Canada in the World Wars and Interwar Years
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| This article is part of the series: History of Canada |
| New France |
| Canada under British Imperial Control (1764-1867) |
| Post-Confederation Canada (1867-1914) |
| Canada in the World Wars and Interwar Years |
| History of Canada (1945-1960) |
| History of Canada (1960-1981) |
| History of Canada (1982-1992) |
| History of Canada (1992-Present) |
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Contents |
[edit] World War I
On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated, setting off a chain of events leading to World War I. By August 4, Britain had declared war on Germany and, as part of the Empire, Canada automatically entered in the fray. Although Canada had no choice in the matter, as foreign affairs were still conducted from Britain, the war was initially popular even among French Canadians, including Henri Bourassa. Canadians fought at Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, and other important battles, originally under British command, but eventually under a unified Canadian command. From a Canadian point of view the most important battle of the war was the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, during which Canadian troops captured a fortified German hill that had eluded both the British and French. Vimy, as well as the success of the Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop, helped give Canada a new sense of identity.
With mounting costs at home, Sir Thomas Whyte introduced the first income tax in Canada as a "temporary" measure. The lowest bracket was 4% and highest was 25%.
[edit] The conscription crisis of 1917
After three years of a war that was supposed to have been over in three months, Canada was suffering from a shortage of volunteers. Prime Minister Robert Borden had originally promised not to introduce conscription, but now believed it was necessary to win the war. The Military Service Act was passed in July, but there was fierce opposition, mostly from French Canadians (led not only by Bourassa, but also Wilfrid Laurier), as well as Quakers, Mennonites, and other pacifists. Borden's government almost collapsed, but he was able to form a Union government with the Liberal opposition (although Laurier did not join the new government). In the 1917 election, the Union government was re-elected, but with no support from Quebec. Over the next year, the war finally ended, with very few Canadian conscripts actually participating.
[edit] Halifax Explosion
On December 6 of 1917, the Imo, a Belgian relief ship collided with the Mont-Blanc, a French munitions ship in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The crash set the Mont-Blanc, whose holds were full of benzol, picric acid, and TNT, on fire. The crew could not stop the benzol-fuelled fire and abandoned ship as the ship drifted towards the harbor. Twenty minutes after the crash, the fire reached the TNT and picric acid and the Mont-Blanc exploded with a force stronger than any man-made explosion before it, destroying most of Halifax and the surrounding towns. Halifax had served as a key link between the United States and Europe, helping organize convoys for trans-Atlantic crosses. After the explosion, Halifax dropped out of the war effort, focusing primarily on survival.
More than 620,000 Canadians served in the war. Of these, more than 60,000 died and more than 155,000 were wounded.
[edit] Post-war society
During the war, the women's suffrage movement gained support. The provinces began extending voting rights to women in 1916, and women were finally allowed to vote in federal elections in 1918 (but only if they were over 21 years of age). Canada was also faced with the return of thousands of returning soldiers, with few jobs waiting for them at home. They also brought back with them the Spanish Flu, which killed over 50 000 people by 1919, almost the same number that had been killed in the war.
The move from a wartime to a peacetime economy, combined with the return of the soldiers from Europe, led to another crisis. In 1919 the One Big Union was formed, an organization of the various unions across the country. This Union was a large influence on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which some saw as an outbreak of Bolshevism, especially as the Soviet Union had recently been formed. The army had to be sent in to break up the strike.
Meanwhile, in western Canada, and to some extent in the Maritimes, populist reformers were pushing for increased provincial rights and a focus on agriculture, rather than the industrial focus of Central Canada. They formed the Progressive Party of Canada, which supported Mackenzie King when the Liberals had a minority government in 1925-26. King eventually lost support, however, because of the trade tariffs issue, as well as a liquor smuggling scandal. He was forced to resign in 1926, but was re-elected later that year.
[edit] The Great Depression
Canada suffered greatly when the Great Depression began in 1929. While the decline started in the United States, it quickly spread to Canada because of the gold standard and the close economic links between the two countries. The Canadian economy was the second-worst affected in the world by the Depression, after the United States. The first area affected was wheat, which saw a collapse in prices. This destroyed the economies of the Prairie provinces, but as wheat was then Canada's largest export it also hurt the rest of the country. This was soon followed by a deep recession in manufacturing, first caused by a drop-off in demand in the United States, and then by Canadians also not buying unneeded luxuries. Perhaps most harmful, however, was the subsequent reduction of investment: both large companies and individuals were unwilling and unable to invest in new ventures. Unemployment rose to 25 per cent.
[edit] Government Reaction
Mackenzie King believed the crisis would pass and refused to send federal aid to the provinces and only introduced moderate relief efforts. The Liberals lost the 1930 election to Richard Bedford Bennett and the Conservatives. Bennett, a successful western businessman, campaigned on high tariffs and large scale spending, but as deficits increased he became wary and cut back severely on federal spending. 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, but this was largely unsuccessful. The government became a focus of popular discontent, even though its policies were largely the same as those of other Western governments. Canadian car owners who could no longer afford gasoline reverted to having their vehicles pulled by horses and dubbed them Bennett Buggies. Bennett's perceived failures during the Great Depression led to the re-election of Mackenzie King's Liberals in the 1935 election.
Although the United States began to see rapid improvements as a result of FDR's policies, Canada saw far less growth. Nevertheless, by this time the worst of the Depression was over. Mackenzie King implemented some relief programs such as the National Housing Act and National Employment Commission, and also established the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1936) and Trans-Canada Airlines (1937, the precursor to Air Canada). It took until 1939 and the outbreak of war for the Canadian economy to return to 1929 levels, however.
[edit] New Parties
The Progressive and United Farmers Parties had achieved some success in the 1920s, but during the 1930s, their members generally joined other parties, like the Social Credit movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation.
In Alberta, a Christian radio broadcaster named William "Bible Bill" Aberhart became interested in politics partly because the Great Depression had been especially harsh on Albertan farmers. Particularly, he was drawn to the "social credit" theories of Major C. H. Douglas, a Scottish engineer. From 1932 to 1935, Aberhart lobbied for the governing political party, the United Farmers of Alberta, to adopt these theories. The basis of social credit is that the difference in production cost and individuals' purchasing power should be supplemented through government grants. When these efforts failed, Aberhart helped found the Social Credit Party of Alberta, which won the 1935 provincial election by a landslide with over 54% of the popular vote.
The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was founded in 1932 in Calgary, Alberta, by a number of socialist, farm, co-operative and labour groups, and the League for Social Reconstruction. The CCF aimed to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression through economic reform and public "co-operation". Many of the party's first Members of Parliament (MPs) were former members of the Ginger Group of left-wing Progressive and Labour MPs. In its first election in 1935, seven CCF MPs were elected to the House of Commons. Eight were elected in the following election in 1940.
The period also saw the rise of a small Communist Party of Canada, but only informally as the party was declared illegal under Section 98 of Canada's Criminal Code. The party continued to exist, but was under the constant threat of legal harassment, and was for all intents and purposes an underground organization until 1936. The party mobilised the 1,500-man Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the International Brigades.
[edit] On to Ottawa Trek
The depression had crippled the economy and left one in nine Canadians on relief.[1] Nor did relief come free; the Bennett government had asked the Canadian Department of National Defense to organize work camps where the labour of unemployed single men was used to construct roads and other public works with little remuneration. The poor working conditions in the camps led to serious unrest, including a major strike in Vancouver in April 1935.[2] The strikers’ demands included adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers, and that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in Federal elections. Public support was enormous, and the action snowballed into a bigger movement when the men decided to take their grievances to the federal government. In June 1935, hundreds of men boarded boxcars headed East in what would come to be known as the “On to Ottawa Trek.”
The protest was halted, however, before it could reach the capital. In Regina, the RCMP confined the protestors in a local stadium. Only the eight leaders of the protest were actually allowed to proceed to Ottawa, where they were granted a meeting with Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. Bennett attacked the group as radicals, and eventually had the delegation hustled out of his office. Upon returning to Regina to unite with the rest of the protestors, they organized large public rallies, which broke out into riots when the Federal government deployed police to break up the rallies and arrest the leaders. Two people were killed and several injured. When the trek was over the government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the camps. Control of the camps was handed over to the provinces, and pay rates also improved somewhat.[citation needed]
[edit] World War II
The Canadian economy, like the economies of many other countries, improved in an unexpected way--the outbreak of the Second World War. Canada had been a founding member of the League of Nations, but elected to remain neutral throughout the 1930s. Mackenzie King even met with Adolf Hitler and decided he was not a threat. When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mackenzie King was finally convinced that military action would be necessary, but waited until September 10 to declare war (unlike World War I, when Canada was automatically at war as soon as Britain was). Utimately, more than one million Canadians served in armed forces.
One of Canada's major contribution to the war was the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, in which over 140,000 Allied pilots and air crews received training at bases in Canada. The first military action of the war for Canadians came in 1941, when they unsuccessfully defended Hong Kong from the Japanese. Hong Kong was taken on December 25 with horrendous Canadian and British casualties. On August 19, 1942, Canadians were again defeated in the Dieppe Raid. Canadian troops fought in Italy in 1943, and in 1944 successfully captured Juno Beach during the Battle of Normandy. They were instrumental in liberating the Netherlands, for which the Dutch still fondly remember Canadians today.
[edit] The conscription crisis of 1944
As in World War I, the number of volunteers began to run dry as the war dragged on. Mackenzie King had promised, like Borden, not to introduce conscription, though his position was somewhat ambiguous, as he had declared "conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription."
With rising pressure from the people, on June 21, 1940, King passed the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) which gave the government the power to "call out every man in Canada for military training for the defence of Canada", and only Canada. Conscripts could not be sent overseas to fight. English Canadians, expectedly, were displeased and took to calling these soldiers "zombies" who they stereotyped as French Canadians who were "sitting comfortably" while countrymen died.
On April 27, 1942, Mackenzie King held a national plebiscite to decide on the issue, having made campaign promises to avoid conscription (and, it is thought, winning the election on that very point). English Canada was mostly in favour of conscription, but, as expected, French Canada was not. Nevertheless, the vote was yes overall and King was free to bring in a conscription law if he wanted. However, the issue was put off for another two years, until November 1944 when King decided on a levy of NRMA troops for overseas service. There were riots in Quebec, and even an aged Henri Bourassa spoke out against the decision.
Some 13,000 NRMA men eventually left Canada, but only 2,463 reached units in the field before the end of the fighting. 69 died in battle.
[edit] Japanese internment
When Canada declared war on Japan in December 1941, members of the non-Japanese population of British Columbia, including municipal government offices, local newspapers and businesses called for the internment of the Japanese. In British Columbia, some claimed that Japanese residents who worked in the fishing industry were charting the coastline for the Japanese navy, and many of their boats were confiscated. The pressure from the public was so great that early in 1942 the government gave in to the pressure and began the internment of both Japanese nationals and Japanese Canadian citizens. About 95% of the nearly 23,000 people of Japanese descent who lived in Canada, were naturalised or native-born citizens.[citation needed] Those unwilling to live in internment camps faced the possibility of deportation to Japan.
Unlike Japanese American internment, where families were generally kept together, Canada initially sent its male evacuees to road camps in the British Columbian interior, to sugar beet projects on the Prairies, or to internment in a POW camp in Ontario, while women and children were moved to six inland British Columbia towns. There, the living conditions were so poor that the citizens of wartime Japan even sent supplemental food shipments through the Red Cross.[citation needed] During the period of detention, the Canadian government spent one-third the per capita amount expended by the U.S. on Japanese American evacuees.[citation needed]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Zuehlke, Mark (1996). The Gallant Cause: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. Vancouver: Whitecap Books. ISBN 1-55110-488-1.
- ^ Hoar (Howard), Victor (1969). The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion: Canadian Participation in the Spanish Civil War. Toronto: Copp Clark.
