October of 1929 came as a shock to wall street and to the economy of North America. The relationship between the United States and Canada was never recognized as being so closely related as when both countries quickly sunk into the great depression. Along with this economic apocalypse came a climatic drought which destroyed farmlands, dried up the land and blew away the top soil on many parts of the prairies. These national emergencies were meet by the Bennett government with exactly the wrong combination of financial actions which compounded the slowdown in the economy. These actions were only recognized as being damaging towards the end of Bennett's term when he finally became a convert to deficit spending for stimulating he economy. Many new political parties arose from this desperate time and across the oceans in Japan and Germany, new totalitarian dangers reared their ugly heads with hardly a protest from the great democracies.
