Remembering Barry Broadfoot And The Ten Lost Years

After working as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun for seventeen years, Barry Broadfoot left his desk to travel “at least 15,000 miles” with a tape recorder and collect oral accounts of living through Canada’s Great Depression. He interviewed hundreds of Canadians from all walks of life. Sometimes he conducted scheduled interviews, but often he just struck up conversations in bars, grocery stores, and the like. The result was his book, Ten Lost Years: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression (1973).

The book was a hit and immediately established Broadfoot as an integral part of Canada’s cultural scene in his day. He went on to write eight more books through the ’70 & ’80s, including the best-selling The Six War Years (1975) and The Pioneers Years (1976). It was fairly common to see Barry interviewed on daytime talk shows and CBC radio, and it was always obvious that he was a beloved figure in Canada’s media scene, much like Stuart McLean and his Vinyl Café series. Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years was also adapted into a very successful and well-received eponymous stage-play that is still performed to this day in Kingston, Ontario at the Kingston Theatre Alliance.

Born in 1926 in Winnipeg, Barry was a child of the Depression. After living through such a formative and traumatic era of Canadian history, he was surprised to find how little was being taught about the Depression in schools. He writes:

“Can ten years just be chopped out of a nation’s history?…The more I thought about it the more I came to believe that everyone under 50 years of age should have a chance to learn these hard times when a woman in a textile factory could work 54 or 60 hours a week for $5; when the people of Southern Ontario sent hundreds of freight car loads of fruits and vegetables and warm clothing to Saskatchewan, where millions of wheat-growing acres were burned out and blowing away as dust; and where families turned their backs on their hard-won farms and walked away; when a firm red spring salmon at Vancouver was giving the fisherman one cent a pound; and when, in New Brunswick, the net cash income of the average farm one year was just $20.”

Clearly, Broadfoot was a man who had great empathy for his countrymen that suffered through the travails of Canada’s Great Depression and showed so much perseverance.

Ten Lost Years contains about thirty first-hand accounts from the Depression. Some are light-hearted tales of fortitude, while others are full of haunting tragedy. The oral accounts range from a couple paragraphs to several pages. Some story titles are: Good Old Ketchup Soup, Gopher Pie? Sure, and Ever Eaten Wolf?

Here is a short one called What is Starvation?

                  “If starvation is what they do in India, then I never starved. If being hungry was not having a scrap of food in two days, then I was hungry lots of times.”

Or, The Receipt:

                  My mother was a widow and she shipped a steer. A big prime steer, from Saskatchewan to the Winnipeg stockyards because they told her she’d get a better price. But with the prices then and the weight loss and the trucker costs and the selling commission and what have you, she got a letter back from the agent saying she owed them $6. Without a word of lie.

                  She was a proud woman and paid her debts and she really rustled for the $6 but she sent it off. And when the receipt came back she framed it and hung it on the wall of our parlor until she died and we sold the house. Pretty good one eh?

Barry Broadfoot retired in the early ’90s in Nanaimo, BC. He passed on there in 2003 at the age of 77, but not before donating $20,000 to create a journalism endowment for Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo (now Vancouver Island University). What a great Canadian.

You don’t find any journalist like Barry Broadfoot anymore. Sure, there are some journalists that are getting around and doing some excellent work, but no one is really putting in the work to record and defend the history of regular Canadians. A lot of this has to with a shift in mainstream historical inquiry within the Canadian intelligentsia and media.

Mainstream historical inquiry in modern Canada is mostly preoccupied with detailing the historical grievances of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and other minority groups, or deconstructing classic Canadian historical figures.

Despite there being over twenty million people in Canada that are direct descendants of Canadian pioneers and settlers that lived through Canada’s Great Depression, if you go into any Canadian bookstore or library, you will very rarely see a book that tells their stories. Instead you are much more likely to come across The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of The History of North America Turtle Island by Kent Monkman & Gisèle Gordon.

In a nutshell, the current discourse around the settling of Canada is that a bunch of European swindlers came to Canada, tricked the Indigenous peoples into giving up their land, and then many more Europeans showed up, built stuff and oppressed everybody, and Canada was born.

It says a lot that the pioneers of the Great Depression – a people who have such interesting stories that we can learn so much from – have been relegated to the dustbins of history. Whether or not one has a positive view of colonialism, it can’t be denied that the pioneers of Canada lived through an interesting and distinctive era of human history that, despite all the ugliness we focus on today, was full of bravery, fortitude, heroism, tragedy, progress, and charity.

Much like the Indigenous tribes of Canada, the Metis, and the Inuit, the pioneers that went on to live through Canada’s Great Depression lived during times that were tragic and heroic, and they too have many more stories to tell us that we can all learn from.

The term “pioneer” or “settler” as a point of historical inquiry has been largely erased from Canada’s national consciousness and replaced with the term “colonization”. Further, the term “pioneers” is rarely used nowadays, and the current fashion is to refer to them as colonizers, which is probably because the word pioneer has a heroic ring to it.

I think one of the reasons that Canada’s pioneer history has become a shunned subject is because looking into the challenges of pioneer life humanizes them. And if they are humanized, that might lead to compassion for the “colonizer”.  Academics and activists use a broader term like “colonizer” so that the millions of largely impoverished pioneers are only seen in the abstract – not as human beings, but just part of a system of pure injustice called “colonialism”.

This flawed perspective of history is promoted because it is used to justify the radical policy of endless mass-immigration into Canada. By portraying the settling of Canada as an illegitimate criminal act and dehumanizing the people involved in the process, mass-immigration activists are able to label non-indigenous Canadians that have been here for generations who are against mass-immigration as illegitimate racists that must be silenced.

That is why Broadfoot’s books are more important now than ever, because they are a record of a people. For the twenty million or so Canadians that are descended from the pioneers, Broadfoot’sTen Lost Years book show us for what we really are.

Part of the upheaval that Canada is currently going through is the change from the historical narrative of “a country built by hardy pioneers” to “a country stolen by greedy colonizers.”

During a time of changes like we are in, we must hold on to our stories, and we must maintain a record of how things really were.

If the twenty million Canadians that are descended from the Canadian pioneers who survived Canada’s Great Depression don’t protect and promote the stories of the pioneers, then progressive academics will be able to label them and their history however they want.

Reading a copy of Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years is a good place for Canadians to start reclaiming a more balanced and complete history of our country.

Editors’ note: Readers interested in checking out Barry Broadfoot’s Ten Lost Years can order a copy here. You might also consider borrowing a copy from your local library – if they don’t have one, you can fill out a request form to ensure that books like this remain widely available and the memory of Canadian pioneers lives on.