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On to Ottawa Trek/Regina Riot

Article by Michael Snider

Published Online March 17, 2003

Last Edited December 16, 2013

This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on July 1, 2002. Partner content is not updated.

Pulling down the bill of his hat, Jack Geddes squinted against the Prairie wind. Perched atop the boxcar of a moving train, Geddes could just make out the Alberta foothills. Beyond them, through the thick, black smoke belching from the steam engine, lay the snow-capped Rockies. Painfully hungry, the 18-year-old hobo lay back on the boxcar's iron catwalk, covered himself with his Hudson's Bay blanket and let the rocking train lull him to sleep. Two days to Vancouver, he thought. And if relief couldn't be found there, well, there were always the "slave camps."

It was 1932 and Canada was in the relentless grip of the Great Depression. The country's lifeblood - exports of natural resources like wheat, lumber, fish and minerals - had all but dried up, plummeting in value from $1.12 billion in 1929 to $576 million. More than one out of four people seeking work couldn't find any. Prime Minister R.B. BENNETT 's Conservative government initially responded to the crisis in 1930 with $20 million for public works projects. A huge sum for the time, but not nearly enough. Fear of communist rabble-rousers stirring up the wandering unemployed prompted Bennett to establish relief camps, later called slave camps by those who lived there. Run by the Department of National Defence, the camps became powerful symbols of Ottawa's lack of concern for the unemployed. In June, 1935, more than 1,000 of these desperate men set out from B.C. to confront Bennett in the nation's capital. Fearing a snowballing rebellion, the government waylaid the ON TO OTTAWA TREK in Saskatchewan and, on the July 1 holiday, crushed it in what became known as the REGINA RIOT , the most violent episode of the Great Depression. One man died and more than 100 were injured.

The Dirty Thirties offered little hope for too many. There was no unemployment insurance, no medical coverage, no old age pension. "There were no jobs and we weren't wanted," says 85-year-old Gene Llewellyn, who as a 16-year-old in 1933 left his Terrace, B.C., home to ease the burden on his parents. "We'd come into a town, and they'd run you out."

The only alternative to riding the rails or eking out an existence in the hobo jungles that sprung up beside most major cities was to seek aid in the relief camps. No one expected the camps - established in October, 1932, to house and provide work for single, unemployed homeless men - to be around for very long. They were considered a temporary solution because most believed the Depression itself would be temporary. But by 1935 there were nearly 150 relief camps dotting the country, 53 of them in British Columbia largely because of its warmer climate. Workers spent 44-hour weeks doing construction or land clearing in exchange for three square meals and a 20-cent per day allowance. For the men, the 20 cents solidified their belief they were working in slave camps. While authorities prohibited any attempt to form unions, the harsh lifestyle ironically gave organizations like the Communist Party of Canada a captive and receptive audience. "These men were just like any of us," says Bill Waiser, author of Park Prisoners , a book about how Canada's national parks were used as work camps. "They wanted jobs, they wanted a home and a family. Putting the men in camps, you focus their discontent. Then on come the communists who say, 'You're being exploited.' "

Still a proud member of the Communist Party, 90-year-old Robert "Doc" Savage of Quesnel, B.C., can't recall who came up with the idea to take their demands to Bennett's desk in Ottawa. Savage simply remembers organizing 400 men on the morning of June 3, 1935, and leading them - along with more than 1,000 others - onto the boxcars and out of Vancouver's rail yard singing the union hymn: Hold the fort, for we are coming. Union men be strong. Side by side we battle onward. Victory will come . "We were joyous," says Geddes who grew up in Calgary but now lives in White Rock, B.C. "We were going to Ottawa and we were going to lay our problems at the feet of R.B. Bennett."

People along the way prepared a welcome at nearly every stop. The local press called the trekkers "our boys" and westerners, who identified with their issues, generally embraced them. And at most stops, more single unemployed men piled onto the boxcars and joined the journey.

Ottawa believed the protest would run out of steam before the mountains. But when the train descended from the Rockies into Calgary, Bennett's home riding, the prime minister prepared for a confrontation. Unwilling to risk the political fallout of a Calgary showdown, Bennett decided to draw the line in Regina. On June 14, the 50-car freight rolled into the Queen City. After the marchers disembarked to stretch their legs, Bennett banned them from getting back on. Stalling for time in the hope the trek would fizzle out peacefully, the prime minister invited a contingent of strikers, including Savage, to meet with him in Ottawa. Eight of the leaders sat down with Bennett for an hour on June 22, but the tone of the meeting was belligerent and ended in bitter failure.

Returning to Regina, Savage and the leaders faced new challenges. Their transportation had been cut off, the exits to the city blocked and rumours surfaced that a relief camp was being prepared to intern them all. Recognizing defeat, the trek leaders promised to disband provided they could leave Regina. The RCMP refused, insisting the only place the 2,000 men were going was to a specially prepared camp in Lumsden, 25 km northwest of Regina.

On July 1, after hours of bitter discussions with local officials, the march leaders called a meeting. That evening, between 1,500 and 2,000 people filled Regina's Market Square. Most, though, were townsfolk with their families observing the local drama on the holiday Monday. As for the trekkers, most of them were watching a baseball game in another part of the city. More than 300 RCMP dressed in riot gear were concealed in large moving vans parked on three sides of the square, with another 50 nearby on horses. Dozens of local police waited in a garage right off the square.

As one of the leaders took the stage and began to speak, a whistle blew. Using baseball bats and billy clubs, the police waded into the crowd. "They opened the door and out they come beating the hell out of us," remembers Geddes. "They chased us all over town." RCMP threw teargas into Market Square to break up the crowd and the riot spilled into adjoining streets. A pitched battle raged for more than three hours. At one point, several people set upon a plain-clothes policeman and beat him to death. Late into the night, as about 300 rioters cornered a small troop of police, the commanding officer ordered his men to fire over the crowd's heads. Seventeen people were wounded, including five Regina residents. By morning, among the more than 100 people sent to hospital were 40 police. "The amount of people I saw with their heads bashed in was terrible, really terrible," recalls Geddes.

The march had been crushed and some of its leaders arrested. But the severity of the riot sobered both protestors and government. The trekkers were allowed to return home or to the B.C. relief camps. Bennett, blaming the riot on communist agitators, endorsed an inquiry that whitewashed the authorities of any wrongdoing. According to Waiser, a University of Saskatchewan history professor: "In truth, it was a police-provoked riot. They raided a peaceful meeting and the people fought back."

Bennett, however, did not escape the fallout. In the federal election campaign three months after the Regina Riot, the prime minister promised radical reforms, including health and unemployment insurance as well as a minimum wage. But it was too late. In October, 1935, William Lyon Mackenzie King soundly defeated Bennett.

Less than a year later, a federal investigation concluded that maintaining the relief camps was no longer "in the best interests of the state." After housing 170,000 men over 3 ½ years, they were closed. But for many of the hopeless men who lived in them and took part in the protest, the trek had provided a purpose. "We were pretty militant, but we had a reason to be," says Llewellyn. "If you were going hungry in the richest country in the world you would have done it too."

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On-to-ottawa trek national historic event.

• On-to-Ottawa Trek  (Designation Name)

Importance: Culmination of failure of Canada's depression-era relief projects for unemployed single men

A defining event of the Great Depression, the On-to-Ottawa Trek has become a poignant symbol of working class protest. In 1935, over a thousand angry unemployed men left federal relief camps in British Columbia and boarded boxcars to take their demand for work and wages directly to Ottawa. As the number of protesters increased, the federal government resolved to stop the movement. The police arrested its leaders at a public meeting on July 1st, sparking the Regina Riot. Although it never reached Ottawa, the Trek marked the failure of the Depression-era work camps as a solution to widespread unemployment.

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The 'on-to-ottawa trek'.

Unemployed men protest government inaction during the Great Depression

The aftermath of the Regina Riot: one protestor and one policeman dead, more than a hundred injured, and the movement’s leaders imprisoned.

Author: The Edmonton Journal

Source: Edmonton Journal July 12, 1935, p1

Relief camp workers riding the rails on their trek to Ottawa in June 1935.

Author: Unknown

Source: Library and Archives Canada, C-029399

Vancouver Mayor Gerry McGeer reads the Riot Act in Victory Square on April 23, 1935.

Source: City of Vancouver Archives, AM54-S14-Vol 9, No2 503-D-1

Police and demonstrators clash at the Regina Riot on July 1, 1935.

Author: McDermid Studio

Source: Glenbow Archives, NA-3622-20

On April 4, 1935, thousands of workers put down their pickaxes, shovels, and other tools and deserted British Columbia’s relief camps, hitching rides on boxcars bound for Vancouver. However, the ultimate destination would be Ottawa.

This wasn’t the first walkout among relief camp workers , but it was the largest. Over five years had passed since the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday, signalling the start of the Great Depression . While the markets in the United States seemed to be recovering, Canadians saw no such progress at home. Instead, the government had herded thousands of jobless men from city streets into rural relief camps , where they were set to hard labour for a paltry wage of 20 cents per day. It was an attempt to hide the problem of poverty rather than address it. 

Even though the camp workers were technically banned from organizing, thousands of them joined the newly-formed Relief Camp Workers’ Union (RCWU). The group — which was affiliated with the Communist Party’s trade union, the Workers’ Unity League (WUL) — decided that one dramatic move would draw attention to their cause: a general strike. On April 4, camp workers from all across Western Canada walked off the job.

Two thousand men converged on Vancouver. They would spend the next two months protesting in the city.

At the time, Canadian politics was splintered. British Columbia’s Liberal government, which had campaigned on promises of “Work and Wages,” was at odds with the Conservative federal government under R.B. “Iron Heel” Bennett. He contended that policing and aid were local responsibilities. The lack of any cohesive and productive action by the government garnered only frustration from its citizenry. When the men arrived in Vancouver, public support was in their corner.

Less than three weeks after the strike started, Vancouver Mayor Gerry McGeer — who had was on a law and order platform — decided that enough was enough. After a large workers’ demonstration on April 23, McGeer read the Riot Act in Victory Square. Later that night, he would have police raid the workers’ headquarters. A violent street battle broke out. Arrests were made.

By June, after months of demonstrations, the protestors were frustrated. They had reached an impasse with the local government, and there was no clear path forward. The men decided they needed to chart a bold, new path, so they decided to take the fight to Ottawa. A grand exodus ensued. On June 3, one thousand men hitched rides on freight cars — a practice called “riding the rod” — to confront the prime minister himself.

At least, that was the plan. Halfway to Ottawa, the strikers stopped in Regina, with only the movement’s leaders carrying on. When they did meet with Bennett, the conversation quickly devolved into insults, and no resolution was found.

The strike leaders returned to Regina with a new plan. They spread the word: On July 1, Dominion Day, there would be a rally in the city’s Market Square. But local authorities found out and devised their own scheme. They wanted to prevent the movement from growing larger than it already was.

On the day of the rally, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people had convened in the square when the RCMP riot squad arrived, armed with clubs. They forcibly shut down the protest in what would become the most violent conflagration of the Great Depression: the Regina Riot. By the end of the day, one constable and one protestor had died. More than a hundred people, mostly locals, were injured. Meanwhile, the movement’s leaders had been arrested, screeching their campaign to a halt.

While Bennett and his law enforcement might have won the battle, he didn’t win the war. Or rather, he didn’t win the election. A few months later, the Conservatives lost power, sunk by the public’s distaste for Bennett’s repressive tactics.

Unfortunately, a change of the guard didn’t result in a swift economic turnaround. There would be more hard days to come in British Columbia and across Canada.

Author: Leah Siegel

• Greater Vancouver Area

1. Belshaw, John Douglas. “The Great Depression.”  Canadian History: Post-Confederation , B.C. Open Textbook Project, opentextbc.ca/postconfederation/chapter/8-5-the-great-depression/. 

2. McCallum, Todd.  Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver . Athabasca University Press, 2014. 

3. Mickleburgh, Rod.  On the Line: a History of the British Columbia Labour Movement . Harbour Publishing, 2018. 

4. “On to Ottawa Trek.”  On to Ottawa Historical Society , BC Labour Heritage Centre, 2002, www.labourheritagecentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Booklet-On-to-Ottawa-web.pdf. 

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ON TO OTTAWA TREK - 1935

The "On to Ottawa Trek" was a protest march and strike by unemployed men in 1935 in Canada, which had its roots in the political and economic conditions of the time. The Great Depression had hit Canada hard, and the country was facing high levels of unemployment and poverty. Many of the protesters were single, unemployed men who were frustrated with the lack of support and assistance from the government. The protest was organized by the Relief Camp Workers' Union (RCWU) who was demanding better treatment and conditions for unemployed men living in government-run relief camps. The RCWU also wanted to draw attention to the poor conditions in the relief camps and the lack of work opportunities for the unemployed men. Vancouver was the starting point for the "On to Ottawa Trek" of 1935. The trek was organized by the Relief Camp Workers' Union (RCWU) and led by Arthur "Slim" Evans, Roddy Mann and other leaders. The trek began in Vancouver with around 1,000 unemployed men who were frustrated with the poor conditions in government-run relief camps and the lack of work opportunities. The protest march was organized to draw attention to the plight of unemployed men living in the relief camps and to demand better treatment and conditions from the government. The protesters hoped to make their way to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, to present their demands directly to the Prime Minister. In Vancouver, the protesters were met with support from the local labor community and some political figures. They left Vancouver on June 3, 1935, and traveled eastward, hopping freight trains to make their way across the country. Along the way, they were met with support from other labor organizations and sympathetic communities. However, the trek met with violent resistance from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Regina, Saskatchewan, known as the "Regina Riot", and was ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its main goal of bringing unemployed workers' issues to the attention of the government. Despite this, the On to Ottawa Trek is an important event in Canadian labor history, as it brought attention to the plight of unemployed workers during the Great Depression, and the government's lack of support and assistance for them. The protest began in Vancouver and made its way eastward, with the protesters hopping freight trains to travel across the country. The trek gained attention and support along the way, but it was ultimately met with violent resistance from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Regina, Saskatchewan, known as the "Regina Riot." The trek is an important event in Canadian labor history, as it brought attention to the plight of unemployed workers during the Great Depression, and the government's lack of support and assistance for them. The leaders of the "On to Ottawa Trek" of 1935 were mostly members of the Relief Camp Workers' Union (RCWU). The main leader of the trek was Arthur "Slim" Evans, who was a miner and labor organizer. He was a charismatic leader who was able to rally the unemployed men and lead the march from Vancouver to Regina. He was arrested during the Regina Riot, but later released. Another key leader of the trek was Roddy Mann, who was a union organizer and journalist. He played a significant role in organizing the trek and also wrote articles about the trek that were published in newspapers across Canada. There were also several other leaders of the trek, including Bill Pritchard, who was a union organizer, and Bill Hughes, who was a leader in the RCWU. The trek was also supported by several other labor organizations, including the Communist Party of Canada and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a political party that advocated for socialist policies.

• June 3, 1935: The trek begins in Vancouver, with around 1,000 unemployed men leaving the city to protest the poor conditions in government-run relief camps and the lack of work opportunities.
• June 4-6: The trek makes its way eastward, with the protesters hopping freight trains to travel across the country.
• June 7: The trek arrives in Kamloops, British Columbia.
• June 8: The trek arrives in Revelstoke, British Columbia.
• June 10: The trek arrives in Golden, British Columbia.
• June 11: The trek arrives in Lake Louise, Alberta.
• June 12: The trek arrives in Calgary, Alberta.
• June 13-15: The trek continues through Alberta, with stops in various towns.
• June 16: The trek arrives in Regina, Saskatchewan, where it is met with violent resistance from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This event is known as the "Regina Riot."
• June 17: Many of the protesters are arrested and taken into custody in Regina. The trek ends, and the remaining protesters are dispersed.
• June 27: The leaders of the trek, including Slim Evans and Roddy Mann, were arrested and charged with various offences.

The Relief Camp Workers' Union (RCWU) was a labor union in Canada that was active during the Great Depression. The union was formed by unemployed men who were living in government-run relief camps. These camps were set up by the Canadian government as a way to provide shelter and basic necessities for unemployed men during the Great Depression. However, the conditions in the camps were often poor, and the men were frustrated with the lack of work opportunities. The RCWU was formed to advocate for better treatment and conditions for unemployed men living in the relief camps. The union also sought to draw attention to the poor conditions in the camps and the lack of work opportunities for the unemployed men. The union organized several protests, including the "On to Ottawa Trek" of 1935, which was led by Arthur "Slim" Evans and Roddy Mann, among others. The RCWU was supported by several other labor organizations, including the Communist Party of Canada and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a political party that advocated for socialist policies. The union was active until the early 1940s, when the government closed the relief camps and the need for the union diminished.

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No era in Canadian history is as well-defined as the Depression. Even the dates are precise, from the spectacular Wall Street crash on October 29, 1929, to the beginning of World War II on September 3, 1939. The bottom fell out of the economy, inflicting untold misery and poverty on millions of Canadians—whether ill-fated Saskatchewan farmers, eastern factory workers or labourers in BC’s once humming woods and mines. By the time it ran its course, the Depression had shown once and for all the inadequacy of an unregulated free market and the need for government action to ensure a decent life for ordinary people.

The ten lost years were characterized by government indifference. There was nothing like the New Deal of US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt that did so much to limit the plight of millions of hard-hit Americans. Instead, those unable to find work in Canada were provided with extremely meagre relief payments if they had a family—or if single, forced into work camps for a pittance. Both R.B. Bennett and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the country’s two prime ministers during the 1930s, were more concerned with balancing the budget than helping citizens in desperate need. Those who protested were more often than not clubbed or thrown into jail. “The image of a policeman’s truncheon bringing a shabbily dressed man to his knees was to become familiar,” wrote Pierre Berton in his angry book The Great Depression .

The Depression seemed to come out of nowhere. As the Roaring Twenties neared their end, prosperity continued its multi-year roll. Investors were making fabulous riches on paper from the ever-rising stock market, financing their wealth by loans and buying on margin. Production was at record highs. But consumers couldn’t buy everything. Worrisome stockpiles of unsold products began to accumulate. Then in the fall of 1929, the stock market’s Black Thursday, October 24, was followed by the even more catastrophic Black Tuesday of October 29, and the house of cards collapsed. Billions of dollars were lost in a single day. The Great Depression was on, triggered at its most basic level by overproduction, under-consumption and a sea of credit based on expectations of endless growth.

Products moving through BC’s formerly busy ports declined nearly 60 percent. Lumber production, critical to the province’s economic health, fell 30 percent. A scourge of horrendous poverty and unemployment fell over the land, never seen before or since. By 1933 one-third of all eligible wage earners, 1.5 million Canadians, were without work, many with no social safety net. For hundreds of thousands of mostly young Canadians, riding the rails, occupying jungle camps, visiting soup kitchens and bumming a meal became part of the rhythm of daily life. Large numbers of Prairie families driven from their land by dust storms, drought and plagues of grasshoppers added to the desperation.

Before long, with its relatively mild climate, Vancouver became the unemployment capital of Canada. In the fall of 1931, Andrew Roddan, minister of the First United Church, told a visiting federal cabinet minister that his church’s bread lines were feeding more than 1,200 people a day. Hundreds were sleeping in shacks made of bits of tin and wood, while others slept outside, often in the rain, among rats “as big as kittens,” Reverend Roddan reported. When a local restaurant began handing out bags of bread crusts at the end of the day, a hundred men would show up every evening for the scraps.

As most labour unions focused on their own members, and politicians with no answers tried to pass responsibility to other levels of government, the country’s Communist Party (CP) came to the fore. From its founding at a 1921 clandestine meeting in an Ontario barn, where the twenty or so delegates slept in the hayloft, the party had grown in influence during the 1920s. Although ever subject to the policy whims of the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), the CP had developed a base of skilled, committed organizers, who found the country’s hard-pressed industrial workforce and hordes of single unemployed men tailor-made for action. Ordered by the Comintern to abandon its previous policy of working within established unions, the CP established its own radical federation in early 1930, just as the Depression hit. The Workers’ Unity League (WUL) was to hold its red banner high for the next five years and play a major role in confronting authorities and the forces of capitalism.

A union of the unemployed affiliated with the WUL was soon leading regular protests and hunger marches demanding, with some initial success, better relief. Still, assistance remained barely above subsistence levels and predominantly restricted to families. For the masses of unemployed single men, many of whom washed up on the West Coast, there was nothing but charity. The WUL’s involvement in organizing the unemployed made authorities nervous. “Communist agitators,” they feared, were stirring up revolution among the throngs of jobless hanging around Vancouver and other cities.

To get them off the streets and away from the clutches of the Workers’ Unity League, the federal government devised a network of relief camps, perhaps the most mean-spirited of all the country’s responses to the ravages of the Depression. Most were wilderness work sites far from the city, where single unemployed men received bare-bones accommodation, skimpy food and paltry compensation in return for their labour. The first camps provided $1.15 a day. The men worked building roads, parks and other public facilities. A year later, pay was down to $7.50 a month. A year after that, all relief camps were taken over by the Department of National Defence. The daily stipend was further reduced to the derisory sum of twenty cents, and the trouble began.

Rather than squelching unrest, the camps proved fertile ground for communist organizers. While few camp workers had any interest in Stalin, they appreciated efforts to improve their lot and fight back against the camps’ harsh military-like rule. The Relief Camp Workers’ Union, a direct charter of the Workers’ Unity League, became a force in all eighty-three BC camps. Braving blacklists, camp residents staged numerous strikes and protests to demand better conditions, keeping abreast of activities in other locations through the union’s popular, surreptitious newsletter, the Relief Camp Worker . Much of the successful organization could be attributed to the efforts of one driven individual: Arthur H. “Slim” Evans.

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In short order, Evans would become a household name across Canada and a red flag to governments, police and the courts wherever he led a fight on behalf of workers or the unemployed. Fiercely committed to working-class struggle, the lean carpenter in his mid-forties had already been wounded once and jailed three times for his role in union battles, including most recently in Princeton. There, a miners’ strike provoked cross burnings and frightening threats by a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, violent attacks on peaceful pickets, a late-night vigilante attack on a local union leader and the kidnapping of Evans himself. Yet it was Evans who went to prison, serving more than a year in jail on a charge of advocating the overthrow of the Canadian government during the strike. When he rejoined the relief camp protests in late 1934 as district organizer of the Workers’ Unity League, protests began in earnest.

Responding to growing strife in the camps, Evans and the Relief Camp Workers Union declared a strike on April 4, 1935. Their rallying cry, “Work and Wages,” was to resound for the rest of the Depression. Nearly fifteen hundred camp workers answered the summons to Vancouver, pouring into the city by rail, road and foot. The presence of so many young, restive unemployed men with no money and nothing to do, under the leadership of communists, unnerved civic leaders. Flamboyant mayor Gerry McGeer bombarded Ottawa with demands that they be rounded up and sent back to the camps.

But organizers displayed an astounding ability to feed and billet the strikers, keep them occupied and, most importantly, maintain order and discipline. In defiance of civic ordinances, they raised funds with regular tag days. Men wearing sashes that read “When Do We Eat?” worked four-hour shifts at busy street corners, holding out tin cans for donations. A sympathetic public showered them with cash. On one bumper Saturday, tin-canners brought in a record-breaking $5,500. With a sense of mischief, Evans, who had been up for forty-eight hours organizing the all-out blitz, asked police to safeguard the tidy sum until the banks opened Monday morning. When two officers arrived to carry off the money, he told them it was “Moscow Gold.”

Little was left to chance. The men were organized into four divisions, each with its own leader. There were committees for just about everything. All reported to the central strike committee headed by Evans. “We couldn’t slice a loaf of bread into five bologna sandwiches without appointing a committee to see it was done according to plan,” division leader Steve Brodie joked later. Hunger marches, demonstrations, tin-canning, large public rallies and boisterous snake dances through downtown streets became as familiar to Vancouverites as the North Shore mountains. May Day produced the largest parade in the city’s history.

Mother’s Day was even better. The Mothers’ Council, a broadly based, left-wing women’s group that was formed to muster sympathy for “our boys,” led a large Mother’s Day march to Stanley Park. There, they formed a giant heart around the young relief camp workers. That night, mothers across the city invited strikers to their homes for a meal. It was, said one event planner, “something of real value instead of the usual bourgeois, maudlin sentimentalism associated with Mother’s Day.”

The only trouble occurred during an impromptu snake dance through the aisles of the Hudson’s Bay Company on April 23. When police arrived to evict the protesters, a large glass display case was shattered and merchandise strewn about. Hundreds then marched down Georgia Street to the Victory Square cenotaph, where squads of RCMP, provincial police and city police surrounded them in a tense stand-off. A delegation of strikers was dispatched to the mayor’s office to try to defuse the situation. The twelve-member delegation got nowhere with the bullheaded Gerry McGeer. As they left his office, all but one was arrested for vagrancy. McGeer proceeded to a corner of Victory Square for a much-ridiculed reading of the Riot Act.

Six weeks into the strike, however, despite waves of public sympathy, there was no sign of either the city or Ottawa granting relief, providing “work and wages” or forcing them back to the camps. Running low on food, the stalemated strikers needed something different. On May 18, their four divisions marched off in different directions. Two headed to local department stores, one went to the West Vancouver ferry depot, while the fourth followed a familiar route toward Main and Hastings. But this time, catching police off guard, they strolled into the city library on the corner, headed up the spiral staircase of what is today the Carnegie Centre and began occupying the civic museum on the third floor. Barricading the door, they posted a large sign on the window: “When Do We Eat?”

Large, supportive crowds gathered in the streets below. Well-prepared, the men lowered baskets on a string. Citizens filled them with bread, pies and pastries from neighbourhood bakeries, jugs of coffee, cigarettes, chocolate and sweets. The bounty proved too much for some, who hadn’t eaten well in days. Bottles of pills were sent up to ease their stomach discontent. As police fumed, jubilant snake dances took over Hastings Street, accompanied by lusty renditions of the strike’s rallying song, “Hold the Fort.” (“Hold the fort/ For we are coming,/ Union men be strong./ Side by side keep pressing onward,/ Victory will come.”) For the first and only time in the protracted protest, Gerry McGeer gave in. By phone from the Vancouver Yacht Club, he agreed to have the city feed and lodge the fifteen hundred strikers over the weekend. The occupiers emerged from the library in triumph.

The tactic was typical of Slim Evans. He had a genius for maintaining momentum. “You can’t go on marching and singing and begging with tin cans,” he would say. “You’ve got to do something new.” Two weeks later, as the passage of time began to thin ranks, sap morale and cut into public support, Evans hit the strategic mother lode. At a mass meeting called to discuss the future of the faltering strike, someone put forward the idea of taking the protest to Ottawa. Evans seized on the idea. When the proposal was endorsed, the strikers nearly took the roof off the joint with their roars of approval. It was as if a huge jolt of electricity had revitalized their flagging spirits. They had a mission once again.

The ensuing On-to-Ottawa Trek remains one of the defining events of the Depression in Canada. It caught the fancy of the country in a way that not even Slim Evans could have foreseen. The journey came to epitomize everything that was wrong with the federal government’s hard approach to those brought low by forces beyond their control. The public saw it that way too. The farther the young BC trekkers travelled on top of swaying boxcars—many attaching themselves with belts or ropes—in their quest for a fair deal, the more they were embraced by Canadians as doing the right thing.

The idea was mad to begin with, of course. With a mere four days to prepare, little money and scant arrangements along the way, more than a thousand men had to be supplied and kept together for a three-thousand-mile journey to the lair of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. Certain that it would quickly fall apart, governments and police could barely stifle a yawn when the trek was announced. But the relief camp strikers were charged with excitement by the sheer audacity of the plan. “Suddenly there was a new level of struggle. It was as if everything we had done up to that point was preparing for [this],” said trekker Willis Shaparla. Half a century later, Shaparla, a veteran of the D-Day landing, considered his participation in the On-to-Ottawa Trek the highlight of his life.

Yet no one knew what lay ahead the night of June 3, 1935, as hundreds of men clambered atop a line of CPR freight cars by the Vancouver waterfront and headed off into the darkness. Crowds had gathered to see them off. More than 800 left on the first train, another 200 boarded a later Canadian National Railway freight, and 350 more moved out the next evening.

The trek had a rough beginning. In Kamloops, the strikers’ first stop, civic officials were unfriendly, and many men grumbled over the poor arrangements. At the small mountain community of Golden, however, things turned around. Sooty, begrimed, exhausted and hungry after a chilly night ride through the Selkirk Mountains and smoke-filled Connaught Tunnel, men staggered down from their perches and marched toward a local auto park. “I was so cold, I could have fallen off the roof of the box car,” remembered Red Walsh. As dawn broke, there waiting for them was a bathtub suspended over a fire and a grey-haired woman stirring its contents—a vast beef stew—with a three-foot-long ladle. Other stew-filled washtubs were nearby. “Good morning, boys,” she hailed them. It was a stew the men never forgot. Long tables laden with bread and eggs added to their wonderful breakfast.

On they went to Calgary, passing a handful of relieved provincial police at the BC–Alberta border, who gave them a cheery wave. The swirling, acrid smoke that filled the many Rocky Mountain tunnels blackened faces, stung the eyes and made breathing difficult. But Calgarians cheered from their housetops as the sooty trekkers marched to the city’s exhibition grounds. Thumbing their nose at the city’s refusal to grant them a permit, they raised $1,300 in a tag day. And when authorities denied them temporary assistance, they occupied the provincial relief office until the government gave in.

New recruits arrived on boxcars from Edmonton. One of them was Phil Klein, father of future Alberta premier Ralph Klein. (During a fiftieth-anniversary re-creation of the trek, Ralph Klein, who was mayor at the time, welcomed surviving trekkers to Calgary and formally guaranteed them safe passage through the city. He then invited them to lunch.) Fulminations by politicians that the men were being led by communists cut less and less ice. “To be quite frank, we don’t care very much,” said an editorial in the Calgary Albertan . The public saw the protest as just, and the protesters as disciplined young men who wanted a better deal, not revolution. Before leaving Calgary, they were feted at picnics and flooded with food and clothing. Hundreds gathered to say goodbye.

Back in Ottawa, Bennett was stunned by the trek’s growing popularity. Over five hundred more men had joined the venture since Vancouver. Bennett determined that it must be stopped. He chose Regina. As communities continued to bend over backward to feed and lodge the eighteen hundred men on their overnight stops, the RCMP began drawing up a battle plan. Having learned of Bennett’s plans, the trekkers held a mass meeting attended by three thousand people in Moose Jaw. The mood was defiant. “If they attack us, we are not going to lay down and take it,” warned twenty-four-year-old Matt Young. That determination quickened their departure to Regina on the next evening freight.

The overnight journey was terrible. A violent prairie storm replete with thunder and lightning lashed the men all night. But the strikers maintained their discipline. Arriving just after dawn on June 14, they made their way down from the boxcars, lined up in their divisions and proceeded in good order, four abreast, to the local exhibition grounds. Later that morning, they put on a show for the welcoming citizens of Regina, parading in a long line down Eleventh Avenue. “On to Ottawa” was chalked on the back of many flimsy jackets, and the men chanted, “Where are we going? Ottawa! Who’s going to stop us? Nobody! ”

The RCMP had other ideas. Despite opposition from Premier Jimmy Gardiner and strong backing for the trekkers from the citizens of Regina, the Mounties moved hundreds of reinforcements into the city with the intent of stopping the boxcar cavalcade and arresting the leaders. Bennett leaned on the railways to no longer accommodate the trekkers. They were trespassing on private property, he reminded them. Nevertheless, Evans set June 17 for their departure to Winnipeg, where hundreds more single unemployed men were waiting eagerly to join up.

But Bennett put the trek on hold with a cagey invitation to the leadership committee to meet with him in Ottawa; in the meantime, the government promised the trekkers a week’s worth of meal tickets. Although Bennett’s invitation was clearly a delaying tactic to help the RCMP prepare, Evans felt they had no option but to accept. The meeting was a stage director’s dream. Dressed in their worn, rumpled clothes of the road, Evans and his committee sat opposite the corpulent R.B. Bennett, wearing a swallow-tailed coat and winged collar, with a diamond stick pin in his tie. It quickly degenerated into a bout of schoolyard name-calling. Bennett began by charging that the trekkers’ goal was not work but the overthrow of the government. If he believed that, Evans retorted, Bennett wasn’t fit to be leader “of a Hottentot village.” Furious, the prime minister shot back that Evans was an embezzler of union funds. Evans snapped that Bennett was a liar. “You are not intimidating me one bit.” The meeting came to a quick close. The verbal donnybrook between the two men was headline news across the country, setting the scene for the tragedy that followed.

By the time Evans and the delegation returned to Regina on June 26, the city was full of police with riot sticks. Their ranks included seventy-five Mounties freshly arrived from taking part in a bloody crackdown against striking dock workers in Vancouver. The trekkers were trapped, followed by police wherever they went. Assistant RCMP Commissioner Stuart Wood warned that any citizen assisting the trekkers would be subject to arrest. Donations dried up. Access to the radio airwaves ended. When only a sparse crowd turned out for a Saturday picnic on June 29, Evans realized there was no way forward.

He began to negotiate a resolution with Premier Gardiner, who was furious with Bennett and the RCMP for proceeding with no regard for the wishes of the province. The men were prepared to call off the trek and return west, Evans said, but they would not go to an alternate work camp in Saskatchewan as Bennett insisted. There matters stood on the Dominion Day holiday, July 1. In the circumstances, no one thought much about a rally scheduled that night for the city’s vast Market Square. The resulting Regina Riot remains one of Canada’s most widely known civil disturbances.

At 8:17 p.m., as a modest crowd of fifteen hundred listened to the rally’s first speaker, two loud blasts from a police whistle split the early evening air. Within seconds, police were charging through the terrified crowd, clearing a path to the speakers’ platform by knocking over anyone in their way with truncheons. Willis Shaparla called the sudden whistle and police charge “the most fearful moment of my life.” As people desperately took flight to escape the riot sticks, Evans and co-leader George Black were quickly collared and taken to jail. After a brief lull, the fracas turned into a riot.

The unprovoked attack on a peaceful gathering released an outpouring of bottled-up rage from the trekkers and equally angered citizens. Rocks, bricks and other projectiles rained down on police. A few attacked isolated officers with clubs and other weapons. Plainclothes city detective Charles Millar was struck and killed, his assailants never identified. The battle continued in Regina’s darkened downtown streets. Police advanced with tear gas, billy clubs, gunfire and fierce charges on horseback. Nick Schaack, an unemployed farmhand, received several blows to the head. He died in hospital three months later. Despite their numbers and firepower advantage, police did not manage to secure an edgy calm until 11 p.m. The city’s two hospitals treated more than a hundred victims, including some police and at least a dozen patients with gunshot wounds.

The next morning, outraged by the RCMP onslaught, Premier Gardiner wrested control of the situation from police and the federal government by arranging the strikers’ orderly departure. After their frustrating three-week stay in Regina, trekkers began to register for the trip home. All told, 1,358 men accepted the offer to leave—this time inside the trains and “on the cushions.” Two-thirds were from British Columbia, half from Vancouver. Although falling twenty-six hundred kilometres short of its goal, the On-to-Ottawa Trek, hatched in Vancouver, is remembered today as one of the country’s most inspiring protests. Sixty-six years later, at the age of ninety-two, trekker Harry Linsley told an interviewer, “All we ever wanted was work and wages.”

Two years after the trek ended, a number of participants were fighting in Canada’s Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion as part of the international contingent of volunteers against Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Two who died, Peter Neilson and Paddy O’Neil, had been members of the trekkers’ delegation that met with R.B. Bennett in Ottawa.

Search On the Line

The On-to-Ottawa Trek was a 1935 social movement of unemployed men protesting the dismal conditions in federal relief camps scattered in remote areas across Western Canada . The men lived and worked in these camps at a rate of twenty cents per day before walking out on strike in April 1935. After a two-month protest in Vancouver , British Columbia , camp strikers voted to travel east to Ottawa and bring their grievances to the federal government. The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. [ 1 ] The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government ordered the Department of National Defense to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The poor working and living conditions led to general unrest in the camps and facilitated the work of communist agitators, who organized the men into the Relief Camp Workers' Union . A walkout was called on April 4, 1935 and about 1600 strikers headed for Vancouver. [ 2 ] The strikers– demands included the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen–s Compensation Act to include camp workers, the repeal of Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada , and that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in federal elections . Public support for the men was enormous and they decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men boarded boxcars headed east in what would become known as the –On-to-Ottawa Trek.–

[ edit ] Meeting in Ottawa

The protesters reached Regina, Saskatchewan on June 14 and met with two federal cabinet ministers in the government of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett on June 17. Robert Manion and Robert Weir invited eight leaders of the protest (including Arthur "Slim" Evans ) to Ottawa to meet Bennett on the condition the rest of the protesters stay in Regina, where a large RCMP contingent was located. The protesters who remained in Regina, meanwhile, continued to stay in the stadium located on Regina Exhibition Grounds, eating meals in local restaurants.

The June 22nd Ottawa meeting turned into a shouting match, with Bennett attacking the group as radicals and accusing Trek leader Arthur "Slim" Evans of being an extortionist. Evans in turn called the Prime Minister a liar before the delegation was escorted out of the building.

[ edit ] Regina Riot

The eight delegates arrived back in Regina on June 26. Attempts of the Trekkers to leave Regina by car or truck were thwarted by RCMP road blocks. A public meeting was called for July 1, 1935, in Market Square in Germantown (now the site of the Regina City Police station) to update the public on the progress of the movement. It was attended by 1,500 to 2,000 people, of whom only 300 were Trekkers. Most Trekkers decided to stay at the exhibition grounds.

Three large vans were parked on the sides of the square concealing RCMP riot squads. Regina police were standing by in a nearby garage. At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown and the police charged the crowd, setting off hours of hand-to-hand fighting throughout the city's centre. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then charged into the crowd and attacked with clubs. Driven from the Square, the battle continued in the surrounding streets for four hours. Trekkers Arthur Evans and George Black who were on the speakers' platform were arrested by plainclothes police.

Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.

When it was over, 120 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Millar, a plainclothes policeman, had been killed, and Nick Shaack, a Trekker, would later die in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. Hundreds of injured local residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable. The police claimed 39 injuries in addition to the dead police officer, but denied that any protesters had been killed in the melee; the hospital records were subsequently altered to conceal the actual cause of death.

The city's exhibition grounds were surrounded by constables armed with revolvers and machine guns. The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. The Trekkers in the stadium were denied any food or water. News of the police-instigated riot was front page news across Canada. About midnight one of the Trek leaders telephoned Premier Gardiner , who agreed to meet their delegation the next morning. The RCMP were livid when they heard of this and apprehended the delegates for interrogation but eventually released them in time to see the premier.

Premier Gardiner sent a wire to the Prime Minister , accusing the police of "precipitating a riot" while he had been negotiating a settlement with the Trekkers. He also told the prime minister the "men should be fed where they are and sent back to camp and homes as they request" and stated his government was prepared to "undertake this work of disbanding the men." An agreement to this effect was subsequently negotiated. Bennett was satisfied that he had smashed what he believed was a communist revolt and Gardiner was glad to rid his province of the strikers.

The Federal Minister of Justice Hugh Guthrie made the false statement in the House of Commons on July 2 that "shots were fired by the strikers and the fire was replied to with shots from the city police." During the long trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as "not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government." Official reports claim that the riots were caused by a lack of sturdy cardboard boxes in which the vagrants could sleep.

[ edit ] Effects

The events helped to discredit Bennett's Conservative government, and in the 1935 federal election , his party went from holding 134 seats to just 39. It also increased the notoriety of the Communist Party of Canada , which was behind the organization of the Trek. After the Trek, the government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the camps. The camps were soon dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces and that paid the men slightly more for their labour than the earlier camps. Although the Trek did not reach Ottawa, its political reverberations certainly did. Several demands of the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the Trek set the tone for the social reforms and welfare provisions of the postwar era.

[ edit ] See also

• Great Depression in Canada
• Canadian Cities in the Great Depression
• History of Regina
• Estevan Riot

[ edit ] References

• ^ Zuehlke, Mark (1996). The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 . Vancouver: Whitecap Books. ISBN   1-55110-488-1 .  
• ^ Waiser, Bill (2003). All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot . Calgary: Fifth House.  

[ edit ] External links

• On-to-Ottawa Trek - video dramatization (narrated by Trek participants, with historical footage)
• The On-to-Ottawa Trek
• On to Ottawa Historical Society

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uOttawa achieves best-ever results in QS World University Rankings 2025

Growing global recognition of the University of Ottawa’s (uOttawa) research strength and its leadership in sustainability has powered the institution to its best-ever result in the influential QS World University Rankings 2025.

Climbing 14 places, uOttawa has surged into the Top 200 with a global ranking of 189th out of 1,503 universities and a second in Canada ranking for research citations.

“The University of Ottawa’s growing success in the QS World University Rankings is a major recognition of the groundbreaking research capabilities that draw top talent — both students and scholars — to our vibrant, inclusive campuses in Canada’s capital,” says Jacques Frémont, University president and vice-chancellor.

This best-ever ranking is due to uOttawa’s outstanding results in research intensity, sustainability, employment outcomes and international influence.

In particular, University of Ottawa professors continue to distinguish themselves as leaders in research impact. QS also ranked uOttawa’s international research network as among the Top 5 in Canada and uOttawa’s performance in the sustainability index now ranks among the  world’s leading 100 universities.

This latest global recognition of the world’s largest French-English bilingual university follows on the heels of the strategic investments uOttawa continues to make, including the opening of a new Faculty of Health Sciences building and the development of its transformative Advanced Medical Research Centre .

The rankings are compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds, a London-based analytics firm. They assess universities worldwide based on their performance in five broad subject fields and 55 specific areas.

See  the complete QS World University Rankings 2025 .

Chapter 5: On-To-Ottawa