The years 1919 to 1929-roughly from the end of World War I to the start of the Great Depression-are now remembered as the Roaring Twenties. Some Canadians lived the life of parties, conspicuous consumption, and changing moral standards associated with that phrase. Many others lived in another world altogether.

At the start of the decade, the factories that made war weaponry shut down-and few new establishments rose to take their place. Unemployment climbed, and the situation worsened when thousands of veterans began to return from Europe's former battlefields. Soldiers who had been promised "full re-establishment" by the Canadian government after their ordeal in the trenches found themselves out of work, desperate, and angry.

Those still working faced a rising cost of living-but received few wage concessions from their employers. The union movement began to spread as a result. In 1919, there were 420 strikes in Canada. One of these was the famous Winnipeg General Strike.

From 1921 to 1923 Canada suffered a recession, causing bankruptcies and more unemployment. Only in the mid-1920s did prosperity return to the nation, as markets for Canadian lumber, newsprint, and metals began to grow. American investment in factories, mines, smelters, and hydro-electric projects fuelled much of the resource extraction.

Most of the benefits yielded by the new growth went to central Canada and middle- and upper-class city dwellers. These people began buying new consumer goods: cars, radios, telephones, and electric household appliances. They went to nightclubs to listen to the new music, jazz, and flocked to the just-opened motion-picture theatres. Many played the stock market. Their lifestyles fuel our perception of the "Roaring Twenties."

Meanwhile, working class Canadians generally found themselves holding the short end of the economic stick. Historian Michiel Horn has written that during the interwar period "it is likely that more than half of the Canadian people were never anything but poor." In 1929, the average annual wage of $1,200 per year was $230 below what social workers estimated a family needed to live above poverty level.

Seeing firsthand the insecurity and poverty in which so many workers and immigrants lived inspired individuals like J.S. Woodsworth and Abraham Heaps to dedicate their lives to reform. The obstacles they faced were often created by the clash between old ways of thinking and new social and economic realities. What were the forces behind the difficult lives of "The Sick, The Old, The Poor?"