<P> The Liberal Party lost the 1930 election to the Conservative Party, led by R.B. Bennett . Bennett, a successful western businessman, campaigned on high tariffs and large - scale spending . Make - work programs were begun, and welfare and other assistance programs became vastly larger . This led to a large federal deficit, however . Bennett became wary of the budget shortfalls by 1932, and cut back severely on federal spending . This only deepened the depression as government employees were put out of work and public works projects were cancelled . </P> <P> One of the greatest burdens on the government was the Canadian National Railway (CNR). The federal government had taken over a number of defunct and bankrupt railways during World War I and the 1920s . The debt the government assumed was over $2 billion, a massive sum at the time, but during the boom years it seemed payable . The Depression turned this debt into a crushing burden . Due to the decrease in trade, the CNR also began to lose substantial amounts of money during the Depression, and had to be further bailed out by the government . </P> <P> With falling support and the depression only getting worse, Bennett attempted to introduce policies based on the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States . Bennett thus called for a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and other such programs . This effort was largely unsuccessful; the provinces challenged the rights of the federal government to manage these programs . Some of the federal efforts were successful: the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act and Farmers' Creditors Arrangement Act, which provided alternatives to bankruptcy for distressed businesses, were held to be constitutional by the Reference Re Farmers' Creditors Arrangement Act . </P> <P> The judicial and political failure of Bennett's New Deal legislation shifted the struggle to reconstitute capitalism to the provincial and municipal levels of the state . Attempts to deal with the dislocations of the Great Depression in Ontario focused on the "sweatshop crisis" that came to dominate political and social discourse after 1934 . Ontario's 1935 Industrial Standards Act (ISA) was designed to bring workers and employers together under the auspices of the state to establish minimum wages and work standards . The establishment of New Deal style industrial codes was premised on the mobilization of organized capital and organized labour to combat unfair competition, stop the spread of relief - subsidized labour, and halt the predations of sweatshop capitalism . Although the ISA did not bring about extensive economic regulation, it excited considerable interest in the possibility of government intervention . Workers in a diverse range of occupations, from asbestos workers to waitresses, attempted to organize around the possibility of the ISA . The importance of the ISA lies in what it reveals about the nature of welfare, wage labour, the union movement, competitive capitalism, business attitudes toward industrial regulation, and the role of the state in managing the collective affairs of capitalism . The history of the ISA also suggests that "regulatory unionism," as described by Colin Gordon in his work on the American New Deal, may have animated key developments in Canadian social, economic, and labour history . </P>

Of the following in which decade were canada's tariffs at their lowest level