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Boom and Bust
When it was "all over over there" as a popular wartime song said, 48,000 Canadians had lost their lives. Women were obtaining the vote, while the Bolshevik revolution in Russia spurred on a growing labour movement in North America.
As Canada entered the 1920's, half of its people lived in cities crowded with streetcars and automo- biles. The country had been transformed into an electric era, with forests of poles and wires every- where. Sporty roadsters were being driven by young men in raccoon coats and "boaters" - stiff straw hats - with women passengers clad in flapper outfits. Radio sets began to proliferate, playing a new sound from the southern USA ..... jazz.
In 1919, it cost $585 in duty and taxes to import a $1,000 car from the United States to Canada. These import costs were just to become a concern that car dealers would have to face up to. Later that same year, the groundwork was laid to build what would become a Toronto landmark and showcase for the industry's wares - the CNE's Automotive Building.
In 1920, the Association chastised the Ontario Government for awarding contracts for trucks without asking for bids from competitive firms - another sign that it was monitoring the public sector and taking action when necessary.
The Association's shape was gradually changing to reflect a new, prosperous era. In 1922, the idea of using an emblem on all advertising was adopted, so the public would know who they were dealing with. Some of the concerns of the day: workmen's compensation rates for auto repair shops, setting up a system of "blue books" to appraise used cars - and how to handle criticism from the Globe and Mail about automobile safety.
The used car market continued to grow during the 1920s, to the point where such innovations as the Used Car Buyers Guide was developed and published in the Globe and Mail and Empire newspapers with the assistance of the Association. While Canada's industrial base was rapidly expanding in the 1920's, it was still a vast country bonded together by networks of railways. Roads bound farm to farm and town to town, but most were rough and narrow. Bush pilots opened up the north, and radio brought hockey games, dramas, and the news into Canadian homes.
Toronto was becoming a big city, spreading outward from the lake east, west and north. Prosperity brought good times with it like the Association's golf tournaments, where dealers had a chance to relax with friends. Back in June 1928, some dealer duffers played a tourney at Cedar Brook Golf Club, Scarborough, where a G.W. Hogan no relation to Ben, certainly was awarded a prize for the most splashes at number three hole. D.E. Rogerson recorded the shortest drive from the first tee.
Then came the 1930's a time of unemployment, hunger and despair. It was also an era of gritty courageous workers and employers. In the face of plummeting prices and an almost worthless Canadian dollar unemployment grew, business failed, but somehow or other people persevered.
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