 The book, "The Great Depression" is a scalding indictment of the political leaders of the time, the police, the law and of big business.While successive governments at the Federal, Provincial and Municipal level debated over how to deal with the huge numbers of unemployed workers and who would finance government works programs or "the dole", tens of thousands of formerly middle class Canadians suffered in abject poverty while drought seared the western prairies and an unprecedented locust epidemic contributed to record crop failures.The entire decade became known in Canadian historical parlance as "The Dirty Thirties."