Shingles and dressed cedar were scarce, that was all. For
the last two years of the war most of the available man-power and
machinery of British Columbia loggers had been given over to airplane
spruce. Carpenters had laid down their tools and gone to the front.
House builders had ceased to build houses while the vast cloud of
European uncertainty hung over the nation. All across North America
the wind and weather had taken toll of roofs, and these must be
repaired. The nation did not cease to breed while its men died daily
by thousands. And with the signing of the armistice a flood of
immigration was let loose. British and French and Scandinavians and
swarms of people from Czecho-Slovakia and all the Balkan States,
hurried from devastated lands and impending taxes to a new country
glowing with the deceptive greenness of far fields. The population had
increased; the housing for it had not. So that rents went up and up
until economic factors exerted their inexorable pressure and the tap
of the carpenter's hammer and the ring of his saw began to sound in
every city, in every suburb, on new farms and lonely prairies.
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