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Bill Waiser, All Hell Can't Stop Us: The On-to-Ottawa Trek and the Regina Riot (Calgary: Fifth House 2003)
THE ON-TO-OTTAWA TREK and the Regina Riot symbolize the extreme ruthlessness of the Canadian state's response to the unemployment crisis of the Great Depression. Government and police officials, taking their cue from Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and his bourgeois supporters, conveniently characterized the joblessness of the period as largely the fault of the victims and charged that those who organized the unemployed to demand a political solution to the problem were communists.
While the general story of the trek and its violent termination in Regina on Dominion Day, 1935, is well known, Bill Waiser provides the first substantial history of those events in this compelling and well-written narrative. Starting with the organizing among relief-camp workers in British Columbia, Waiser follows the trekkers through the Vancouver demonstrations that marked the beginning of the trek to events in Regina between their arrival in the city on 15 June and...