Notes

Leisure - Neighbors got together to play cards and other games and to talk.
- Popular culture was alive and well at the movies and in music and dancing
- Actor Clark Gable - played in It Happened One Night. Famous actor
- Children read about Superman in Action Comics and followed the adventures of Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, and Terry and the Pirates in newspaper comic strips.
Adults loved to read about the exciting lives of rich people in big cities.
- Talk about how parents weren't really interested with their instruments before the depression but it has helped keep our family together from giving up

Prime Minister Bennett was truly terrified of a communist uprising in Canada

Employment/unemployment - Saskatchewan
- economic problems were made worse on the Prairies by years of drought, as well plagues of grasshoppers and hail storms, which caused huge crop failures
- the lowest price for wheat in recorded history and saw provincial income plummet by 90% within two years, forcing 66% of the rural population onto relief.
- Monthly relief rates for a family of five varied from $60 in Calgary to $19 in Halifax.
- The price of grain also dropped from $1.60 a bushel to $0.28 a bushel in 1932


Elections - Most damaging was a breakdown in world trade, which caused the country’s revenue to plummet
- the government still had to make interest payments on a sizeable national debt and provide essential services to the public
- At the same time, the government increased relief spending, it also contributed to the crisis by laying off employees and making cuts to health care, education, and other social programs.
- As mining companies and paper mills dismissed workers and reduced salaries, fishers watched their profits decrease, The government laid off close to one-third of its civil servants during the Depression and imposed wage reductions on the rest.
- At the same time, it introduced new taxes that increased the cost of living by approximately 30 percent
- The government also slashed spending on health and education but doubled its police force in 1932 to better maintain law and order amid a growing atmosphere of public unrest.
- A typical ration included flour, pork, split peas, corn meal, molasses, and cocoa. It provided for only about half of a person’s nutritional needs. The government did not give more partly because it had very little money to spare during the Depression; by 1933 it was already spending more than $1 million on relief payments annually.