workers and students toward achieving better working conditions and an enhanced quality of life; though its constitution declared it to be independent and without party affiliation, it publicly supported the policies of the Communist Party of Canada. According to Kashtan, who became a YCL organizer at age 17, "We believed that socialism offered the only remedy for unemployment and poverty." By 1928, the League operated 40 schools in Canada with an attendance of 2,000 children. YCL organizers in Montreal around that time included Fred Rose and Sam Carr, who would later become leaders of Canadian Communism. 1930s The onset of the Great Depression inflicted great suffering and hardship on Canadians. The YCL noted in its seventh national convention of August 1934, noted the conditions of "unemployment, hunger and misery". Although the total membership was never large, the YCL's influence and activities in youth movements during the Great Depression were notable. YCL members were involved with unemployed movements, peace activism, trade union activism and campus organizations. Under the slogan "Work and Wages", YCL members worked to organize the unemployed who populated relief camps across the country. "The leading preoccupation of the YCL when I became secretary," Maurice Rush says in his autobiography, "was to organize unemployed youth". Like many other observers, Rush (who was leader of the YCL in British Columbia after 1935) claims that the YCL was active in the Relief Camp Workers' Unions (RCWU), and played a role in mobilizing relief camp youth to participate in the On-to-Ottawa Trek. During the Trek, many working people opened their homes and cupboards to the protestors, sometimes sharing family relief rations. Communist women in Vancouver issued a call for a solidarity action, and five thousand working-class women came out to a special "Mother's Day" demonstration on behalf of the camp workers and to demand the closing of the camps. Informed by Vancouver's mayor that the limited scope of the Municipal Council was ill-equipped to address their claims, the British Columbia branches of the YCL and the Communist Party of Canada together with the Camp Workers' Union decided to march on Ottawa, believing that only action on a national scale could motivate the Bennett Conservative government to hear their concerns. YCL member Arthur (Slim) Evans was elected leader for the cross-country journey. Bennett was widely criticized for his handling of the situation. Later that year, the Bennett government fell in the election, providing