chapter 8

Drought and Public Policy in the Palliser Triangle: The Historical Perspective

Gregory P. Marchildon

Introduction

The Canadian Prairies have had a distinct climate since the last Ice Age, characterized by extreme seasonal temperatures with short, hot summers alternating with long, cold winters, and by a semi-arid climate with cyclical bouts of severe, multi-year droughts (Davison 2001). Following the region’s settlement and use for agricultural production, the Great Depression of the 1930s generated the extreme conditions that made this region well known to North Americans. Collectively remembered as an ecological and human disaster, the prolonged drought of the Dirty Thirties triggered responses by governments at the federal, provincial, and local levels that attempted to address the physical damage and mitigate the human suffering caused by the most prolonged drought in the region in the twentieth century (McLeman et al. 2013; Jones 2002). This chapter reviews the most important of these policy interventions to extract some lessons for the future of the region, a future likely to involve prolonged droughts due to human-induced climate change, especially in the drier sub-region known as the Palliser Triangle.

Map 1. Palliser Triangle with Prairie ecoregions and soil zones

After the arrival of Europeans, and after the international boundary between Canada and the United States was set, subsequent explorers and surveyors notionally subdivided the Canadian portion of the North American Plains into sub-regions. The southernmost sub-region was named the Palliser Triangle (Map 1) after the leader of the British North American Exploring Expedition of 1857–60, Captain John Palliser (Spry 1963). One of this area’s longest droughts in the entire nineteenth century occurred during Palliser’s expedition on behalf of the British government, leading him to declare the southern Canadian Prairies unsuitable for agriculture. In the twentieth century, the dry inner core of the Palliser Triangle was labelled the Dry Belt by climatologists, a term subsequently used by historians to describe the same area (Marchildon et al. 2009).

A History of Drought in the Palliser Triangle

Given the extreme climate and water scarcity that marks the Canadian Prairies, it is not surprising that vulnerability has been an integral part of the human experience in the Palliser Triangle. This vulnerability also helps to explain the sparse population pattern of the Canadian Prairies in general, and the Palliser Triangle in particular, relative to other southern regions of Canada. Similar to today, low population density was a feature of the Canadian Prairies during its pre-history. Indigenous agriculture ranged from extremely limited to non-existent in the southwestern portion of the Canadian Prairies, even during the relatively warm centuries preceding the dry and cold period of the Little Ice Age, more formally known as the Pacific Climate Episode (AD 1250–1550). However, the grasslands did support the enormous herds of bison that were the mainstay of Indigenous communities. Based on extended clan networks speaking a common language, these communities migrated by necessity, moving their buffalo-skin shelters and minimal belongings to follow the bison herds (Dawson 2003; Thomas 1976).

While hunting and gathering was not as water-intensive as farming, water was still required in this dry environment, and there is some evidence that the Indigenous inhabitants of the Palliser Triangle “developed a water management strategy that buffered them from the effects of even long-term drought” (Daschuk 2009: 17). In a semi-arid environment, this meant protecting non-river water sources, such as beaver ponds by restricting beaver hunting. Bison herds would not move from river valleys to their usual summer ranges in the open prairie during the worst droughts, so protecting river-based water sources was an absolute necessity. During prolonged droughts when river tributaries ran dry, Indigenous populations and bison sought forced refuge along the main river channels and beside bodies of water dammed by beavers. It is interesting to note that the Indigenous restriction on hunting beaver lasted long after the arrival of Europeans, despite the economic incentives for Plains tribal groups to engage in large-scale beaver trapping during the fur trade (Daschuk 2009).

The first European occupation of the Palliser Triangle was based on open-range cattle ranching. By the 1870s, the western bison herds were nearing extinction because of the demand for bison hides and bison meat, including pemmican and luxury items such as tongues, which was met by faster-loading and increasingly accurate rifles, resulting in the collapse of the herds. As a consequence, the Indigenous occupants of Palliser Triangle—predominantly the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy, made up of the Siksika, Peigan, and Kainai (Blood) Nations—faced widespread famine. In exchange for food and medical supplies from the newly established Government of Canada, these First Nations signed Treaty 6 (1876) and Treaty 7 (1877), relinquishing possession of most of their traditional bison-hunting territories in exchange for much smaller parcels of reserve land (Daschuk 2013; Marchildon 2009a; Map 2).

Map 2. Plains Indians boundaries, ca. 1850, showing Treaty areas.
(Source: Marchildon 2009c: 5)

When these treaties were signed, the US Plains were already experiencing a ranching boom that would spill over the border into the southwestern portion of the Canadian Prairies (Olefson 2000; Breen 1983). Eager to establish a cattle industry, the Government of Canada passed an order in council to permit 21-year leases of land up to 100,000 acres (approximately 40,500 hectares) for the highly subsidized price of one cent per acre. The original leases prohibited homestead farm settlement to facilitate open (unfenced) ranges. To encourage the northern migration of cattle, the Canadian government also permitted ranchers to import cattle duty-free for two years from the United States. These policies favouring open-range ranching ensured that it expanded rapidly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (Wandel and Marchildon 2010).

The cattle boom ended abruptly in the first decade of the twentieth century. Three major factors seem to have each played a role in bringing this era to an end. First, the introduction of new refrigeration technologies allowed for major import markets, such as Great Britain, to receive less expensive chilled beef from Argentina. Second, an extreme weather event known as the “Killer Winter of 1906–7” decimated the cattle herds in the short-grass prairie of the Palliser Triangle, killing up to 65% of cattle in the Dry Belt. Third, the Canadian government reversed its open-range subsidized lease policy and instead supported and subsidized fenced-off homestead settlement (Evans 1983).

Although cattle ranching remained viable in the western long-grass prairie of the foothills that received higher precipitation, most of the drier short-grass lands of the Palliser Triangle were opened to farm settlement after the Killer Winter of 1906–7. Under the Dominion Lands Act, settlers were given 160 acres (65 hectares) of land under the condition that they cultivate that parcel and establish a permanent homestead on it within three years. In 1909, the Canadian government officially opened the Dry Belt to homesteaders. In conjunction with local real-estate speculators and the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Government of Canada unleashed a major publicity campaign to attract settlers, despite the fact that the Dry Belt received less average rainfall than all other parts of the Palliser Triangle (Marchildon 2007).

A growing British market for imported wheat, coupled with a high world price, encouraged farmers in the Palliser Triangle to cultivate wheat to the exclusion of almost all other grains. The wheat boom brought in both settlers and “suitcase” farmers—individuals from other locales who only worked the land to make a quick profit. The growing population in the region was reinforced by a doubling in the world price of wheat during the First World War. In addition, the region received higher than average rainfall, with even the Dry Belt experiencing bumper crops in 1915 and 1916. However, this boom was the beginning of the end in the Dry Belt in particular, as a prolonged drought took hold in the years that followed (Marchildon 2007; Gorman 1988).

From 1917 until the unusually wet year of 1927, Dry Belt wheat farmers would suffer repeated crop failures due to a lack of rainfall. Drought became an almost permanent feature of the area, recurring year after year. Maps based on a gridded database of mean monthly temperature and total precipitation derived from the Canadian Climate Archive for the Prairie provinces indicate that the Alberta side of the Dry Belt was even more drought-stricken than the Saskatchewan side. These maps also reveal that the extent to which the region was affected by the droughts after 1928 was far larger than the Dry Belt. Indeed, the drought of the Dirty Thirties blanketed the Palliser Triangle and slightly beyond (Marchildon et al. 2008), affecting a far larger population and segment of the Canadian economy. Known within Canada as the “breadbasket of the world,” the Palliser Triangle saw wheat yields plummet and residents migrate to British Columbia, Manitoba, and the forest fringe of the Canadian Prairies (McLeman and Ploeger 2012; McLeman et al. 2010).

The droughts resulted in widespread bankruptcy and poverty for farm families. Many left the devastation in the Palliser Triangle to begin new lives in other parts of Canada. As tax revenues plummeted, local governments were unable to meet their obligations to finance schools, maintain roads, and provide relief for the thousands of destitute farm families (Marchildon and Black 2006; Jones 2002).

The government of Alberta intervened long before that of Saskatchewan because the initial impact of the drought had been greater on its side of the Dry Belt, although some of the policies adopted would be the same in both provinces. The first step was to force banks and other financial institutions to negotiate settlements on farm debt. The next step was to defray the cost of relocating farm families and support local governments in their efforts to provide relief assistance to the families remaining on the land. However, the Alberta government would go further than its provincial neighbour by actively promoting changes in land tenure and, where necessary, replacing some local governments with a provincially appointed administration in the Dry Belt.

The environmental shock caused by the prolonged droughts was considerably exacerbated by the collapse in commodity and stock prices in the Great Depression. In Alberta, per capita income fell by 61%, while in Saskatchewan, where the wheat economy remained dominant throughout the 1930s, per capita income fell by an astounding 72% between 1929 and 1932 (Marchildon 2005). To be sure, there was also a collapse in industrial production affecting central Canada, but the decline in per capita income in Ontario and Quebec (44%) was far less. Having only a small area included in the Palliser Triangle, Manitoba suffered less than Saskatchewan or Alberta: per capita income dropped 49% in the same period, less a result of drought than the decline of business suffered by grain companies and traders headquartered in Winnipeg.

This decline was exacerbated by a collapsing global market in wheat, a market on which Prairie wheat producers depended for the sale of almost all their grain. Beginning in 1928, falling agricultural prices contributed to the stock market crash one year later and would become a major feature of the 1930s (Marchildon 2013). The precipitous decrease in wheat and other grain prices, combined with institutional weaknesses in the banking sectors of numerous advanced industrial countries, initiated a deflationary spiral, which drove a redistribution of income and displaced populations en masse from agricultural regions of countries to non-agricultural regions. Of the wealthier nations in the world, this movement was most pronounced in Canada and the United States, in no small part because of the impact of prolonged drought in the Great Plains of both countries (Madsen 2001).

With the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the federal government intervened, first through large-scale transfers to the provinces for relief payments to thousands of farm families (Marchildon and Black 2006). Eventually, well after similar initiatives in the United States, the federal government created a regional organization to spearhead land and water reclamation initiatives throughout the Palliser Triangle (McLeman et al. 2013).

The remainder of this chapter focuses on two case studies of policy responses to the drought crisis described above. The first summarizes the Alberta government’s response to the earlier drought in the Dry Belt and the actions that ultimately led to the establishment of the Special Areas Administration. The second case study focuses on the Government of Canada’s response to the more expansive drought of the 1930s and the creation of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) to reclaim and conserve both soil and land resources in the Palliser Triangle.

The Special Areas Administration

The Special Areas of Alberta refer to a large—currently 5.2 million acres (2.1 million hectares)—and sparsely populated region on the Alberta side of the Dry Belt. Since the late 1930s, the Special Areas has been governed and managed by a provincially appointed administrative board rather than democratically elected local governments. Although nothing on the order of the droughts of the 1920s and 1930s has recurred, the residents have shown limited desire to eliminate the Special Areas Board and revive the old rural municipality system, in large part because of a continuing fear of drought (Marchildon 2007).

Even by the early 1920s, mounting evidence already suggested that the farm settlement of the Dry Belt had been a mistake. Not only was there less precipitation on average than in the rest of the Palliser Triangle, but the Dry Belt seemed even more prone to sustained episodes of drought than the rest of the Palliser Triangle. In 1921, the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) formed the provincial government, elected in part to address the drought catastrophe in the Dry Belt. According to historian David Jones (2002), the Dry Belt was likely the greatest problem that faced the UFA government in the 1920s and would remain one of its most intractable problems until its defeat in 1935.

Initially, the UFA encouraged the renegotiation of bank loans made to farmers by empowering a government commissioner to negotiate the settlement of debts. By 1922, most farmers had endured the misfortune of five successive years of drought, which in turn had exacted a toll on local businesses, municipalities, and school districts. The purpose of negotiating settlements between debtors and creditors was to save the farms, businesses, school districts, and local governments in the Dry Belt.

However, even with debt rescheduling, only a minority of farms and businesses remained viable, so the UFA government then offered free transportation to destitute farm families who were willing to leave the Dry Belt. Sharing one-third of this cost with the federal government and railway companies, the provincial government provided each family with up to two railway cars to transport its machinery, farm supplies, livestock, and furniture. By 1926, almost 2,000 farm families had taken advantage of the assistance to move north of Calgary or further west to the irrigated districts near Lethbridge (Marchildon 2007).

That same year, the provincial and federal governments established a commission to study the Red Deer and Saskatchewan Rivers, from the town of Tilley in the west to the Saskatchewan border in the east. Covering 1.5 million acres, the Tilley East area (subsequently known as Special Area No. 1) had lost 80% of its peak population by 1926, the result of continual crop failures. Farms were abandoned at such a rate that the viability of the few remaining farms was further threatened by blowing topsoil from the untended fields encircling them. As indicated in Table 1, deserted farms were far more prevalent on the Alberta side of the Dry Belt (roughly contained in Alberta Census Divisions 3 and 5) than on the Saskatchewan side.

The federal-provincial commission recommended that a single board manage all land and water resources throughout the Tilley East Area so that the government could repossess abandoned land for non-payment of taxes. This practice would then allow the government to lease the better land at subsidized rates to the smattering of viable farmers and ranchers left in the area and reseed the worst land, converting it to community pastures to be used by mixed farmers and ranchers for minimal cost. However, implementing the commission’s recommendation was difficult because all public (Crown) land was owned by the Government of Canada and thus not available for allocation by the provincial government.

Map 3. Special Areas, ca. 1942.

It was only through a constitutional change—the Natural Resource Transfer Agreement of 1930—that it became possible for the provincial government to create the Tilley East Area Board and assign it the power to own and reallocate lands. With its new powers, the Tilley East Area Board leased and sold land to enlarge the most viable ranch or mixed ranch-farm operations, and actively discouraged farmers who were attempting to continue a wheat monoculture. The board also converted abandoned farms into community pastures. The experiment proved so successful that the provincial government created a similar body in the Berry Creek Area, northwest of Tilley East. In addition, the school districts were also dissolved, and schools were placed under the administrative control of the Berry Creek Special Area Board. This was followed by the establishment of the Neutral Hills, Sounding Creek, and Sullivan Lake Special Areas in 1935. In the next two years, the provincial government also set up the Acadia Valley, Rosenheim, and Bow West Special Areas (Map 3).

In 1938, during one of the worst drought years of the 1930s, all of these areas were consolidated under a single Special Areas Board. Although appointed by the provincial government in Edmonton, the board and its members were headquartered in the Dry Belt community of Hanna. The provincial government dissolved the 34 separate municipalities and improvement districts, effectively eliminating local government and putting all legal and governmental control in the hands of the new board. The rationale behind the change was to ensure that the Special Areas Board had all the necessary tools at its disposal to manage land and water resources, as well as roads, schools, and other physical and social infrastructure, for almost one-third of the province’s agricultural land base. The three-member board was conferred a remarkably broad mandate to manage the Special Areas in the “manner it deemed most efficient for the remaining residents” of the Alberta Dry Belt (Marchildon 2007: 263; Gorman 1988).

The provincial government’s chief policy objective was to reduce the drought vulnerability of the Dry Belt by thinning out both population (Table 2) and infrastructure, and transforming land tenure from small and unsustainable wheat farms to larger ranches and ranch-farms (Marchildon 2007; Jones 1978). Private ownership was increasingly supplanted by public ownership, under the managerial control of the Special Areas Board. Ranchers and mixed farmers obtained access to the land through inexpensive Crown leases and community pastures. In its first year of operation, the Special Areas Board leased grazing lands for 2.5 cents per acre and rented crop lands for a one-sixth share of the annual crop. Both rates were well below prevailing market values in the rest of the province (Marchildon 2007).

In 1936, farms in the Alberta Dry Belt were already 1.7 times the size of the average Alberta farm. However, with the intervention of the Special Areas Board, these Dry Belt farms would grow to 3.6 times the size of the average Alberta farm by 1956, even though the absolute size of the average farm or farm-ranch had also grown considerably over this period (Marchildon 2007; Gorman 1988). Thus, the policy objective of improving the viability of farm-ranch operations by increasing their size was attained.

Despite the fact that the policy came at the price of residents not having democratically elected rural governments, residents in the Special Areas have consistently rejected a return to local rural governments. Although there have been no sustained multi-year droughts since the 1930s, enough residents continue to fear the possibility of prolonged drought to support this institutional arrangement, one that is unique in the Canadian Prairies. Despite at least two major reviews by the provincial government, one in 1953 and another in 1960, residents rejected a return to more local democratic control (Marchildon 2007).

The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration

In contrast to the Alberta government, the federal government failed to establish any institutional mechanisms to address recurrent drought in the Palliser Triangle until the mid-1930s. Prior to this, the federal government directed its resources to help the provinces fund relief for the Triangle’s rural residents. In July 1931, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett described the drought ravaging the Triangle as perhaps “the greatest national calamity that has ever overtaken this country” (Marchildon and Anderson 2008: 79). Relief was essential to provide the basic foodstuffs and clothing, as well as seed and other essential farm supplies, to ensure that farm families had sufficient nutrition and were also able to feed their remaining livestock and plant another crop. However, most municipalities in the Palliser Triangle lacked sufficient revenues to fund relief. This situation forced the provincial governments to intervene with relief paid for out of provincial revenues, but they too were unable to sustain the relief efforts without assistance from the federal government.

It was impossible to predict how long the droughts—or the Great Depression—would persist, so the federal government transferred money to the provinces for relief payments on a year-to-year basis. Saskatchewan was the province that received the most relief funding, because of the greater number of wheat farmers in the Palliser Triangle. In the 1931–32 season, some 305,000 Saskatchewan residents, nearly one-third of the population of the province, received relief (Marchildon and Black 2006).

The Dirty Thirties became synonymous with the Palliser Triangle because of the tendency of lighter soil types in the Triangle to blow and drift (McLeman and Ploeger 2012). Governments and agricultural experts had been encouraging dryland farmers to allow a portion of their land to go fallow each year to amass moisture for the following year’s crop. However, this practice would prove disastrous on the light lands in the Palliser Triangle. The frequent cultivation required to clear the surface of moisture-robbing vegetation pulverized the soil to a powder, making it highly susceptible to wind erosion during a prolonged drought. These lighter soils, combined with high winds, resulted in dust storms that blackened the prairie skies (Wheaton 1992).

One of the main purposes of rural relief was to encourage farmers to “stay on the land” rather than drift into the cities seeking what turned out to be non-existent employment, a situation that could lead to civil unrest. However, even with relief, farm families were still abandoning their farms in the areas of the Palliser Triangle that had been rendered a desert by the drought and topsoil erosion. Although the Alberta government had concluded that wheat farming alone was no longer tenable in the Palliser Triangle, a contrary view was held by decision makers in Saskatchewan and Ottawa, who felt that with a few exceptions, most of the Palliser Triangle could be reclaimed and once again made productive for grain farming. As such, the exodus of thousands of farm families from southern Saskatchewan to the southern edge of the boreal forest was a source of disquiet to both governments (Marchildon 2009b).

In 1934, in response to pressure from political leaders in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, farm groups, the agricultural press, and segments of the general public, the federal government began working on a concerted effort to reclaim the Palliser Triangle. Early the next year, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act was passed in Parliament to allocate money to the federal Department of Agriculture to plant grass in blown-out areas, build small earthen dams to conserve water, and establish demonstration farms in some of the most drought-stricken parts of the Palliser Triangle. Although the Bennett government was defeated mere months after the Act came into force, these initiatives were actually augmented over the next few years. In 1937, the PFRA was established as a separate agency of the federal government with its head office in Regina—at the time the largest city in the Palliser Triangle (Gray 1967).

As part of this expansion, the PFRA was mandated to take possession of drought-stricken land offered up by the provinces for the purpose of creating community pastures. The Saskatchewan government supported the scheme from its inception, but the Manitoba government would not agree to transfer heavily eroded lands in the southwest part of the province to the PFRA for community pastures until 1939. Alberta refused, permanently, to support the PFRA’s community pasture program, in part because of its own extensive administration of community pastures through the Special Areas Board. However, the Alberta government eventually co-operated with the federal government to allow the PFRA to develop large-scale irrigation and dam projects. These projects captured the water flowing from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the Canadian Prairies. The earliest irrigation projects were in the Lethbridge area but were soon extended to the 30,000-acre Rolling Hills project near Brooks (Balkwill 2002).

By the end of the Great Depression and the extensive droughts of the 1930s, the PFRA had facilitated the construction of thousands of dugouts—artificial farm ponds—and earthen dams for watering livestock. Dozens of PFRA community pastures were providing inexpensive access to grass for mixed farmers and ranchers in southern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba. In addition, the PFRA had conducted a comprehensive soil survey of 90% of the Palliser Triangle. With its 200 agrologists, engineers, hydrologists, soil scientists, field husbandmen, and other highly trained staff, the PFRA would become a fixture in the southern Canadian Prairies for the remaining decades of the twentieth century. By 2010 the PFRA had ceased to exist as a separate branch within the federal Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, and its community pasture program had been dismantled by the federal government.

Conclusion

The two case studies reflect the extent to which governments, both provincial and federal, were capable of intervening to facilitate more effective adaptation to the extreme drought conditions, first in the Dry Belt in the 1920s and then in the whole of the Palliser Triangle in the 1930s. Both the Special Areas Board and the PFRA altered existing institutional arrangements to reduce individual and community vulnerability in the most vulnerable part of the Canadian Prairies.

In both cases, governments initially intervened with programs and policies that were more incremental in nature. Only later, after it was clear that the drought was not a temporary phenomenon, did the provincial and federal governments intervene to facilitate more radical changes to the institutional environment.

Where governments did not feel they needed to act, they did not do so, as illustrated in Saskatchewan’s portion of the Dry Belt during the 1920s. In any case, no government acted proactively in advance of the drought crisis. Once established, however, the organizations created out of the crisis continued to operate with considerable public support for decades afterward, despite the fact that multi-year droughts on the scale of the 1920s and 1930s did not reoccur in the Palliser Triangle. While the Special Areas continue to operate in Alberta, the same is not true for the PFRA, only recently dismantled by the federal government. One can only surmise that the policy assumption underlying this decision is that the severe and prolonged drought conditions of the 1930s will never again return to the Palliser Triangle, a questionable assumption at best given the cyclical nature of prolonged periods of drought in the region and future climate change effects, which are likely to exacerbate these extreme climate conditions (McLeman et al. 2013).

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