Most Canadian historians regard the first thirty years of the twentieth century as a time of national prosperity. As population growth, increases in Gross National Product, or other measures of "national" development testify, Canada was expanding and prospering. But these statistics of national growth mask wide variations in regional growth and do not offer an analysis of the impact of economic expansion upon different classes or groups within Canadian society.
Montreal is a case in point. Between 1897 and 1929, the city of Montreal expanded rapidly. The population of the metropolitan region increased by 54 per cent in the first decade, 31 per cent in the second and 38 per cent in the 1920's. A small city of 250,000 became a metropolis with close to a million citizens in thirty years. Immigrants from Europe and rural Quebec flocked to Montreal because there were jobs available for both the skilled and the unskilled worker. Hydro-electric power made possible the development of a full-scale factory system, and Montreal's strategic location made it an ideal site for certain kinds of secondary manufacturing. The city was already the leading port and railway centre in the Dominion, and it maintained its pre-eminence throughout the period.
Evidence of the wealth generated within the city was readily apparent to the observer. Fine suburbs were built on the lower slopes of Mount Royal and magnificent estates constructed on the higher terraces. Impressive new office buildings transformed the city centre. When the Sun Life Assurance Company head office was built, it was the highest building in the British Commonwealth. The view of Montreal from the look-out on Mount Royal was impressive. The beauty of the city, green with many trees and splendid with large new public buildings, belied the squalor and ugliness of the old working class districts and the inadequate housing and lack of green space in the newer working class wards.
For the majority of Montrealers the "boom" years before the Great Depression of the 1930's were lean years of austerity and insecurity. The working class shared few of the fruits of economic expansion and bore most of the burden of rapid unplanned growth. The city and both provincial and federal governments possessed neither the financial capacity nor the desire to intervene actively in a free market economy which allocated resources on the basis of economic and political power. The wealthy were not unphilanthropic. The number of charities in Montreal was amazing, but the social conscience of the powerful did not encompass the notion of paying a living wage.
Employer hostility to unionization meant that only the most skilled craftsman enjoyed the right to organize. Montreal's workers, however, demonstrated a strong desire to organize and frequently struck to secure a living wage and union recognition. In 1903, for example, more than 7,000 workers participated in twenty-three strikes. The most dramatic confrontation involved 1200 street railway employees and led to violence and the consequent intervention of the militia. During 1919, the year of the Winnipeg General Strike, labour unrest in Montreal reached major proportions with over 30,000 workers involved. Most strikes were unsuccessful - the vast pool of labour in the city meant that there were always workers to replace men and women on strike.
The contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor can be illustrated in many ways. The slides which accompany this pamphlet provide a fleeting impression of two life-styles. The significance of the differences between the two groups is perhaps more readily grasped when firmly linked with statistical data which establish the dimensions of poverty. The description of living conditions in Montreal which follows is intended to provide a framework for understanding an era when absolute poverty was a way of life for most of the city's inhabitants.
Absolute poverty is not easy to define. Robert Hunter, who wrote one of the first estimates of the extent of poverty in the United States, suggested that only the most miserable of the needy were destitute and that the real poor in a community consisted of those who had "too little of the common necessities to keep themselves at their best...the large class in any industrial nation who are on the verge of distress." Another early 20th century writer, Jacob Hollender, described the poor as those who were "in constant danger, even with the exercise of care and foresight, of falling, or slipping, or of being crowded off the treacherous path encircling the morass of pauperism". These descriptions emphasize insecurity: the fear that the family won't earn enough to cover minimum necessities; the knowledge that there is no chance to save for old age and no pension available; the awareness that medical care can be obtained only through charity. Perhaps the essence of the experience is best described by the poet or novelist. Gabrielle Roy has caught the feeling of absolute poverty in The Tin Flute, a novel set in the Montreal of the 1930's. The suffering she describes, however, existed in Montreal before the Great Depression plunged tens of thousands into the "morass of pauperism".
Despite the difficulty of placing statistical values on experiences which extract great psychological costs, the economist and historian, for the purposes of analysis, must achieve some definition of absolute poverty. Today, Statistics Canada suggests that any family or individual spending more than seventy per cent of total income on food, clothing, and shelter is in "a low income situation and likely to be suffering from poverty". By this standard, more than 75 per cent of the wage earners in early twentieth century Montreal were suffering from poverty. If one included the added costs to the individual created by the absence of hospital insurance, medicare, and other extra-income forms of family support, even more would be numbered among the poor.
This estimate is reached by comparing the amount of money needed to purchase food, clothing, and shelter in the early twentieth century with the weekly earnings of Montreal's adult male workers during the period. Here are the results.
Income required to Actual Income
afford basic needs Adult Male Wage
and to remain Earner
above poverty level*
1901 $13.38 $ 8.00 (1897)
1911 $18.68 $10.55
1921 $30.70 $21.00
1929 $31.58 $24.00
* Remember, the poverty level was defined as having to spend more than 70% of income on basic needs.
The best available estimate of a minimum standard of living budget is the Canadian Department of Labour's "Typical Weekly Expenditure", on which these figures are based. This budget was thought to include most necessary expenditures, but it should not be supposed that it was a generous standard. It allowed only 1.4 lbs. of fresh meat per week to each person, less than a quart of milk a day for a family of five, and did not include provisions for fresh vegetables or fruit. Because of the large gap between income and ordinary expenditure, many families were forced to live in slum housing and to exist on an inadequate diet.
The high level of seasonal unemployment, normally twice that of Toronto, accounted in part for the low annual income of Montreal workers. Another important factor was the high proportion of low-paying jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the Montreal economy. These were usually filled by the French-speaking segment of the population. The better paying jobs required skilled industrial workers, who were frequently recruited in Britain. Clerical jobs usually required fluency in English. The working class population of Montreal, therefore, became stratified along ethnic lines with the French-Canadian majority concentrated in the lower income categories.
The problem of low incomes was particularly acute during the First World War when runaway inflation attacked the already precarious level of family earnings. A Quebec Government labour official noted that
the average cost of mere necessities for a workman's family of five is $60 per month...the majority of workmen do not earn more than $15.00 per week. Consequently it is not so surprising to see children obliged to leave school and go to work at the age of fourteen or fifteen years. Their wages are very low but in many instances they are imperatively needed for the family's support.
School enrolment statistics suggest that very few fourteen and fifteen year olds were, in fact, in school in the first place. In 1916 there were only 560 pupils in grade eight in all the Roman Catholic public schools in Montreal even though children were not legally allowed to work in factories until they turned 14. Even if this law was adequately enforced, there were many loopholes. GirIs could stay home to look after younger children while mothers worked, and boys could find jobs as messengers or helpers in the unregulated service and transportation industries. The problem of child labour was accentuated by the war even though it had been a large-scale problem before 1914 and after 1918.
Women, too, contributed to the family income to meet basic needs. It was not the typewriter and the telephone switchboard which "emancipated" working class women from the home. By 1901, 20 per cent of the manufacturing labour force consisted of women who were paid wages which averaged less than half of the amounts paid to male wage earners. Women workers were especially concentrated in the textile and garment industries where working conditions were particularly bad. Women and children were eventually "protected" from long hours by a law which forbade their employment for more than sixty hours per week. (The average work week for all wage-earners declined from 58 to 52 hours during the thirty years under review).
Working conditions were often unpleasant and extremely dangerous. Industrial accidents leading to dismemberment or death were common and injured workers received assistance from the inadequate system of Workman's Compensation established in Quebec in 1909. It was not until the early 1930's that a compulsory state compensation fund was established. Ontario had passed a Workman's Compensation Act in 1914 but, in Quebec, systematic opposition on the part of business interests to improvements in the provincial law blocked this reform for twenty years.
Housing conditions in Montreal were notoriously bad. Outdoor toilets located in crowded multiple family courtyards were common at the beginning of the century. A vigorous campaign against the "pit privy" was largely successful by 1914, but overcrowding and an exceptionally low ratio of open space on building lots continued as a special feature of working class housing in Montreal. The Secretary of the Provincial Board of Health described the typical dwelling in Montreal as "notoriously unhealthy". He commented on the lack of sunlight, lack of natural light, lack of air circulation, dampness, and the prevelance of dark, unventilated rooms.
The consequences of inadequate income, long hours of work, poor working conditions, and inferior housing are most evident when the statistics on mortality and disease rates are examined. Montreal, it appears, was one of the most unhealthy cities in the western world during the late 19th century, and even after mortality rates began to decline steadily, the city's record remained among the worst in North America. There was a very high correlation between poverty and disease, and death rates in the crowded working class wards remained double the rates in upper income areas of the city.
Infant mortality was Montreal's single most serious public health problem. Between 1897 and 1911, approximately one out of every three babies died before the age of twelve months. As late as 1926 the rate was stil fourteen per cent, almost twice as high as the figures for New York City or Toronto. The chief cause of infant deaths was gastro-enteritis, a disease produced primarily by impure food. The eventual decline in the infant mortality rate resulted from the introduction of pure milk depots or Goutte de Lait and the gradual pasteurization of the milk supply. Infant mortality was closely related to family income. In 1921, for example, the rate in upper income areas of the city was six per cent; while rates in excess of twenty per cent were the norm in lower income areas.
The second most important public health problem was tuberculosis. Between 1909 and 1918 the mortality rate from T.B. was always in excess of 200 deaths per 100,000, a figure which placed Montreal in a unique category among large North American cities. The rate declined universally after the flu epidemic of 1918 but Montreal's rate remained proportionately higher. Authorities estimated that one in every hundred Montrealers was suffering from T.B. Tuberculosis attacked the rich as well as the poor but the incidence of the disease was four times greater in working class wards than in the wealthier residential areas. The long campaign against T.B. was fought largely through the efforts of privately financed clinics such as the Royal Edward and Bruchesi Institutes. The work of these organizations and their counterparts in other fields of public health deserves much respect, but private philanthropy could never provide adequate services for all of the population. Well after the end of the 1920's people spoke of "rich man's T.B.", which could be diagnosed and treated, and "poor man's T.B.", which led to the grave.
The effects of poverty on general health and well-being were also important. Medical inspectors of schools noted a high incidence of malnutrition, skin disease, and defects in sight and hearing among working-class children. A study of children born in 1924 revealed that lower income children were fifteen pounds lighter and three inches shorter than a comparable group from upper income families.
In the first three decades of the 20th century, workers in Montreal and the rest of Canada could expect no help from the state. The working class was forced by an economic system which treated labour as a commodity which was to be bought at the lowest possible cost to pay the costs of industrialization and urbanization. While it is correct to argue that all societies undergoing rapid industrialization adopt some system of forced capital accumulation, it is important to recognize that, as in other countries, the application of this economic formula in Canada condemned the working class to a life of poverty and insecurity.
Poverty still exists in Montreal and other parts of Canada. The fact that absolute poverty was much more widespread and intense fifty years ago than it is today should not in any way lessen our concern for the twenty-five per cent of Canadians who live below the poverty line. History can, however, provide a perspective both on poverty and on previously attempted solutions. It is noteworthy, for example, that the only groups of workers who escaped from poverty in the early years of the century, saving the relatively small number who experienced upward mobility, were those who were able to organize unions. The Montreal example suggests that the mass unionization of the 1940's seems to have been responsible for the only significant shift in income distribution which has occured in this century.
