| The federal government's opening of the entire Palliser Triangle to large scale agricultural settlement in 1908, along with a series of devastating droughts over the ensuing decade, resulted in severe hardships for settlers and an intolerable agricultural relief burden for the Saskatchewan government. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Farming Conditions---the province's formal response to the problem---identified certain adjustments in agricultural methods, natural resource use and settlement patterns in its 1921 report that, if put into practice, might gradually help to stabilize production and income levels in Saskatchewan's semiarid fanning regions. Certain constraints hampered provincial efforts to implement the report's key recommendations during the 1920s, and the federal government kept its involvement to a minimum, as it viewed agricultural rehabilitation as a mainly provincial problem. As the experience of severe drought and widespread crop failures during the 1930s demonstrated, the province was financially unable to sponsor a comprehensive agricultural rehabilitation program on its own. This, along with a rapidly deteriorating political and economic situation on the prairies---finally forced the federal government to own up to the oversights in its earlier Dominion Lands policy by passing the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935. The effectiveness of the activities under the Act owed much to the earlier implementation of certain recommendations of Saskatchewan's 1921 investigative commission. |
