1931-1934 - Hard Times       The 1931 Annual Meeting at Calgary opened on a sombre note when the President, Mr. Hoar, presented a glum but realistic prediction that the general economic depression which had begun to be severely felt in 1930, would continue for some time to come and that, despite the transfer of the natural resources to the Province, surveying activity would remain at a low ebb. Interest in the controversial proposals which had been in the works during 1929 and 1930 had apparently vanished and except for the Council's report that the draft of the new Alberta Surveys Act had been studied thoroughly and found satisfactory, nothing new came to the fore during the meeting. The business transacted was of so brief and routine a nature that the members present were able to spend most of the afternoon on a visit to the Glenmore Dam which was then under construction near Calgary. The Council held no meetings until the day before the 1932 Annual Meeting, when their main item of business consisted of sorting out some confusion that had arisen over Mr. C.A. Magrath's admission to honorary membership. This was satisfactorily resolved, and Mr. Magrath was officially; admitted as an honorary member at the annual meeting the next day. On that occasion the members, apparently in a generous mood, also conferred life membership on Mr. A.P. Patrick, Mr. A.S. Weekes and Mr. J.L. Doupe. Otherwise, routine business was the order of the day, although the President, Mr. R.H. Cautley, suggested in his address that it was about time for land surveyors to hoist themselves out of the doldrums by their own bootstraps and to produce some new ideas for enlargement of the scope of their activities. He directed attention to the need for restoration surveys, proposed that all unsurveyed blind lines be run and properly monumented, and noted that current mineral discoveries at Great Slave and Great Bear Lakes in the Northwest Territories presented opportunities for mineral claim surveys which the members ought not to ignore. All of this apparently fell on deaf ears, presumably because it was recognized that these projects would cost money and the supply of that commodity had almost completely dried up. The same dispirited attitude was in evidence during 1933 and 1934. Hard times continued and the membership of the Association steadily dropped in numbers. During these years, annual meetings were attended by about 15 members, the majority of whom were salaried surveyors employed by governments and the railway companies, Few of the men in private practice were earning more than a bare livelihood as surveyors and several had turned to other occupations for their main source of income, performing survey work only as an occasional sideline. Both in the business world and in agriculture, the general picture was one of stagnation and gloom. In the urban centres, thousands of people remained unemployed, and much political and social unrest was becoming evident. Many people were convinced that the system had to be changed, and the advocates of communism, technocracy and social credit were beginning to get serious and sympathetic attention from those who had little or nothing to lose and creating fears in the minds of those who disliked these revolutionary ideas. These fears tended to stifle initiative on the part of those who might otherwise have got the economy moving again, and the Depression deepened while the average individual got by as best he could and took no chances while waiting to see what would happen. What did happen is now history far beyond the range of this record. In Alberta, the U.F.A. government, tarnished with personal scandals and discredited by its administrative failure, was turned out of office in 1935 and replaced by the Social Credit party who were looked upon by many people as saints and saviours but by many others as wild-eyed crackpots who could only lead the province to final ruin. Both these appraisals of the new government turned out to be wrong, and when conditions later did improve, the improvements were mainly activated by causes which lay outside the province and beyond the government's control.   Back - 1930 - Recording Monuments Forward - 1935 - The Old Mistrust of Ottawa