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The Great Depression Essay

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The Great Depression was a period, which seemed to go out of control. The crashing of the stock markets left most Canadians unemployed and in debt, prairie farmers suffered immensely with the inability to produce valuable crops, and the Canadian Government and World War II became influential factors in the ending of the Great Depression.
The 1920’s meant prosperity for Canada. Canadians living in the 1920’s were freer in values, less disciplined, and concerned with material things more than ever before. Many people wanted to get rich quickly, and stock markets in New York, Toronto, and Montreal shot up. On October 24, 1929, many people wanted to sell stocks through the New York Stock Exchange. More stocks
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In the 1930’s a Canadian farmer’s basic crop was wheat. Farmers depended on foreign buyers to sell their grain. After the stock market crash, farmers struggled with sales. The prairies also suffered severely from drought during the Great Depression. The drought turned farmland into a dust storm and farmers lacked the equipment and scientific knowledge to redeem it. Large dust storms known as “Great Black Blizzards” caused great destruction for people living in the Prairies. Fierce winds blew valuable topsoil into clouds of dust. Dust storms caused dust to pile up high against fences, resulting in cattle straying from their pastures. Wells and rain barrels went dry as well as lakes and sloughs. Prairie waterfowl starved to death. Families, in desperation to preserve what little water left, shared used water to wash with, leaving the clean water to drink. Drought drove people off their farms in search of work in other areas of Canada. Many moved to the United States or Ontario. Between 1931 and 1937, Saskatchewan lost 66,000 people. When crops did grow, grasshoppers brought by the drought ruined them. Golfers dug holes in fields resulting in damaged crops. Farmers also struggled with Russian thistle, which covered entire wheat fields. This period of drought during the Depression is known as The Dirty Thirties. In the summer of 1936, the temperature in Brandon, Manitoba reached a high of 110 degrees in the shade. Within ten days 500
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