The 1920s are often called the Roaring Twenties: jazz on the radio, a Model T in the driveway, movies every Saturday and new hockey heroes. For many Canadians in Toronto, Montreal or Windsor, the decade really did bring higher incomes and new things to buy. But a Cape Breton coal miner, a Prairie farmer paying off a tractor, or an Inuit trapper selling white fox furs at a trading post would each tell a different story. This lesson looks at the decade's economy, technology and culture, and asks a historian's question: roaring for whom?
From recession to boom
War factories closed, wartime orders vanished and soldiers came home, so Canada fell into a sharp postwar recession from 1920 into 1922, with high unemployment and falling farm prices. From about 1924, a boom took hold, driven by exports of natural resources and by new consumer industries. A key change was the source of money for growth: American investment overtook British investment during the 1920s. Americans tended to build or buy companies directly, often as branch plants (Canadian factories owned by US firms), which created jobs but gave Americans more control over Canada's economy.
| Sector | What happened in the 1920s | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Pulp and paper | Huge growth to supply American newspapers; by the late 1920s Canada was the world's leading newsprint producer | Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick |
| Mining | New gold, copper and nickel mines and booming mining towns such as Rouyn and Noranda | Northern Quebec and Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia |
| Hydroelectricity | Large dams powered factories, mines, paper mills and city homes | Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, British Columbia |
| Wheat | Large harvests and exports; farmers formed wheat pools (from 1923–1924) to sell grain together | The Prairies |
| Automobiles | Ford of Canada (Windsor), General Motors of Canada (Oshawa, from 1918) and others; for some years Canada was the world's second-largest car producer | Southern Ontario |
- Consumer society: cars, radios, telephones, washing machines and vacuum cleaners spread among middle-class urban families, along with electric light and indoor plumbing.
- Buying on credit: instalment plans let people take a car or radio home and pay monthly. Credit fuelled sales but left many families in debt.
- Advertising in magazines and on radio encouraged people to buy the latest products.
- Urbanization: by the 1921 census, about half of Canadians (49.5 per cent) lived in urban areas, up from 45.4 per cent in 1911; by 1931 it was 53.7 per cent.
An uneven boom
| Region or group | Experience in the 1920s |
|---|---|
| The Maritimes | Shipbuilding, coal and steel declined, and higher railway freight rates hurt trade. The Maritime Rights movement demanded fairer treatment; the 1926 Duncan Commission recommended lower freight rates and larger federal subsidies, which were only partly adopted. In Cape Breton, coal miners fought wage cuts in bitter strikes; miner William Davis was shot dead by company police on June 11, 1925, still remembered as Davis Day. |
| Prairie farmers | Angry about high tariffs on machinery and low prices for wheat; they formed co-operatives and wheat pools and backed new farmers' parties. The Progressive Party won 58 seats in the 1921 federal election, more than the Conservatives. |
| Ontario and Quebec | Gained most from manufacturing, cars, hydroelectricity, pulp and paper and mining. |
| Workers | After the defeats of 1919, unions struggled; many jobs were unsafe and wages were low, especially for women and immigrants. |
| First Nations, Métis and Inuit | Largely excluded from the boom's benefits. In the western Arctic, high prices for white fox fur in the 1920s brought new income to Inuit trappers after the collapse of whaling, but tied families more closely to trading posts. After oil was found at Norman Wells in 1920, the government negotiated Treaty 11 (1921) with Dene and other nations in the Mackenzie Valley. |
Science and technology
- Insulin: in 1921, at the University of Toronto, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in J. J. R. Macleod's laboratory, extracted insulin from the pancreas, and James Collip purified it. In January 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson became the first person treated; a purified extract given on January 23 worked. Banting and Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize, and each shared his prize money, Banting with Best and Macleod with Collip. Diabetes went from a death sentence to a manageable condition.
- Radio: on May 20, 1920, Montreal station XWA (later CFCF) broadcast a scheduled program of music to listeners in Ottawa, one of the earliest scheduled broadcasts in North America. By the late 1920s, radios brought news, music, hockey and American programs into many homes.
- Cars and roads: cars changed leisure, gave rise to gas stations and paved highways, and made suburbs and tourism possible.
- Bush planes: pilots flew prospectors, mail and medicine into the North. In January 1929, Wop May and Vic Horner flew diphtheria antitoxin in an open-cockpit plane from Edmonton to Fort Vermilion in bitter cold.
- Farm mechanization: gasoline tractors and new harvesting machines began to replace horses, letting fewer workers farm more land, but also adding to farm debt.
Arts and popular culture
On May 7, 1920, seven painters, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley, opened their first exhibition as the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Toronto. Inspired by their friend Tom Thomson (who died in 1917), they painted the rocks, lakes and forests of northern Ontario and later the Rockies and the Arctic in bold colours, hoping to create a distinctly Canadian art. In British Columbia, Emily Carr painted the forests and the villages and totem poles of Northwest Coast nations; a 1927 National Gallery exhibition brought her national attention. Writers such as Stephen Leacock and Mazo de la Roche, whose novel Jalna (1927) won a major American prize, found large audiences.
- American influence: Hollywood movies (Toronto-born Mary Pickford was one of the biggest stars), American magazines, jazz and radio programs spread fast, worrying many who wanted a distinct Canadian culture.
- Prohibition and rum-running: most provinces banned alcohol sales during or after the war, but Quebec (which allowed beer and wine again in 1919) and British Columbia both switched to government-controlled liquor sales in 1921, and Ontario's prohibition lasted until 1927. Making alcohol for export stayed legal, so Canadian liquor was smuggled into the United States, which had national prohibition from 1920 to 1933; distillers such as Samuel Bronfman grew rich.
- Sport: the National Hockey League was founded in Montreal in November 1917, and stars such as Howie Morenz drew huge crowds. The schooner Bluenose, launched in Lunenburg in March 1921, won the International Fishermen's Trophy that October. The Edmonton Grads women's basketball team dominated for years, and at the 1928 Olympics Percy Williams won the 100 m and 200 m and a women's relay team including Bobbie Rosenfeld won gold.
- Remembrance: inspired by John McCrae's 1915 poem In Flanders Fields, veterans adopted the poppy as a symbol of remembrance in 1921.