Glen Pearson Journeys Podcast
Glen Pearson has spent his entire adult life in pursuit of public service, democracy, and the primacy of citizenship. But those words can sound abstract until you see what they really mean over the course of a human life. They mean showing up when others turn away. They mean believing that communities are not held together by systems alone, but by moral commitments — by ordinary people who decide, day after day, that the lives around them matter.
Over decades of work in politics, humanitarian service, community leadership, and writing, Pearson has come to understand something that modern society often forgets: a healthy democracy is not primarily built in legislatures, media studios, corporate towers, or in algorithms. It is built in the quiet habits of citizenship. It is built whenever people choose responsibility over cynicism, contribution over withdrawal, and neighbourliness over isolation.
For much of his life, he has tried to give language to those truths. Through more than seventy books, countless articles, podcasts, and his long-standing column in the London Free Press, Glen has chronicled not merely political events, but the deeper moral and social currents moving beneath them. His work consistently returns to the same central question: how do human beings remain connected to one another in an age that so often pulls them apart?
That question has become especially urgent in our time. We live amid extraordinary technological advancement and unprecedented material convenience, yet many people move through life carrying a quiet loneliness. Institutions that once formed identity and belonging have weakened. Public life has grown harsher, more performative, more tribal. Too often citizenship itself has been reduced to outrage, branding, or consumption, as though democracy were simply a marketplace of grievances rather than a shared moral project.
Pearson’s life and writing offer another vision.
He argues that meaning is not found in endless self-preoccupation, but in service. That purpose emerges when people dedicate themselves to something larger than personal advancement. That communities flourish when citizens stop asking only what they are owed and begin asking what they are called to give.
Again and again, his work points toward the small but transformative acts that renew societies: feeding neighbours, mentoring children, protecting institutions, listening across differences, creating spaces where dignity can survive. He believes the future will not ultimately be saved by ideology or spectacle, but by the patient rebuilding of trust between people who learn once more how to see one another as fellow travellers rather than enemies. Thus the title of this site – Journeys.
At the heart of Pearson’s message is a profound faith in human possibility. Not a naïve optimism that denies suffering or division, but a deeper conviction that people are capable of moral courage when summoned toward a worthy purpose. He reminds us that citizenship is not merely a legal status. It is a moral vocation. Democracy survives only when enough people choose to carry one another through difficult times.
In an age searching desperately for meaning, Glen Pearson invites us back to the enduring truths that make both lives and nations worth building: service, decency, sacrifice, community, and love.
Glen Pearson Journeys Podcast
Unravelling - Chapter 2
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This video is about My Movie 102
I'm Brian Pearson from the Journey Podcast. Joining me as we do a deep dive into my new book, The Unraveling, about how Canada lost its way. I hope you enjoyed this dive.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to this deep dive. As we open today's source material, I really want you to picture a specific photograph.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the one from 1933, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. So you're looking at this line of men, just hundreds of them.
SPEAKER_02It's a striking image.
SPEAKER_00It really is. They're stretching down the street, wrapping around the corner, like completely spilling out of the frame, and they're waiting outside a government relief office.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell But the details in that photo are what really get you.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus Right. Because these aren't the, you know, hollow-eyed, ragged transients from the popular mythology of the Great Depression. These men are wearing really good suits.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell They have pressed trousers.
SPEAKER_00Yes, pressed trousers, and their shoes have been recently polished. Like, I mean, they are dressed for a world they desperately believe still exists.
SPEAKER_02They're standing in this queue with this, well, a really devastating kind of dignity.
SPEAKER_00Completely convinced that the system which just comprehensively failed them is going to eventually self-correct.
SPEAKER_02Trevor Burrus, Jr. Which is such a powerful starting point.
SPEAKER_00It is. And our mission today is to pull from this fascinating historical text we're calling Chapter Two, The Lesson of the Depression. We want to uncover how this catastrophic economic collapse fundamentally redefined what freedom actually means. Right. And more importantly, for you listening right now, we're going to explore why the lesson those men learned is a blind spot we are, you know, still wrestling with today.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Because the core of that blind spot really comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the market itself.
SPEAKER_00How so?
SPEAKER_02Well, the central realization of the 1930s, this agonizing lesson, was that the market as a structural mechanism is entirely incapable of malice.
SPEAKER_00Okay, meaning it doesn't have an agenda.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. It does not hate you. But the flip side is that it's equally incapable of care. It allocates resources based purely on price and profit.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So when it contracts, it does so with total unflinching indifference to human suffering. I mean, the market simply does not distinguish between liquidating an inefficient factory and starving a decent family.
SPEAKER_00That's a terrifying reality to face.
SPEAKER_02It is. And we're going to examine what happens when an entire society grasps that terrifying reality and how that trauma basically birthed the modern social safety net.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, which is wild because I was looking at the sheer cliff dive of the economic numbers in the source text, and I honestly couldn't figure out why the leadership of the time didn't see the depth of this coming.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the contrast is stark.
SPEAKER_00Right. Because in 1929, things were booming. Wheat prices were strong, manufacturing in Central Canada was expanding rapidly.
SPEAKER_02Everything looked great on paper.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And when the New York stock market collapsed over four days in October 1929, the financial press, Prime Minister McKenzie King, and later RB Bennett, they all treated it like a brief disruption. Why were they so convinced it was just a blip?
SPEAKER_02Honestly, the classical economic theory of the era practically demanded that belief.
SPEAKER_00Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the prevailing orthodoxy was that markets always tend toward equilibrium. So if demand drops, prices drop, which supposedly stimulates new demand, and the cycle just corrects itself.
SPEAKER_00Huh. So they literally didn't have the intellectual framework to process a sustained systemic contraction.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The idea that a modern economy could just fall into a pit and stay there, it defied their entire understanding of how the world worked. Wow. So when Canada's gross national product plummeted by nearly 40 percent between 1929 and 1933, it just broke every model they had.
SPEAKER_00I mean, the numbers for unemployment are staggering too, going from about 3% nationally to nearly 20%.
SPEAKER_02And even higher in some places.
SPEAKER_00Right. In some manufacturing hubs in Ontario and Quebec, it crossed 30 percent. You read these statistics and they almost lose their meaning.
SPEAKER_02They become abstract, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But the source text paints a picture of the prairies that reads like a post-apocalyptic novel. It wasn't just a financial crash.
SPEAKER_02No, it was a compounding ecological disaster. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00You had a historic drought hitting at the exact moment global wheat prices collapsed. The topsoil literally blew away.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, turning the noon sky brown with dust.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Just burying fences and suffocating livestock. And wheat went from $1.60 a bushel to just 35 cents.
SPEAKER_02That is an 80% collapse in price. And this is where that structural indifference of the market we discussed becomes a physical reality. Right. The prairie farmer's income drops by 80%, but his input costs specifically, his debt obligations remain entirely static.
SPEAKER_00Okay, let's unpack this for you listening. Think of it like this. Imagine your entire industry vanishes overnight. Your income drops by 80%, but your bank doesn't care.
SPEAKER_02They still demand the exact same mortgage payment.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So the market is basically a thermostat. It doesn't care if you're freezing in the room, it just reads the ambient temperature and acts.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Right. If the math says shut off the heat, it shuts off the heat.
SPEAKER_00The bank holds your mortgage, they read the financial thermostat, and they demand the payment, totally ignoring the brown sky outside your window.
SPEAKER_02A perfect analogy. Bank's internal logic dictates foreclosure, regardless of the environmental context.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Which just devastated the region.
SPEAKER_02Completely. The result was a mass depopulation event. Between 1931 and 1941, an estimated 250,000 people fled the southern prairies.
SPEAKER_00250,000.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Ghost towns, abandoned homesteads. This was the physical record of what an unmediated market does to human communities when the signals point to contraction. It physically scarred the demography of the region for a generation.
SPEAKER_00Knowing all this, I look at the federal government's response and I keep asking myself, like, why didn't Prime Minister R. B. Bennett just open the treasury?
SPEAKER_02That's a fair question.
SPEAKER_00Because the text points out he wasn't a cartoon villain. He personally mailed his own money to unemployed citizens who wrote to him in desperation.
SPEAKER_02He did, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if he had personal compassion, why was his systemic response so paralyzed?
SPEAKER_02Well, Bennett suffered from an intellectual blind spot shared by almost the entire governing class of the British Empire at that time.
SPEAKER_00Which was what?
SPEAKER_02He viewed poverty as an aggregate of individual misfortunes. He could feel profound empathy for the starving man standing in front of him, but he lacked the conceptual lens to see that this man was the inevitable byproduct of a macroeconomic system functioning exactly as designed.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_02Because they believe mass unemployment was a collection of personal failures, their policy responses were incredibly punitive.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, which is really the only way to explain the relief camps.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_00You have 20% of the workforce untethered from the economy, riding the rails from city to city looking for nonexistent jobs.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And the state solution is shocking.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Yeah, they have the Department of National Defense sweep tens of thousands of young men out of the cities and hide them in remote wilderness camps.
SPEAKER_02Out of sight, out of mind.
SPEAKER_00They live in barracks, eat institutional food, and get paid twenty cents a day to chop wood or build roads that lead basically nowhere.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell The location of those camps was highly strategic, though.
SPEAKER_00Oh, you mean keeping them isolated?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. The government's primary objective wasn't economic stimulus. It was political containment. Keep them out of urban centers where they might organize, unionize, or riot. Aaron Powell, that makes sense. Furthermore, the conditions in those camps were deliberately calibrated to be miserable.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell I read that and had to reread it. Wait, so the terrible conditions were literally the point. Yes. It's like a doctor prescribing a medication with awful side effects just to make absolutely sure you're actually sick. It feels like intentional cruelty disguised as policy. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02The cruelty was an applied moral philosophy. It stems directly from the Victorian poor law principle known as less eligibility.
SPEAKER_00Less eligibility.
SPEAKER_02Right? What's fascinating here is the establishment fundamentally believed that human beings are inherently lazy and that the only thing keeping society functioning is the threat of starvation. Wow. Therefore, any relief provided by the state must be definitively worse than the absolute lowest paying, most miserable job available in the private market.
SPEAKER_00Because if you made the relief camps comfortable, the logic went you would destroy a man's incentive to work.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. They were applying a psychological weapon to a structural economic crisis. They thought mass unemployment was an individual problem the unemployed had to solve themselves.
SPEAKER_00But I mean, you you could only enforce intentional discomfort on a starving population for so long before the physics of the situation changed.
SPEAKER_02The pressure inevitably built.
SPEAKER_00Right. And eventually the citizens pushed back physically. In June 1935, the men in those British Columbia relief camps simply walked out.
SPEAKER_02They'd had enough.
SPEAKER_00About 1,500 of them boarded freight trains headed east to Ottawa to confront Bennett directly.
SPEAKER_02This became the on-to-Ottawa trek. And as they moved through the prairies, the movement swelled to roughly 2,000 men.
SPEAKER_00Organizing under the Relief Camp Workers Union, right?
SPEAKER_02Yes, and they maintained strict discipline. They wanted to present themselves as respectable citizens with the legitimate grievances. A very symbolic day for a clash.
SPEAKER_00Bennett decides he cannot let this army of unemployed men reach the Capitol. He orders the RCMP to stop them. The police move into Market Square in Regina to arrest the leaders, and it ignites a massive riot.
SPEAKER_02It was chaos.
SPEAKER_00Scores of people are injured, one police officer is killed, and the trekkers camp is completely dismantled.
SPEAKER_02Now, from a purely tactical standpoint, the federal government achieved its goal. The trek was broken.
SPEAKER_00But strategically.
SPEAKER_02Strategically, in a riot was a profound disaster for the Canadian establishment. I mean, sending mounted police into a public square to beat starving unemployed citizens on a national holiday.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's not a good look.
SPEAKER_02It served as a glaring moral indictment of the entire capitalist system. The public watched this play out and realized the basic social contract was broken.
SPEAKER_00Even Bennett seemed to realize the ground was collapsing under him. Facing an election he knew he was going to lose, he went on the radio in early 1935 and suddenly proposed a Canadian New Deal.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a huge pivot for him.
SPEAKER_00Right. He pitched minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and heavy business regulation. The ultimate defender of the free market suddenly sounded like a reformer.
SPEAKER_02Bennett's pivot, desperate as it was, is crucial historical evidence.
SPEAKER_00Because it showed he knew the system had failed.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The courts ended up striking most of his New Deal down, and he lost the election to McKenzie King anyway. But the fact that Bennett proposed it at all proved that even the most committed ideological defenders of the status quo had to concede that the unmediated free market was a failed project.
SPEAKER_00So with the centrist liberals and the conservative establishment failing to provide coherent answers, the intellectual void gets filled from the political margins.
SPEAKER_02This is where things get really interesting.
SPEAKER_00Right. This is where we see the birth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, founded in Calgary in 1932. And I want to be super clear to you, listening, we are impartially reporting the arguments presented in our source text here.
SPEAKER_02Right. We aren't endorsing either the socialist or capitalist viewpoints.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Exactly. But the CCF releases the Regina Manifesto in 1933, and it is essentially a declaration of war on the existing economic order.
SPEAKER_02The manifesto explicitly blamed the private ownership of the means of production for the misery of the Depression.
SPEAKER_00He didn't hold back.
SPEAKER_02Not at all. It called for the eradication of capitalism and its replacement with a system dominated by public ownership, social insurance, and national economic planning.
SPEAKER_00And what's vital to understand is that the architects of this document, people like Frank Underhill, Eugene Forzi, Frank Scott, and Leonard Marsh, they were largely academics.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and they weren't just shouting slogans.
SPEAKER_00Right. They were using the hard data of the depression. They mapped out the structural flaws, arguing that the free market's boom and bust cycle was just too destructive to be left to its own devices.
SPEAKER_02Precisely. They used the data of the collapse to prove that the free market inherently required democratic supervision to prevent it from devouring the society that hosted it. Wow. But while the academics provided the intellectual scaffolding, they did not give the movement its ultimate political traction.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And here's where it gets really interesting. That brings us to Tommy Douglas.
SPEAKER_02A key figure.
SPEAKER_00He wasn't an academic or an economist. He was a Baptist minister from Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Right. I find his trajectory fascinating because he realized that telling a starving man to focus on spiritual things is entirely useless when his kids are hungry. He saw poverty as a daily pastoral fact, not a distant theoretical abstraction. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Douglas grounded those massive academic theories in the practical reality of suffering.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Elected to Parliament in 1935 and later becoming the premier of Saskatchewan in 1944, his 17-year tenure changed the trajectory of the country. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00He really did.
SPEAKER_02Douglas proved that a government operating firmly within a liberal democracy could intervene in the market to provide basic security without causing an economic catastrophe.
SPEAKER_00Right, without nationalizing the entire economy or triggering the collapse his opponents predicted.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. He dragged the political center of gravity toward what would eventually become the modern welfare state.
SPEAKER_00The source text highlights that Douglas and the CCF weren't just fighting over policy. They were fighting to redefine the very concept of what it means to be free.
SPEAKER_02This is such a crucial point.
SPEAKER_00They forced a philosophical shift between negative liberty and positive liberty.
SPEAKER_02This distinction is the intellectual engine of the entire era. Negative liberty is freedom from interference.
SPEAKER_00Like the state leaving you alone.
SPEAKER_02Right. It dictates that the state cannot imprison you without cause, and private power cannot arbitrarily coerce you. This is the bedrock of classical liberalism, and it remains absolutely vital.
SPEAKER_00But the reformers argued that negative liberty is an incomplete equation.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Positive liberty is the freedom to do something which inherently requires material conditions.
SPEAKER_00Let me try an analogy for you here. So negative liberty is like being told you are completely free to drive anywhere you want.
SPEAKER_02Sounds great.
SPEAKER_00Right, wonderful. Except you don't own a car and there are no roads.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Positive liberty is the state helping build the roads, so your freedom actually means something in the real world.
SPEAKER_02If we connect this to the bigger picture, formal freedom without material capacity is just an abstraction. The men trapped in those relief camps, earning 20 cents a day, forbidden from entering cities, they possessed negative liberty.
SPEAKER_00Because no one had formally enslaved them?
SPEAKER_02Right. But they were not free in any meaningful lived sense. They were prisoners of a collapsed labor market.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The argument the CCF advanced was that the welfare state providing health care, education, and economic security was not the enemy of freedom. It was the absolute prerequisite for it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Now, the text does acknowledge the opposing argument, which is, you know, still incredibly prevalent today. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Yes, the classical capitalist viewpoint.
SPEAKER_00Right, which argues that economic outcomes are a reflection of individual merit, talent, and effort. The fear is that government intervention distorts the natural reward system of human endeavor.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell And reformers of the 1930s understood that people do differ in talent and work ethic. Sure. But their critique of the pure merit-based argument was that it systematically ignores the massive role of circumstance.
SPEAKER_00Oh, definitely.
SPEAKER_02To pretend outcomes are purely based on merit ignores the family you were born into, the health shocks you endure, and the macroeconomic conditions present when you enter the workforce. It mistakes a partial truth for a complete one.
SPEAKER_00And speaking of the weight of circumstance, I want to dive into the geography of inequality during this time. Because the suffering of the Great Depression was aggressively uneven.
SPEAKER_02Very much so.
SPEAKER_00The corporate and financial classes, centered largely around Bay Street in Toronto and in Montreal, emerged from the 1930s with their structural power largely intact.
SPEAKER_02They took financial hits, certainly, but they didn't face the existential ruin we saw elsewhere.
SPEAKER_00Meanwhile, the prairies, the resource towns in the north, and the urban poor were absolutely devastated.
SPEAKER_02This uneven distribution actually birthed Western alienation. The lasting grievance was realizing the federal government would offer the prairies the misery of relief camps while protecting the banks of central Canada.
SPEAKER_00I want to push further on how the state actively engineered who suffered too, because the source text details the staggering, unique devastation inflicted on indigenous communities.
SPEAKER_02Yes, this is a vital piece of the history.
SPEAKER_00This wasn't just market indifference. This was state-mandated exclusion. I was reading about the mechanics of the Indian Act during this period, and it is chilling.
SPEAKER_02The permit system under the Indian Act is a prime example of positive liberty being actively denied.
SPEAKER_00How did that work exactly?
SPEAKER_02Legally, indigenous farmers were barred from selling their produce, their livestock, or even their firewood on the open market without explicit written permission, a permit from a federal Indian agent.
SPEAKER_00Wait, really? So an indigenous farmer manages to grow a crop during the worst drought in history, finds a willing buyer in the market, but the state just intercepts the transaction.
SPEAKER_02Frequently, yes. India agents often refuse to issue the permits, arguing that indigenous participation in the market would create unfair competition for white farmers who were struggling.
SPEAKER_00So the produce would just rot.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. The government actively prevented indigenous communities from mobilizing their own resources to survive the crisis.
SPEAKER_00That is awful.
SPEAKER_02It really highlights how the structural indifference of the market was compounded by systemic, racially targeted legislation.
SPEAKER_00Pulling all of these threads together, we returned the overarching lesson of the 1930s.
SPEAKER_02The ultimate takeaway.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. The generation that survived the dust, the relief camps, and the riots absorbed a brutal truth. The market will not inherently protect citizens. Right. The depression proved that security, the simple assurance that a single industry failure or illness won't instantly render your family destitute, that security must be provided by democratic government.
SPEAKER_02They realized that while no government can guarantee perpetual prosperity, a democratic state must guarantee a floor.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02This terrible education laid the foundation for the post-war welfare state. They built institutional mechanisms, unemployment insurance, public health care, pensions, to socialize the risks of economic life that the pure market ignores.
SPEAKER_00So I ask you, the listener, to look at how we discuss the economy today. Listen to the debates about inflation, employment, and social programs.
SPEAKER_02Very familiar.
SPEAKER_00How often do we still hear the exact echoes of the 1930s? The enduring idea that poverty is purely an individual failing, or the argument that struggling people just need the right incentive to work.
SPEAKER_02The source text leaves us grappling with a really profound reality. The generation that lived through the Great Depression, the people who pay the agonizing physical and psychological tuition to learn that the market lacks a moral compass, they are almost entirely gone.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_02Today, as we debate dismantling parts of that very social safety net they built, we have to ask ourselves something. Are we placing excessive, unjustified confidence in the self correcting capacity of markets all over again?