workers walked off to their jobs. Metal and construction workers, factory workers, and even department store clerks marched into the streets of Winnipeg. • They were joined by many jobless veterans, no one knew how big the strike would become, or that it would last for 6 weeks. Stores and factories closed.

16. Newspapers stopped printing, even mail delivery and telephone service ended. Businesses and services refused to operate without the permission of the strike’s leaders (known as the strike committee.) • When the police joined the strike, the city fired them. Then the city hired special constables to replace the police. • Why did some people think that the strike was the beginning of a revolution?

17. For the answer to this question, it’s important to know what happened in Russia near the end of the First World War. • In 1917, there was a revolution in Russia, a political party called the Bolsheviks took power. • The Bolsheviks killed Russia’s monarch, the Czar, and his family. • The Bolsheviks wanted communism, this is a political system where the government owns all property.

18. Bolsheviks • Bolsheviks means a member of the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party after seizing power in October Revolution of 1917.

19. Communism • Communism means advocating class war, and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned, and each person works, and is paid according to their abilities and needs.

20. The Bolsheviks created a dictatorship and called on workers in other countries to join them in a worldwide revolution. • Some people in Winnipeg feared that what happened in Russia was about to happen in Canada. Some believed that the Winnipeg strike was led by Bolsheviks and dangerous immigrants. • A group of Winnipeg business owners who opposed, the strikers formed the Citizen’s Committee of 1000 to try to stop them.

21. Very few of Winnipeg’s strikers wanted a revolution. Most people went on strike to protest their bad working conditions, and poor way. • Workers believed their employers had made huge profits during the war and were unwilling to share them. • The Citizen’s Committee of 1000 asked the government to end the strike, even though the strikers were peaceful. The NWMP (North West Mountain Police) were sent to Winnipeg to break up the strike. • On June 21 the mountain police charged down main street, swinging clubs, and firing revolvers.

22. People pushed, and ran. 2 strikers were killed, and 30 were wounded, the strike’s leaders were arrested. Among them was J.S. Woodsworth (see p.117). • Other members of the Strike Committee were sent to jail for two years. After the strike, people in the government tried to find out what caused it. • They concluded that the strikers had not wanted a revolution. They agreed with some strikers’ demands. • The citizens of Winnipeg would continue to argue about whether or not the strikers had been right for many years to come.

23. J.S Woodsworth • Today J.S Woodsworth is remembered as one of the founders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1932. he had a long, and important career before then. • He grew up in Ontario, and grew up in Brandon, Manitoba. When he became 22, he became a methodist minister. Woodsworth had 2 great ideas: • One was Social Gospel • And the second was pacifism. Pacifism is the belief that all problems should be solved without violence.

24. Sir Arthur Meighen • Arthur Meighen was one of the greatest public speakers in Canada’s Parliament. • He dazzled other members of Parliament with his gift for language, Meighen was born in Ontario. He represented the Manitoba riding of Portage la Prairie for many years, beginning in 1908. • Meighen was minister of justice under Prime Minister Borden, he played an important role in breaking up the Winnipeg General strike in 1919.

25. Meighen was not prime minister very long because, he had a political career. He served for many years in the Conservative Party. • He also served as a senator, Meighen retired from politics in 1942.

26. The Struggle for Women’s Rights • In the late 19th century, Canadian women could only vote in the municipal (town or city) elections. • They could only vote if they owned property, voting for a mayor or a school board trustee is an important right. • However, women didn’t have the more important right to vote for members of the provincial legislatures or federal parliament. • For decades, women formed groups to fight for the right to vote. One of the first was the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Association, created in the year 1883.

27. Suffrage • Suffrage means right to vote

28. In the Canadian west, the struggle for suffrage was led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This group thought that it could reach it’s temperance goals if women had the right to vote. • The women who led the fight for voting right were suffragists. Many important Canadian suffragists were from the West. • Among them were Manitoba’s Nellie McClung and Albert’s Emily Murphy. They fought for women’s rights for decades.

29. Suffragists • Suffragists means someone who promotes the right to vote, often for women.

30. Nellie McClung • Nellie McClung was a Canadian feminist, politician, and social activist. She was a part of the social reform movements prevalent in Western Canada in the early 1900’s.

31. Emily Murphy • Emily Murphy was a Canadian women’s right activist, jurist and a author.

32. They gave speeches, held rallies, and wrote letters to politicians. Opposition to women’s suffrage was strong. • Many men thought that women were not suited for politics. A famous Canadian writer named Stephen Leacock said, “Women need not more freedom, but less.” Some women agreed. • However, support for women’s suffrages grew during the First World War. Thousands of women had joined the work force and proved themselves the equal of men.

33. In January 1916, Manitoba became the first province in Canada to give women the right to vote. Other provinces followed. • By April 1917, women could vote in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario. These rights only applied to provincial elections. • That began to change in 1917, in September, the Wartime Elections Act gave some women the right to vote. • These women had to be British subjects who were enlisted or had a close relative in the armed forces.

34. In May 1918, the federal government extended the right to most women aged 21 or older, granting the same voting rights as men in federal elections. • First Nations women, and men with Indian status and Asian women, and men. However, were not allowed to vote yet. • Some Canadian provinces, were slow to give women the right to vote in provincial elections. In Quebec, for instance, women couldn’t vote until 1940.

35. The Person’s Case • Women won the right to run for election in the House of Commons in 1919. 2 years later, in 1921, Ontario’s Agnes MacPhail became the first women elected to Canada’s Parliament. • Women could still not be appointed to the Senate. According to the British North America Act. • Senators had to be “qualified persons” under the law. In the late 1920’s, five women from western Canada: Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, and Nellie McClung.

36. However, Canada’s Supreme Court would not change the law, the Famous Five, as these women became known. Appealed the decision all the way to Great Britain. ( in those days, Britain still had power over such laws.) • In October 1929, Britain’s Privy Council (it’s highest court) struck down the Canadian law. According to the members of the Privy Council, this law was a “ relic of days more barbarous than ours.” • Many Canadians hoped that Prime Minister King would appoint one of the Famous Five to the senate.

37. Appealed • Appealed means to take a court case to a higher court for review and possible reversal of a verdict or decision.

38. In fact, none of the 5 ever served as a senator. Instead, King chose Cairine Wilson, a friend of the Liberal party, to be Canada’s first woman senator in 1930. • Wilson went on to be a great Canadian senator. Earning the right to vote and to be a senator were important steps toward equality. • The struggle for women’s right was not over. Many people still thought that women were not equal to men. Even, today, women hold only 20% of the seats in Canada’s Parliament

39. Real equality means changing the way people think, the struggle continues.

40. A Rapidly Changing World • The First World War moved industry, and technology forward. When peace came, new industries, and new inventions changed Canada, everything seemed to be moving faster. • Automobiles, and streetcars whisked people to work. Airlines, some of them started by veteran flying aces, carried people from city to city. • People talked about the mod cons – modern conveniences. These were such as electric stoves, refrigerators, toasters, record players, radios, and automobiles.

41. More and more, people shopped in big department stores. These stores included Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The age of consumerism was born. • Not everyone could share in the new technologies. For instance, most farm homes in Canada didn’t have electric power. Many farms in Manitoba didn’t have electricity until the late 1940’s. • There was an invention that farmers were more likely to own than city-dwellers-the automobile.

42. Consumerism • Consumerism means buying things other than the basic necessities of life.

43. The car comes to Canada • Imagine the excitement at the picnic on a hot June day in 1866 when Prince Edward Islanders saw a car for the first time. • A parish priest named Father Antoine Belcourt was the proud owner of a strange new machine. It was a steam-powered carriage, which he had bought from an American inventor. • He decided to show it off to his congregation, belching steam, and putting along at only 2 or 3 kilometers an hour, the steam carriage was still too much.

44. It went off the road, crashed through fence, and rolled. Luckily, no one was hurt. Father Belcourt is remembered for 2 reasons: • He owned the first car in Canada • And he had the first car accident • The automobile became very important to Canadians. During the 1920’s hundreds of thousandths of Canadians bought cars. • By the end of the decade, more than a million cars, and trucks filled Canada’s roads.

45. In Ontario, American companies, such as General Motors, and Ford, built factories. They produced hundreds of cars every day. • Canada soon became the world’s second-biggest producer of automobiles (after the United States). In 1926, more than 25 000 cars rolled off Canada’s assembly lines. • Cars changed the way Canadians lived, in cities, people could now live farther away from where they worked. Families began to take vacations in other provinces. Houses built garages.

46. Houses were built garages, cities built more, and wider roads, and governments built highways linking towns and cities.

47. The Radio Age • In the days before television, families often listened to the radio. The 1st radio program in North America was a concert broadcast in 1920 from station XWA in Montreal. Soon thousands of Canadians were buying radios for their homes. • At first, there were very few stations in Canada. Most Canadians listened to American radio programs. In the 1930’s, the government of Canada made a nationwide network of radio stations. The network was called the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

48. One of the most popular programs in Canadian history got it’s start in November 1931. On Saturday nights, Canadians from coast to coast gathered around their radios to listen to Hockey Night in Canada. • The show’s announcer was Foster Hewitt. He became famous for his phrase, “He shoots, he scores!” By the end of the 1930’s, three quarters of Canadian homes had radios.

49. The first trans-Atlantic radio message • Today, we use cell phones, and computers that let us communicate in an instant with people around the world. We have sent spacecraftsmillions of kilometers into space and marvel at pictures sent back to us from Mars. • The early 20th century, such things were found only in science fiction. Then an Italian inventor named Guglielmo Macaroni made history at Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland. • On December 12,1901, Macaroni, the inventor of the radio, received the 1st radio signal sent across the Atlantic.

50. He used an antenna nearly 50 meters long, he used kites to carry the antenna high into the sky. Later on, he received a signal from his friend in Cornall,England. It was the letter S in Morse code. • Radio was called the wireless in the early days. From this simple signal over the wireless, the modern world of telecommunications began. In 1902, Macaroni sent longer messages back and forth to England. Soon, radios were sending human voices over long distances.