Post Confederation Canadian History - Essay Example

Post Confederation Canadian History This paper will analyze the responses of the working people and the social reformers to industrial urbanization in Canada post confederation. The paper also demonstrates how housing reform, as an early component of social policy, was intended to 'Canadianize' the working class to facilitate class cooperation and preserve social hierarchy in the tumultuous years surrounding the First World War. It focuses largely on Toronto, but shows that similar approaches to housing reform were common across Canada. Intensifying pre-existing English-Canadian nationalism and racism proved to be a helpful means of assuaging the bruising social conflicts of the war era. As a ruling myth, nationalism was used to eclipse other social divisions, especially class, by positing an overarching national identity that promoted relations of domination and discouraged an effective, united challenge to the system through scapegoating 'others.' In the nationalist discourse of the social reform movement, concepts of race and nation were fused and simultaneously based on the principles of exclusion and inclusion. Consequently, as Robert Miles argues for the similar British case, 'racism' formed 'the lining of the cloak of nationalism.' Gender ideals -- women's 'respectable' role as domestic manager, reproducer, and nurturer -- also interacted with concepts of nation, race, and class in the reform project as women's proper role in the domestic sphere was considered essential to 'Canadianizing' the working class. State intervention in the housing sphere in the interwar period was limited when compared with initiatives in the post-Second World War era; fewer than 7000 houses were built under government auspices in the period. But the discourse of housing betterment, along with its counterparts in other areas of social policy and the practical measures implemented at the local level, assisted in strengthening the popular fiction of 'Canadian' supremacy and spreading the bigoted message that 'outsiders' (however loosely defined) were to blame for the country's problems. This attitude dovetailed neatly with the divide-and-rule strategy pursued by government officials increasingly concerned with the intense class struggles of the period. Social planning experiments were circumscribed but nevertheless emblematic of significant developments in the history of the Canadian state and reform ideas. Central to this process was the contribution of housing reformers to the question of what constituted the Canadian nation and, more crucially, a 'proper' Canadian. Reform-minded state officials sought popular legitimacy by reinforcing pre-existing notions of the dangerous 'other' -- non-British, non-white 'races' and 'nations' and, increasingly, urban native-born and British immigrant workers -- in stark opposition to the ideal of the cherished and respectable 'white British Canadian.' Simultaneously, the reform tendencies of the period sustained and deepened the conviction that women's role was solely in the home as nurturer and Canadianizer of the 'race.' Through reform propaganda and practical implementation of various housing reform measures, it proved useful for reformers to attribute social and economic afflictions to the so-called inferiority and 'un-Canadianness' of various social groups --immigrants, women, and workers -- rather than to structural flaws in the capitalist system itself. 'Reform' in the First World War period can be defined as an approach advocating state intervention in the economy and society to alleviate the social problems of capitalism and thereby preserve the system itself. The role housing reform could play, as part of the larger project of securing social consent by stabilizing family structures and contributing to the construction of a distinct national identity, constituted a pivotal concern in the discourse of the reform effort. Yet without losing sight of this distinct regulatory thrust from above, it is also necessary to chart how housing experts and policy makers groped through the contradictions of urban society in a creative manner they themselves saw as more or less disinterested. Based on growing beliefs in the necessity of state intervention and the capacity of the trained expert to alleviate social conflict, the movement for housing betterment centered on a notion of 'community' that ostensibly stood above labor and capital, aiming to harmonize social relations for the greater good of the 'national' community. Reformers criticized unbridled capitalism in the urban setting -- rampant land speculation, unscrupulous practices by landlords and developers, and what they saw as self-destructive laissez-faire government. Nevertheless, we must not disentangle reformers from the structural imperatives and concrete social relationships of capitalist society. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci insightfully noted of European middle-class reform: 'The intellectuals are breaking loose from the dominant class in order to unite themselves to it more intimately.' Housing Reform, 1900-20 The 'housing question' in Canada -- the explicit identification of housing as a major social problem -- evolved out of the broader urban reform movement that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faced with debilitating social strife, middle- and upper-class reformers attempted to come to terms with new social and economic developments -- principally, monopoly industrial capitalism and rising class conflict -- that threatened the prevailing social system. The drive for efficiency, captured well in the sphere of productive relations by the writings of the eminent American efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, originated as a response to the palpable hazards of such developments. Although Taylor himself was decidedly uninterested in living conditions, reformers in Canada explicitly made the link. In municipal government, charity, and social welfare reform, the tenets of businesslike proficiency held sway in the minds of reformers and state officials alike. Simultaneously, there was a groping in reform quarters -- sometimes going beyond the usual reform constituency in times of crisis to wide sections of the ruling class -- for more harmonious forms of social relations to breach the seemingly irreparable divide between classes. In a 1906 expose on the Ward, a notorious Toronto slum, an editorial in the popular Toronto Daily Hews signaled this uneasiness: 'The relations between Capital and Labor are growing more and more strained ... Class distinctions are becoming more defined than ever before.' A general perception that economic disparity and working-class militancy were on the rise in many countries induced a real sense of fear among reform elements and the ruling class that the social order was in danger of serious disruption. The years preceding the First World War were punctuated by an 'accelerating' working-class militancy, including bitter labor battles in many major industries across the country and a corresponding attempt by the state and employers to head off working-class discontent through a combination of coercion and consent. Modern social policy, the focused and systematic regulation of labor force reproduction, initially emerged as a response to the adverse effects of international migration, perceived political threats to the social order, and as a pre-emptive measure against economic and military deterioration. Public health and housing reform made up two elements of this interventionist social policy in the 1900-20 period. Public health officials and housing reformers attempted to come to terms with the alarming social effects of the new urban, industrial way of life --the rise in urban poverty, crime, 'immorality,' and social strife --which they perceived as a hazard to the manners, culture, and order of the existing society. Haltingly embracing a social rather than an individual interpretation of the causes of urban malaise, they attempted to secure the efficient reproduction of a contented labor force crucial to the growing needs of a national economy by identifying urban difficulties and promoting various measures to improve the dwellings of the country's workers. Efficiency and social harmony -- increasingly the preserve of professionally trained and paid reformers rather than amateur volunteers -- became the guiding principles of the reform movement from the initial tentative steps of public health reform, through the establishment of federal think-tanks, to the first sustained interventions in the housing sphere after the First World War. Squalid housing conditions in the rapidly industrializing cities of Canada, often publicized in lurid newspaper stories, were one of the key factors in the emergence of the modem public health project around the turn of the century. John Bacher has thoroughly documented the effects of the 'economic boom' on working-class housing conditions in this period. He notes that 'an increasing proportion of the work-force [was] faced with the choice of accepting shelter that was overcrowded, poorly serviced, or below minimal building-code and sanitary standards, or sacrificing other necessities of life.' From 1900 to 1913 rents across the country increased by 62 per cent. Wages rose by only 44 per cent. Poor housing conditions resulted in injurious health effects that directly limited the productivity of the labor force. The pernicious effect of dilapidated working-class housing was continually stressed in the reform literature of the period and was reflected in attempts to systematize and centralize public health administration. Municipalities enacted building codes and sanitary controls, and granted local officials the power to inspect, condemn, clean, or destroy what were considered inferior dwellings. Public health authorities were also distinctly concerned with the effects of poor health on social order. In the most acute period of working-class militancy in 1918-19, public health itself was envisioned as a key palliative to intense class conflict. Charles Hastings, medical officer of health (MOH) for Toronto, alerted state authorities that 'we must recognize the rising tide of socialism in this country, and that one of the best ways to counteract it is to make people happy by making them well. We must redeem our wasted youth.' Without the vehicle of the federal state, social reformers had no practical financial and institutional capacity to affect substantial change at a broad, national level -- a critical goal given reformers' view of the national scope of the problem. The federal government attempted to fill this gap in 1909 when it founded the Commission of Conservation. The COC was the first government organization in the country devoted to studying the problems generated by urbanization --specifically public health and housing issues. It was entrusted with investigating major urban social problems; collecting, interpreting, and publicizing information; and advising on policy issues. It published a monthly bulletin, Conservation of Life, in English and French, whose circulation reached 12,000 in 1917. The COC also extended its activities into the academy, inaugurating lecture courses at the University of Toronto and at McGill University in 1919-20. In tandem with a rising number of professional town planners, it promised a more effective, scientific, and judicious study of urban problems. Under the direction of the British planner Thomas Adams, the coc successfully pushed for planning legislation at the provincial level and the creation of municipal affairs departments. Adams was a noted town planner associated with the British Garden City Movement. He was a major propagandist for urban planning, publishing 139 articles between 1914 and 1921 and a major book, Planning and Development: A Study of Rural Conditions and Problems in Canada that drew worldwide acclaim. Although few projects were ever completed, the COC was also central in designing town plans for about one hundred urban centers in all nine provinces, including the major cities. The urban planning movement, exemplified by the COC, stressed efficiency and scientific innovation in the projects of public health and housing betterment. Until the critical housing crisis of the war period, this movement never extended to a consideration of providing housing with the aid of public funds. However, the legislative and regulatory foothold established by the COC in the housing reform project provided the ideological underpinning and momentum for more direct intervention in the housing sphere after the First World War. Continuing problems of substandard housing and dwelling shortages, deteriorating economic conditions, pressure from labor, and the support of well-placed business interests and reformers led, just before the war, to municipally sponsored and provincially guaranteed limited-dividend projects in Toronto and Pointe-aux-Trembles. These projects were small in scale, providing no solution to the spiraling problem of housing shortages and substandard shelter conditions. The first sustained intervention came during the last days of the war. The scope of the housing problem in 1918-19 was truly national: the adverse conditions of wartime -- scarcity of resources, price inflation, and unwillingness on the part of business to invest in housing -- led to a marked decrease in residential building. Cities across the country reported distressing numbers of inadequate dwellings and massive housing shortages. These conditions fuelled an already seething discontent in the working-class movement. Growing working-class militancy throughout the war years culminated in 1919 in Canada's 'Red Year.' In terms of union membership and strike activity, 1919 would not be equaled until the unrest of the latter years of the Second World War. There were more than thirty prolonged general strikes in sympathy with the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike in towns and cities across the country. And, as Greg Kealey has shown, the strike wave of 1919 was truly national, encompassing diverse industries, occupations, and social groups, and it paralleled a growing interest in socialist arguments for workers' control over industry and the necessities of life. F.]. Peel, a socialist member of the Metal Trades Council and general strike committee in Toronto, looked ahead to a future when both working and living conditions would be rationally organized in the interests of the majority of working people: 'There will be no masters and no slaves. Human brotherhood will be removed from the ideal to that of fact, and all such vast disorganization of production, miles of talk and writing, and wasted energy will disappear, and society will bend its energies to beautifying the earth, providing homes, not warrens, for all, and making life worthwhile for everybody.' It was in this climate of heated postwar social relations that housing itself became a major issue of contention. The soaring cost of living was a key factor that underlay the explosive social conditions of the immediate postwar period; housing was an important part of the cost of living, and contributed to the sense of anxiety and resentment workers felt. The strategically important construction industry was in grave danger of collapsing, and employers in other industries complained that housing shortages were resulting in labor scarcity. The Toronto branch of the Canadian Manufacturers Association (CMA), the beacon of the industrial bourgeoisie, called the housing crisis a 'menace' to the 'industrial, social and political welfare of this whole country.' Speaking in the wake of the 1919 unrest, L.A. Thornton, a city commissioner in Regina, advised that 'social safety requires that the workers be enabled to live in surroundings which will induce a sense of security, self-respect and responsibility.' N.W.Rowell, Privy Council president in the federal government, warned that there was 'less respect for law and authority than ever in Canada' and that without an adequate program to deal with the unemployment problem, no one could 'forsee just what might happen.' Veterans' organizations were particularly troubled about the housing shortage. Returned soldiers were extremely restive and were perceived to pose an actual threat to social order if they were not placated by prompt action on unemployment and the housing scarcity. The Toronto secretary of the Great War Veterans Association (GWVA) warned that 'nothing will do more to create a feeling of restlessness amounting almost to Bolshevism' than inaction on the housing problem. The participation of veterans in the Winnipeg General Strike and the mutiny by Canadian soldiers in Wales must have reinforced these concerns. The GWVA and other veterans' groups were instrumental in lobbying municipal and provincial governments in Ontario and British Columbia for action on the housing problem, and they persistently pressed for a comprehensive program of house building. They dearly understood the threat to society of disaffected returned soldiers, most of whom were workers facing unemployment, soaring living costs, and housing shortages. Across the country, housing also became an explicit focus of working-class struggle. The National Industrial Conference (1919) and the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations (1919) both highlighted poor dwelling conditions as one of the chief causes of the working-class upheaval and recommended immediate measures to tackle the problem. Literally hundreds of workers complained to the Royal Commission of exorbitant food prices, soaring rental costs, and inadequate housing. Well-placed reformers and politicians, predicting labor troubles ahead, had also sensed that the country would have to deal directly with the labor movement in its housing initiatives. In Ontario, organized labor was part of a delegation of business people, veterans, and other reformers who successfully urged Ontario Premier William Hearst to form a Housing Committee to study the problem and take action. Hearst made it dear in a private letter that 'it is very important to the success of the undertaking [the Ontario Housing Committee] that we should be able to satisfy the reasonable labor men that the scheme was really for their advantage and every possible latitude was being allowed.' Works Cited Douglas, R Francis nd Donald B Smith, (2002) Readings in Canadian History: post Confederation, 6th ed., Toronto: Thomson Learning Douglas, R Francis, Richard Jones nd Donald B Smith, (2004) Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation, 5th ed., Scarborough: Thomson Nelson Read More