On-to-Ottawa trekkers on a freight train at Kamloops, June 1935

Men crowd the roofs and ladders of Canadian Pacific boxcars, bound east. Library and Archives Canada describes it as “Strikers from unemployment relief camps en route to Eastern Canada during ‘March on Ottawa’ in June 1935 in Kamloops, B.C.” These were the men of the British Columbia relief camps who struck in April 1935, held Vancouver for two months and rode the freights east under Arthur “Slim” Evans until they were stopped at Regina; Duff Pattullo’s government had told them the camps were Ottawa’s business. Three years later men of the same generation, led by one of Evans’s pupils, sat down in the Vancouver post office.