Richard Rajala, "Forced Relief," Legion Magazine (2000)

Read 10 Oct 2026. The Department of National Defence relief camps of 1932-1936, by a historian of BC’s forests. General McNaughton was “Concerned about the threat of civil unrest and the questionable fitness of future military service among the estimated 70,000 young men who were wandering throughout the west”; bunkhouses “of frame and tarpaper construction contained two tiers of straw-filled bunks and a wood-burning stove”; the men called themselves “the Royal Twenty Centers.” The Vancouver Sun’s Bob Bouchette, touring the camps in 1934: “The present system breeds idleness, a feeling of futility and a smouldering resentment against society.” See pattullo-bloody-sunday.