Dear Diary,

It is Dec 18 1929, I am close to out of work and money and my food is beginning to run low. The Federal Department of Labor says that my family of 5 needs between $1200 and $1500 a year to maintain the "minimum standard of decency." At this time, 60% of us men and 82% of women make less than $1000 a year and I am slowly getting poor. I even had to send my 12 and 13-year-old sons out of school to work to help put food on our tables and clothes on our backs. The nineteen twenties were boom times in Canada. Unemployment was low; earnings for our companies and us workers were high. But prosperity came to a halt with the stock market collapse in New York, Toronto, and Montréal and around the world in October 1929. The crash set off a chain of events that plunged Canada and the...