The Halifax Relief Commission (1918-1976): Its History, Historiography, and Place in Halifax Disaster Scholarship

Abstract

IN DECEMBER 1931 THE REVEREND DR. SAMUEL HENRY PRINCE, professor of economics and sociology at the University of King’s College and author of the first scholarly study of the Halifax Disaster,1 presented a paper to the Nova Scotia Historical Society entitled “The Halifax Explosion – Fourteen Years After.”2 In it he described in specific detail the core accomplishments of the Halifax Relief Commission: $4M on constructing temporary hospitals and houses (816 of the latter), 500 permanent houses erected (including 324 in what is known today in Halifax as “the Hydrostone”), repairs to 12,000 damaged houses, the settling of 16,000 claims for disaster losses (totalling $18.5M), assistance for 14,000 medical and convalescent cases, $1M to reconstruct churches and other public institutions, and $3.5M in pensions for the disabled as well as widows and orphans.3 The Halifax Relief Commission would continue to exist for another 45 years until 1976, focusing on the provision of pensions and similar assistance, but today it is forgotten, as obscure as the Halifax Disaster remains a defining, indelible moment in the public memory about the city. Yet in a recent study of the Nova Scotian experience of the First World War, historian Brian Tennyson properly includes the Halifax Disaster on 6 December 19174 and the Halifax Relief Commission as significant aspects of that experience.5 But to this day the Halifax Relief Commission remains the missing link in the historiography of the disaster. Why is that the case? This research note, through a close critical examination of the limited existing historical literature on the commission, attempts to answer that question. Created through legislation in April 1918, the Halifax Relief Commission was a federal-provincial hybrid: established by the government of Canada and incorporated by the Nova Scotia legislature. It was a cross between an administrative tribunal and a Crown corporation. Given the time and circumstances of its creation, any study of it must consider the expanding role of the Canadian state in wartime; doing so enables the student of administrative history to contextualize