By the fall of 1931, the effects of the Great Depression were being fully felt. Nearly one in five workers suffered unemployment. Wages were falling. Industry and commerce were slowing down. Despite the scale of this economic downturn, governments were slow to adopt interventionist welfare measures. Even as some began to talk of a “back to the land” movement as a way out of the crisis, Prairie farms emptied. Falling wheat and livestock prices undermined their viability. Since bad things never happen in isolation, a drought hit the region, causing a dramatic drop in yields from harvests, especially in Saskatchewan. It was against this backdrop that the Association catholique franco-canadienne de la Saskatchewan (ACFC) appealed to French-speaking communities.  

Help came from Ontario. The Association canadienne-française d’éducation de l’Ontario (ACFEO) joined forces with the Fédération des femmes canadiennes-françaises, the Union des agriculteurs franco-ontariens and the Association des maraîchers de la province d’Ontario in a vast subscription drive. Five railcars, each containing around 35,000 pounds of merchandise, were sent to the French-speaking communities of Radville, Willow Bunch, Ponteix, Val-Marie, and Meyronne. These goods were accompanied by a $900 donation to the ACFC (Le Droit, February 5, 1932).

This success was more or less modelled on work undertaken a few months earlier by the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste de Québec (SSJB). For the SSJB, the Depression became a pretext for bringing back to the forefront the defense of the educational rights of French-speaking communities in other provinces. The fear was that these “outposts” of the French-Canadian nation would otherwise collapse. Launched in June 1931, the campaign raised over $1400 by mid-October. Contributors included several Catholic unions, as well as the Commanders of the Order of Jacques-Cartier (Le Droit, October 16, 1931).

The crisis, and the need for economic recovery forced the players in the institutional network to reinvent themselves: they had not been “founded with the intention of providing for a situation like today’s, which no one foresaw at the time” (Le Droit, January 11, 1932).