11
BREAKING THE MOULD, 1914–1930
Art and patriotism: Miss Canada urges a farmer to contribute in this poster advertising the Canadian Patriotic Fund, 1919.
In 1914 and again in 1939 Canada went to war because Great Britain went to war. As the War of 1812 was in many ways the continuation and resolution of the American Revolution of 1776, so the Second World War of 1939–45 was an extension of the Great War of 1914–18.
On the surface, the Canada of 1939 was very different from the Canada of 1914. Shorter skirts, lighter clothes, and a faster pace to life were the most evident signs of change. Yet above the crowds, the streetscapes were much the same. The Victorians had built for the ages, and their monuments lined Canadian streets. Churches were still the most common, certainly the most obvious, public buildings. Gothic or gingerbread or neoclassical, government buildings were meant to impress. So were the temples of business, the banks and insurance companies, for example. The great Sun Life Building on Dominion Square in Montreal was the prime specimen, solid but tall, “reminiscent of imperial Rome,” according to one critic.1 Their monuments could be all the more impressive, and much taller, because behind the pillars, stone, and concrete they were supported by steel girders and accessed by electric elevators. The downtowns of Canadian cities accordingly pointed up, and urban areas as small as Regina acquired their ten-storey “skyscrapers” in the 1910s and 1920s.
Downtown was still downtown, the hub for offices, shopping, and finance. Canadian downtowns were curiously familiar, coast to coast, in styles of building or streetscapes but also in the names on the buildings. Canada was becoming a country of large companies. Its banking system had consolidated into relatively few banks, headquartered by the 1920s in Montreal and Toronto, each with many branches. (Only in Quebec did a co-operative savings movement, the caisses populaires, vary the formula, but even there the national, Canadian, banks predominated in the cities.) The department stores were familiar too, Eaton’s and Simpsons, based in Toronto, being the main ones. Eaton’s and Simpsons stores reached beyond the cities, with catalogue offices in towns of all sizes. Canada’s oldest firm, the Hudson’s Bay Company, prospered, with its network of trading posts across the north; it too had expanded into department stores in the west.
The rhythm of life was not very different from before the Great War. Sunday remained reserved for religion, and trying to get service of any kind other than religious in most of Canada was an impossibility. Meals outside the home were sparse, drinks except in Quebec were few, and secular entertainments, from libraries to movies, banned. None of this would have been surprising to a visitor from 1900, though the war had added extra restrictions under the guise of reform.
The technologies that served and defined daily life were developments of technologies that had existed twenty-five years before. Movie theatres were larger and more universal: every town of any size had at least one. Movies talked after 1927, telephones were more frequent, and there were more aircraft in the skies. There was radio, which in the 1920s was the province of private enterprise. For information, people still relied on newspapers. Yet most people still travelled on streamlined versions of the coal-fired locomotives that had carried people from place to place in 1914, and passenger planes were still exotic. There were more paved roads and more cars than in 1914, it was true, but most traffic moved, as it had in 1880, by rail. The railways had different names and ownership: the Borden government was compelled to nationalize the bankrupt Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, and combined them into a single company, Canadian National Railways, which competed with the vigorously private Canadian Pacific. Telegraphs and the post office were still the usual means of communication between cities. The post office was the largest department in the federal government, in 1914 and throughout the 1920s, in terms of numbers of employees.2
Progress and reform weren’t merely about technology and its uses. For half a century reformers had strained to limit society’s abuses, especially alcohol, and with the generation of 1914 they largely succeeded. The war provided the opportunity, for in the context of heroism no sacrifice could be too great. Efficiency and morality combined to legislate prohibition, an end to alcohol sales. As a result it was more difficult to get an alcoholic drink in Canada in 1939 than it had been in 1914. What was different, by 1939, was a concern that laws prohibiting or limiting liquor went too far—although for many not far enough.
The various governments did what they could. Outside private clubs, which flourished during this period, consuming alcohol was made as uncomfortable as possible—limited for the most part to “beer parlours” where low-alcohol beer might be quaffed. Quebec, as always, was the exception. There, under the eye of a benign and corruptible police force, there were few limits, as generations of thirsty Ontarians came to learn. Naturally, Quebec was cited as a bad example by prohibitionists elsewhere.
Prohibition and the fight against drink were just one of the trends apparent in 1914 that continued through the 1930s. Urbanism was another. More Canadians lived in cities, and by the 1920s urban Canadians formed a clear majority of the population, which was already predictable in 1914. Urban life created new needs, as old neighbourhoods and rural connections were left behind. Social and educational services expanded to meet the need.
Professionalism—impersonal, fair, and expert—had been one of the hallmarks of the progressive era before 1914, and was even more apparent in 1939. Experts, from engineers to doctors, were more varied than in 1914 and probably better trained in universities in Canada and abroad; their presence grew in government and in large companies. Above all, there were more managers.
The prime minister in 1914, the lawyer Sir Robert Borden, hadn’t gone to university, but as an eminent professional he had taught at one, Dalhousie in Halifax. Borden was half a generation on from his predecessor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, born in 1841, and much more than Laurier he espoused the notion that the fruits of progress—especially in technology— were to be found in Canada in abundance and needed only proper channelling, which would be provided, if necessary, by the state. Borden sang the hymn of proper organization that was the progressives’ signature tune.
The prime minister in 1939 was yet another generation on, born in 1874 compared with Borden’s 1854 birthdate. William Lyon Mackenzie King was a university graduate, as Laurier had been, and a lawyer, like Borden and Laurier and most of Canada’s prime ministers, then and since. He was also a trained economist, and a labour negotiator by profession. It was as an expert that the Laurier government hired him as Canada’s first deputy minister of labour, and he took his skills with him into politics as a member of the Laurier cabinet and, after Laurier’s death in 1919, leader of the Liberal party.
No Canadian prime minister has ever been a complete teetotaller, as far as personal conduct was concerned, and also in terms of public policy.3 Prohibition was enacted under Borden, but as enforcement loomed, the prime minister was quick to order in supplies of Scotch by the case. Mackenzie King, outwardly sanctimonious, was not a man to refuse a sherry or a martini. On state occasions, he reminded himself that he was really drinking for two, himself and his country. Think of Canada, one can hear him murmuring. If state occasions required a banquet, it would likely be held across the Ottawa River from puritan and Protestant Ontario, in Catholic and—where alcohol was concerned—latitudinarian Quebec.
Neither Borden nor King would go very far in defying society’s conventions. Indeed, both made their careers by implementing them, the Liberal King more than the Conservative Borden. King, as a result, seemed an even safer bet than Borden, reassuring to a generation that experienced more than the usual share of war and disruption.
WAR AND DIVISION
The first months of the First World War were optimistic in Canada, as they were everywhere else. Crowds cheered, bands played, and people and politicians exchanged vows full of purpose and unity. There was no question, for the time being, that the empire’s cause was just, that right and wrong were in play, and that Canada must do all it could to make the right prevail. Sir Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed a political truce, and cancelled all his partisan meetings. When Parliament met in emergency session in August 1914 the Liberals cooperated fully; it was Laurier who guided Borden in shaping the government’s emergency legislation, the War Measures Act.4 Even Henri Bourassa, editor (and founder) of the “bon” newspaper Le Devoir in Montreal,5 agreed that Germany’s invasion of Belgium justified Britain and its allies in resisting aggression.6
The government pledged money, supplies, and troops for the war. Money was admittedly a problem. The country was in a depression; trade was down; and imports were sagging and with them the tariff revenues that were the government’s mainstay. The government had few economic instruments at its command. There was no central bank, no income tax. Provinces had their own revenue needs. And so the government did what Canadian governments always did when faced with a shortage of funds: they went to the London money market for a loan. They got one, and with it a warning that they should not rely on London in the future, as the British government had little money to spare for the colonies. In the case of Canada, there was an obvious alternative: New York. It was a sign of changing times, and the times would change even more in the next few years.
As for supplies, Canada had plenty of wheat and the harvest was approaching. Canada offered wheat to Britain, and the gift was accepted. As for troops, from coast to coast militiamen were anxious to serve. There were few professional soldiers to dampen the enthusiasm of the recruits with the counsels of experience. The minister of defence, Sir Sam Hughes, was madly enthusiastic, fearing only that the war might be over before his troops could get to Europe.
Hughes was not unique in his keenness for the war effort. Recruits swamped military depots. In Edmonton alone, two thousand men marched from the United Services Club behind a band playing “Rule Britannia” and the French and Russian national anthems.7 A similar enthusiasm swept the country—except, apparently, in the French-speaking parts of Quebec. The politicians followed the crowd, publicly repudiating partisanship and calling for unity. Yet, as always, in a few months the need for political skills and the art of compromise would bring partisanship back.
Hughes swiftly assembled the components of an army at a camp outside Quebec City, and sent it overseas, unready and untrained, on the first available shipping. The Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), as it was called, became part of the British Expeditionary Force, but it was some time before any of the Canadians would reach France. They had to learn how to march, and shoot, and dig. The medical corps had to learn how to cope with sanitation and disease: the first casualties of the CEF occurred in camp, in England, far from the battlefield.
The CEF began as an amateur force under amateur commanders, enthusiastic but undisciplined.8 (Ironically, the few permanent-force officers were most needed on the technical side—signals and artillery, for example—and many had to be retained in Canada to keep the military organization functioning.) On reaching Great Britain, it was stiffened with professional officers supplied by the British, especially in staff positions. The higher the rank, or the more technical the function, the more likely it was that the relevant officer would be British.
So were many of the troops. Canada enjoyed heavy British immigration before 1914. (More than 10 percent of Canada’s 1911 population was British-born.)9 Many of these immigrants had been disappointed by what they found: Canada was not quite what they had hoped for. Many were single men, and many of the single men were, in 1914, unemployed and, as a consequence, fairly mobile. Canada’s reputation as a land of opportunity was rather strained, particularly in the face of reports of third-world conditions in city slums. In Montreal, the infant mortality rate was said to equal Calcutta’s. Evidently, there wasn’t much for many of Canada’s soldiers to leave behind. Of the first contingent of 36,267—those who left by the end of March 1915—23,211 were British immigrants, 10,880 were born in Canada, and of them, 1245 were French Canadians.10
It was clear from the beginning that Canada did not enter the war a united country. True, there was no real opposition to going to war, but underneath the official enthusiasm were signs of disquiet. Perhaps French Canadians could enlist in units that would serve with the French army, the Montreal newspaper La Presse suggested. Perhaps they shouldn’t enlist at all: Canada would best serve the empire by shipping wheat and other commodities. Reluctance on one side was matched by suspicion on the other. In Montreal, police even discouraged citizens from singing “O Canada” instead of the official anthem, “God Save the King.”
There were issues dividing English from French. There was always prejudice: fear of the other language, or the Catholic religion, or, on the other side, of the Protestants. There was disputation over French as a language of education in the English-speaking provinces, suppressed in the West and under assault in Ontario, where the provincial government had banned the teaching of French in the school systems, public and separate. The government’s action was supported by the English-speaking Catholic hierarchy of Ontario and enforced by squads of school inspectors.11 How, then, could French-Canadian soldiers fight for justice abroad when they were denied it at home?
The federal government could do little about schools and language; the last time it had tried, in Manitoba in 1896, it had received a bloody nose. Borden wasn’t much interested in the issue, and even less interested in what the weak French-Canadian contingent in his cabinet could tell him. The Ontario government—Conservative, like Borden, and with powerful sympathizers inside his cabinet—refused to budge. Accordingly, Borden did nothing.
The issue of “Ontario Schools” certainly embittered French–English relations in Canada during the Great War, and did nothing to encourage French-Canadian recruitment during that conflict. Yet French-Canadian antipathy to overseas military adventures was already well established—the precedents of the South African War and the naval controversy of 1909–13 show that clearly enough. There was a long history of disagreement over some of Canada’s great public issues—language and schools in the West and the Riel rebellion being obvious examples.
There was also a strong tradition of reconciliation and compromise in the national political system, and especially in the two great political parties, Conservative and Liberal. Laurier was almost the perfect embodiment of the tradition, weaving among obstacles, balancing interests and prejudices, giving way where necessary, going along and getting along. Cities like Montreal and Quebec had their own, smaller versions of the national system, with political and business elites of both languages getting along because they had to. In Montreal, the mayoralty alternated between English and French Canadians before 1914, and even after 1914, when the mayoralty passed permanently into the hands of French Canadians, English speakers remained an important feature of the city’s politics.
On the great issue of the empire, opinions differed. French Canadians weren’t republicans. Prominent French Canadians accepted the knighthoods showered on prominent Canadians, and participated enthusiastically in the folklore of monarchy—the pomp and parades and ceremonies, and the adoration of visiting royalty. To this were added the parallel and equally vivid ceremonies of the Church, which were also more frequent and thus presumably more engaging on a daily basis. The Roman Catholic Church was anything but a subversive force, and its hierarchy never questioned, in public at least, the powers that were—of whom the Church and its bishops were definitely a part. The Church also offered an alternative for those discontented with the minority status of French, or the difficulties of being Catholic in a majoritarian Protestant country.
Nevertheless, a constant tension simmered between the English and French groups in Canada. English Canadians subscribed to the idea that there was one Canadian nationality, a construct of British-imperial and Canadian identities. Ethnic groups were subordinate to this national identity—at most, ethnic differences existed to enhance, not contradict, the larger nationality.12 As the historian Arthur Silver has argued, this approach made the French not very different from the Welsh or perhaps the Irish.13 And yet the Irish-Canadian bishops themselves spotted the difference made by language—which was why, before the war, they identified their interests with the English-speaking (though Protestant) majority of the country, and not their fellow Catholics.
French Canadians, then, were not moved by the same sentiments, nor subject to the same psychic temptations, as their fellow citizens. Politics in Canada on the national level usually took this distinction into account. Ordinarily, politicians fudged the distinction—the Laurier technique. Even Henri Bourassa, while admitting present and actual differences, predicted a day when French and English would coalesce into a single nationality— once English Canadians had abandoned the follies of empire and dropped their pretensions to racial superiority. Unlike Laurier, Bourassa did not try to escape or avoid the contradictions between the Canadian ideal and the Canadian reality. And unlike the relatively few extreme nationalists of his day, he did not escape into fantasies of separatism.14
Instead, Bourassa set out on his own course, explaining to English Canadians where and when he could that their commitment to empire as expressed in whole-hearted participation in the war was mistaken. The grievances of the French Canadians of Ontario should be the priority, not the wrongs of distant Europe and the excitement of empire. For his pains he was almost mobbed on a theatre stage in Ottawa in December 1914, and was saved only by the manager ringing down the curtain.15 He said the same, even more emphatically, to French-Canadian audiences, where his arguments met with much greater resonance. “In the name of religion, liberty and faithfulness to the British flag,” Bourassa wrote in Le Devoir, “the French Canadians are enjoined to go fight the Prussians of Europe. Shall we let the Prussians of Ontario impose their domination like masters … under the shelter of the British flag and British institutions?”16
It’s estimated that out of the 619,636 men who served in the CEF, 35,000 were French Canadians, 14,000 of whom had volunteered for the army before June 1917. These figures are not quite what they appear to be, since another 228,000 of the 619,000 were born in the United Kingdom, and overall just over half were born in Canada. Quebec had fewer immigrants from Great Britain than other provinces, and fewer unmarried men. (Recruitment in the Maritime provinces, where there were also fewer immigrants, was lower than in Ontario and the West, though not as low as in Quebec.) More French Canadians were farmers, compared with other ethnic groups, and across the country farmers were slow (if not impossible) to enlist. It is nevertheless indisputable that French Canadians did not serve in the armed forces in anything like the same numbers or proportions as English Canadians. That fact in itself was much commented upon at the time, especially in the English-language media, and may have contributed to the further erosion of recruitment in Quebec.
Recruitment of French Canadians wasn’t a complete failure, and even some nationalistes joined up—the prominent politician Olivar Asselin, for example. Bourassa’s cousin Talbot Papineau also joined the army, and engaged his relative in a well-publicized debate in the press over the rights and wrongs of participation in the war. And despite Hughes’s reluctance to encourage purely French-Canadian units, several French-speaking battalions were formed, the most successful of which, the 22nd Battalion (now the Royal 22nd), is still in existence.
By 1916, with no end in sight to the fighting, Canadian politics had reached an impasse. Recruitment was slowing to a trickle, and increasingly fervent appeals to sacrifice, justice, and the common cause drew little response. With Laurier’s agreement the Borden government secured a year’s extension of the term of the Parliament, which would have expired in the fall of 1916. Borden was faltering by that point, and it was unlikely that Laurier would agree to another extension. War or no war, politics had returned to fever pitch by the beginning of 1917.
POLITICS, MONEY, AND MUNITIONS
Canada’s problems seemed to be exacerbated by the uncertain leadership of the prime minister, Sir Robert Borden. Borden, a Nova Scotian and at one time one of Canada’s leading lawyers, had been Conservative leader since 1900. He had survived two election defeats at Laurier’s hands before winning in 1911; by 1915 all the signs pointed to yet another defeat whenever the next election took place.
Borden was slow and methodical in his approach to life and politics. His pronouncements and platforms suggested he was a reformer, and he showed few accomplishments for his first three years in office. In 1914 he did what the occasion warranted, but instead of bold initiatives he worked through the politicians—the ministers—his party provided. They were a doubtful and possibly wasting asset. The Conservative party was on the wane in 1915 and 1916. As Conservative governments tumbled in Manitoba and British Columbia, it seemed that more could be done. But what?
Borden was slightly less sluggish when it came to the political problems caused by his defence minister, Sir Sam Hughes. It didn’t take Hughes long to become unpopular with his own troops. Stories circulated about the minister—how his cronies got supply contracts (true); how he favoured his son, who became a general like his father (indisputable); how his behaviour was capricious and erratic. A waiter who pleased the minister with prompt service was said to have been rewarded with an officer’s commission. It hardly mattered whether the story was true or not; it was plausible, and it was believed.
The most notorious case was the Ross rifle, a marksman’s gun made in Quebec City. Hughes preferred the Ross to the British standard rifle, the Lee-Enfield, even though the Canadian rifle was difficult to load, jammed frequently, and stopped functioning altogether in the mud. The troops responded by scrounging Lee-Enfields wherever they could, meanwhile cursing the minister for the Ross.
As a result Hughes weakened the government, even among its supporters. A scandal broke out over contractors for the manufacture of artillery shells, held to be both defective and insufficient, and the scandal was tracked back to Hughes.
Borden responded by gradually stripping the minister of his authority, in 1916 creating a new minister for the overseas army. Hughes resigned, to Borden’s great relief. Hughes’s mistake had been to assume that running an army in time of war demanded nothing more than the tried and true methods of the old politics—favouritism and patronage spiced with patriotism. Borden knew that this was no longer sufficient, and that his government wouldn’t survive unless it demonstrated a greater capacity for professionalism and objectivity.
Borden was uncomfortable with many of the ordinary tasks of politics. He got on badly with his more political ministers; from their point of view, he failed to understand that his Conservative party needed stronger sustenance than the thin gruel of “good government.” In the short run they were mistaken, but over the longer term it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Borden wrecked the existing party structure without putting very much in its place. By the time that fact became apparent, the war was over and Borden was gone.
The prime minister suffered no great damage from the Hughes episode, but it hardly indicated that he was a confident and decisive leader. It took external circumstances to galvanize him to reshape his government and its objectives. As casualties mounted among the Canadian troops sent overseas, and the effort to sustain them became intolerable under the political system that then existed, Borden came to the conclusion that their sacrifices demanded a different response. The war broke Canada’s political mould: it was up to Borden to do what he could to transform it.
STRATEGY AND CASUALTIES
Canada’s volunteer soldiers, the CEF, were fed into Great Britain’s volunteer army, the BEF. Great Britain was the only combatant not to rely on conscript forces in 1914; as a result, the British army was tiny compared with the German or Russian or French militaries. Those armies had been planning for war for years, with elaborate mobilization schemes based on railway routes and timetables. Moving and sustaining an army was an immense enterprise; once begun, it was difficult to stop.
The combatants of 1914 did not want to stop. They created a war on two fronts, along Germany’s eastern and western frontiers. The Germans attempted to strike first in the west to dispose of the formidable French army before turning on the Russians. They did not succeed in defeating the French or capturing Paris. Though casualties were heavy, the French held off the Germans before their capital, and then outflanked them in a series of manoeuvres that extended the battle as far as the North Sea coast of Belgium, in front of the medieval city of Ypres. As the armies marched north, they entrenched along the route, until by December 1914 a line of trenches—“the Western Front”—ran from the Swiss border, for Switzerland was neutral, to Ypres.
The British and French armies met at Ypres, and there the first Canadian soldiers were sent, in the spring of 1915. The Germans selected Ypres for the trial of a new weapon. Their chemists had concocted a poison gas, and the German high command released it on the Allied soldiers. It was effective, up to a point. Some of the Allied troops melted away, but the Canadians held their line, and the Germans did not after all break through. Poison gas signalled that this war was more frightful than earlier conflicts, but it was only one of the mechanical devices that ensured that the “Great War” would be different from any other. Poison gas was used by both sides, more easily by the Allies, because the prevailing winds came from the west. Gas masks were soon evolved to cope, and gas did not prove to be the decisive weapon its inventors had hoped.
That was also true of a later development, the tank. Essentially a mobile artillery platform, tanks were first used on the Western Front in 1916. Developed by the British, they were imitated by the other major combatants. Heavily armoured but underpowered, the tanks were prone to breakdowns after only a few hours of use. Because of this defect, the tanks of the Great War were marginal weapons, sometimes useful but never decisive.
The Great War was a war of artillery and machine guns at the Front, and supplies—food and ammunition—at the rear. The artillery was supposed to clear a way for the infantry to attack by demolishing the enemy’s trenches. The infantry would then “break through” and the cavalry would pour through the gap the infantry had won. For nearly four years the cavalry waited, fortunately for them, because the infantry did not break through on either side. The reason they didn’t succeed was the strength of the defences, again on both sides: the trenches, with machine guns and strong points made of concrete in which troops could shelter during artillery bombardments. Artillery shelling, used by the ton by all the attacking armies,17 may even have advantaged the defence rather than the offence because it signalled in a fairly mechanical and predictable way that an attack was underway, and where the attack was intended to go.
Major Engagements of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918
The objective, the strategy, of the various armies wasn’t really to gain territory—though that was useful—but to destroy the enemy’s army. The enemy army must be defeated in the field, and killed or captured. In itself this strategy made sense. The problem was a mismatch between strategy and tactics. That was particularly the case from the Allied side, because the German trench systems were thicker, better fortified, and better designed. Behind the lines railways chugged along the Front and up from the rear, bringing reinforcements and supplies to the immense armies that confronted each other.
The armies didn’t spend their entire time assaulting one another’s trenches. Most of the war was spent in periods of boredom, punctuated by acute terror—the terror of going “over the top” of one’s own trenches toward the enemy’s, or the terror of an enemy sniper, or the crushing bombardment of the enemy’s artillery. Most casualties were caused by artillery.18
The Great War was remarkable for another phenomenon. It was the first war in modern times, perhaps in human history, in which more soldiers died in battle than from disease. Advances in medicine, organization, transport, and supply meant that the wounded had a much greater chance of rescue and transport and better methods of treatment than ever before. (The death rate for Canadian soldiers in the Great War was 114 per thousand; it would be lower still in the Second World War.)19 Once wounded, a soldier would be evacuated toward the rear, to dressing stations or field hospitals. For the severely wounded, it was a trip back to England (“Blighty” in contemporary slang—and such injuries were “Blighty” wounds) for proper care and recuperation.
The perfection of military technology and organization, the efficient staff work that moved 458,000 Canadian troops across the ocean, the men and women who fed, clothed, and trained them, then evacuated the casualties and cared for the wounded made the continuation of the war possible.
The war lasted for more than four years. The decisive battle imagined by the commanding generals never happened. Each year the generals presented their plans to the politicians. It was up to the politicians to find the men and supplies, and the money to pay for it all, only to discover that there was never enough, and that the generals’ promises melted into the mud of the trenches.
The politicians blamed the generals for their failures, which were real, and the generals blamed the politicians for their deficiencies, which were partly imaginary. They did not blame the politicians for their real failure, which was to have set war aims that could not be negotiated, only imposed through victory or accepted through defeat. Sometimes the politicians nerved themselves to fire a general or two, but because the military commanders had become iconic figures, symbols of hope and skill and bravery, it was difficult to do so. There were only two commanders of the BEF, Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig. Haig, who led the British Empire’s armies in France from 1915 to 1919, oversaw the disastrous Battle of the Somme in 1916, the equally disastrous Flanders offensive in 1917, and the near-defeat of the British army at Amiens in 1918. His conduct of the war was measured in literally millions of British dead and wounded, including over 200,000 Canadians (56,000 dead, 150,000 wounded).
The politicians resented what the generals were doing, but they had nothing better to offer. The politicians, after all, were the men who decided on war aims, and the absolute incompatibility of the war aims of the belligerents was what determined the length of the war. The Allies— Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire—agreed early on not to make a separate peace and, remarkably, stuck to it. They claimed to be fighting for justice and the rule of law; practically speaking, they were fighting to prevent German hegemony in Europe. Though the Allies didn’t know the details, that was in fact the German objective.
Because the war proved much more costly in terms of treasure and lives than any of the combatants had reckoned, it became necessary to appeal to transcendental values of sacrifice among the civilian populations. The fruits of victory grew, while the perils of defeat grew too. The villainy of the enemy was not left to the imagination, but cultivated by propagandists. Canadians learned, from their newspapers and official propaganda, that the Germans (labelled Huns after the barbarians of old) looted, pillaged, and raped their way across Belgium and France. War posters depicted the bestial Hunnish soldiery; politicians and publicists declaimed the message from the platform; ministers and priests amplified it in the churches. As the months and years passed, the shrillness of the rhetoric made it more and more difficult to reach any kind of compromise peace, and in the event, there was none. The war would have to be won or lost on the battlefield, and on the home front, not in the chambers of diplomacy.
The home front could be a point of weakness. In Russia, a weak government and a chaotic political system combined with economic disruption and military defeat to sap the foundations of the imperial system. In March 1917 the Russian emperor was swept away and replaced by an uneasy alliance of bourgeois politicians and labour militants. They in turn were overthrown in November by the radical Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party under V.I. Lenin, who claimed to represent the workers and peasants. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war, agreeing to whatever conditions the Germans pleased in March 1918. The Germans exacted harsh terms, and in so doing gave the rest of the world a sense of what a German-dictated peace would be like. The Russians and the Bolsheviks had, however, demonstrated that it was possible to end the war and survive, and their example was, in the climate of 1917–18, contagious.
ACCIDENT AND PRECEDENT: CANADA AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Before 1914 Canada did not have, and could not have, a foreign policy. As a colony of the British Empire, Canada enjoyed internal autonomy, including the ability to legislate its own taxes, among them tariffs. It conducted its own commercial foreign policy as an extension of this tariff autonomy, negotiating and implementing trade treaties (though always with a British signature) with various countries, including France and the United States. But when it came to defence policy, and other aspects of political foreign policy, Canada accepted whatever the British chose to do. If the occasion was important enough, as in the South African War and the Great War, Canada was bound to participate. No Canadian representative was present when the British cabinet decided on war in August 1914, nor were there any Canadians in the room when British ministers received intelligence about the war, or decided on war policy.
To underline the obvious, British ministers were responsible to the British electorate, not the Canadian. Their decisions involved Canada, and legally they represented Canada in foreign affairs, but they did not have to manage Canadian politics or cope with the local consequences of imperial decisions. That was left to Borden and the Canadian cabinet. And Borden, sixty-four hundred kilometres away from the seat of empire and the war, had his own priorities, even if, in the summer and fall of 1914, they had been superseded by imperial obligations.
Until 1914 imperial obligations had never imposed much stress or cost on Canada. Now they had, and imperial–colonial relations took on much the same form as they had in the 1830s. If the colony was paying in cash and in kind, and its ministers were assuming the political risk of extracting men and money on a continuing and apparently indefinite basis, then there must be consultation, and responsibility, between the imperial government and its colonial associate.
The problem was that there was no institution, no organization where representation and responsibility could cohabit. There were the old problems of communication and distance. There was the force of habit, for British ministers were unused to sharing decisions with their colonial counterparts. Some members of the British government wondered aloud if the problem might not be best solved by giving independence to Canada and Australia as an alternative to sharing Britain’s sovereign power.20
Borden visited Britain in the summer of 1915. Instead of determination and decision, he found hesitation, confusion, and disunity. Canada’s contribution—by then several divisions of troops—was appreciated, but no one could tell the Canadian prime minister how or whether there would be a victorious end to the war. When he returned to Canada, Borden found that once again his main source of information was the newspapers. Irritated, he drafted a letter in January 1916 in which he compared the dominions’ position in the empire to “toy automata.” He went on to ask, “Is this war being waged by the United Kingdom alone or is it a war waged by the whole Empire?”21
There was no satisfactory answer. British politics were unsettled, and British politicians distracted. Borden, meanwhile, had problems of his own. In Canada, recruitment was faltering during 1916, controversy over the Ontario Schools question reached new levels of bitterness, and scandals over the distribution of war contracts plagued the government. Against this background, Borden was in no position to press his demand for greater dominion representation in the formulation of war policy.
The answer, when it came, was the result of political change in Great Britain, not Canada. David Lloyd George, a senior Liberal minister in the British government and most recently minister of munitions, deposed his predecessor, the Liberal H.H. Asquith, in December 1916. Lloyd George had for some time recognized the importance of the dominions militarily and economically to the British war effort. A very practical politician with the ability to think in new patterns, Lloyd George found it easy to conceive of the dominions as a factor in British politics. He promptly asked their leaders, including Borden, to come to London to confer on the strategy of the war. To manage the dominion representatives, Lloyd George invented an Imperial War Cabinet—essentially the existing British war cabinet made up of the most senior ministers, plus dominion representatives.22
Borden arrived in London in February 1917, in time to witness the British reaction to the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States into the war in April. (Borden knew little more about American politics or the American president, Woodrow Wilson, than his British colleagues, though he claimed to.) The main business before the empire’s ministers was the authorization of a new offensive in France, led by Field Marshal Haig, as he had recently become. Haig was optimistic, and the Imperial War Cabinet gave him what he wanted. The ministers also discussed manpower, which in Britain and the colonies was beginning to run dry. This Borden knew from his own experience—efforts to recruit more volunteers for the army in France had been spectacularly unsuccessful, and the registration of men of military age had failed to stimulate a rush to the colours. There were not, therefore, enough replacements for the army.
Borden took the occasion of his trip to London to visit Canadian troops in France—now four divisions organized in the “Canadian Corps,” efficiently led by a Canadian officer, General Arthur Currie, and recently victorious in a large though limited battle on Vimy Ridge. Borden was especially moved by his visits to military hospitals, and came away with the fixed conviction that in order to keep faith with the troops at the Front he must send reinforcements.
Returning home in May 1917, Borden told his cabinet that it must compel men to join the war through conscription. He knew such a measure must be controversial, not least because the recruitment figures showed that French Canadians hadn’t volunteered for the army in anything like their proportion of the population. Accordingly, Borden tried to win over Sir Wilfrid Laurier, offering him and the Liberals half the places in the cabinet and any seat except the prime ministership.
Laurier refused, in what may have been his most important political decision. Partisan loyalties ran deep, as did an old Liberal aversion to conscription and compulsion that wasn’t limited to Canada or Canadian Liberals. Laurier was conscious and fearful of the consequences in Quebec. If he joined a coalition or Union government, he would abandon Quebec to Henri Bourassa and the nationalistes. He would not do so, and appealed to his followers to follow his example.
Many of the English-speaking leaders of the Liberal party would have preferred to take Borden’s offer, but they had a problem. The party rank and file, even in English Canada, were unwilling to break ranks with Laurier. In Ontario and the West many Liberals were recent immigrants, unmoved by appeals to British race and patriotism. Many were farmers, and farmers as a group resisted volunteering. Traditional Liberals in the Maritime provinces also hesitated.
Borden had to offer not merely a necessary policy but political safety. This he did through the Wartime Elections Act, which disenfranchised any citizen who had immigrated to Canada from an enemy country— meaning mostly Austria-Hungary—after 1902. Doukhobor and Mennonite conscientious objectors also lost the right to vote. The Act created new voters—the wives, sisters, and daughters of the military. Another act allowed military voters, who would presumably vote appropriately, to cast their ballots in whatever constituency they chose or had chosen for them. Then Borden rammed conscription through Parliament in August 1917. The government’s electoral prospects immediately brightened, helped along by Borden’s promise to exempt farmers from conscription. Farmers and other voters outside Quebec also got the impression that the necessary reinforcements would be found in that province.23 The non-Quebec rural vote suddenly became much friendlier to the Conservatives and anyone else who chose to run under Borden’s banner.
An election was scheduled for December 1917. As he had hoped, Borden collected his dissident Liberals, who added strength to the government in Ontario and the West. The issues were simplified for partisan purposes: “Do we want German rule?” a Saskatchewan newspaper demanded.24 If so, then vote for Laurier; if not, Borden was the man. Laurier found himself leading a French-Canadian party with a few party faithful attached. Those English-Canadian candidates who did run under Laurier’s banner knew they were mostly doomed—men like Mackenzie King, the former minister of labour. King hesitated, but in the end he made the right choice, or had the right choice forced on him. He would lose in 1917, but in losing he would establish a public record of fidelity to Laurier, and to the cause of English–French compromise in Canada.
Borden won a majority of seats, and he got conscription. His followers won in a campaign that came very close to preaching racial hatred, a fact that did not pass unnoticed in Quebec. As in 1911, Borden wasn’t too choosy about the method by which he won—a classic case of the end justifying the means. In the short term, it did. But politics are run not merely for the present, but in memory. The election of 1917 would play again and again over the next twenty years in Quebec, with toxic results for the Conservative party.
A trickle of reinforcements reached the army in France, including some draftees from Quebec. Borden had partially achieved his object, but at considerable political cost. In a very real sense it was Laurier who won the struggle, if not the election, though it was certainly a contest he would rather not have conducted. As Liberal leader, he felt abandoned and betrayed by some of his oldest associates. But in Quebec it was Laurier, not Bourassa, who carried the day. Bourassa retreated to the sidelines. Opposition to Borden and his policies remained in the hands of the Liberals in Quebec, and the Liberals were quintessentially the party of the establishment. Even Bourassa then and later was not a separatist, and did not preach the departure of Quebec from the Canadian federation.25
Certainly there was evasion from the draft, and other forms of resistance. In Quebec City troops from Ontario fired on rioters, but instead of spreading, the riot subsided. By the spring of 1918 resistance in Quebec was the least of Borden’s worries. In March the German army stormed the British lines in France, and almost broke through. Faced with the possibility of imminent military defeat, Borden broke his election promise and applied conscription to farmers’ sons.26
Borden also travelled to London in the spring of 1918 for another round of the Imperial War Cabinet; he would stay until August. The mood among the assembled ministers was sceptical if not despairing. There was no question that the war must go on; the question was how. The answer, as always, was more of everything—more reinforcements, more supplies, more taxes to pay for it all. This was less depressing than it might have been, because on the economic front the Canadian government was doing far better than expected.
Although the results of Borden’s conscription measure were disappointing, his industrial mobilization was not. Once responsibility for munitions was removed from Sam Hughes, war production boomed. Responsibility for the manufacture of armaments in Canada was transferred from the Canadian government to the British. Under the direction of a Toronto businessman, Sir Joseph Flavelle, production of all kinds soared in 1918: it was estimated that a full 25 percent of the shells fired on the Western Front that year came from Canada.
Even more surprising, the money to pay for war production came from Canada. Borden’s government began the war borrowing in London, and then New York. Taxes were raised, and eventually a very modest income tax was imposed.27 The federal government did this reluctantly, for it represented an incursion into areas of taxation previously reserved for the provinces and municipalities. Most of the money, however, came from selling bonds inside Canada—the Victory Loans of 1917, 1918, and 1919, which yielded in the billions of dollars and were purchased by over a million subscribers.28
As a result, Borden spoke for a stronger, less dependent Canada in 1918. It could even be argued—and it was—that it was the British who were now dependent, using Canadian funds for imperial armaments, firing Canadian-made weapons, eating Canadian-produced food, and relying on dominion soldiers (mostly Canadian and Australian) as the shock troops for the BEF. To the British prime minister, Lloyd George, Borden told tales of incompetent British generals, inefficient staffs, and misguided tactics. Together with Lloyd George and the other dominion prime ministers, he interviewed candidates to replace Field Marshal Haig as BEF commander in readiness for Haig’s next failure.
Ironically, in August 1918 Haig succeeded. The German army had been worn down by four years of war, and even reinforcements from the former Eastern Front weren’t enough. Canadian troops led the breakthrough in France, at Amiens, and led the British advance into Belgium. Canadian soldiers for the first time in three years passed beyond the hellish landscape of craters and trenches and into fields and forests not yet devastated by war. With American troops arriving by the hundred thousand, the German army collapsed. Their high command demanded an immediate end to the fighting. As German envoys drove to meet the Allied commander in chief, the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Wilhelm II fled and the socialists took power in Berlin.
At 11 a.m. on the eleventh of November, 1918, the fighting stopped. Canadian troops at that point had reached the city of Mons in Belgium; in a small skirmish some Canadians were killed just as the fighting ended. (One Canadian, from Saskatchewan, was the last Allied soldier to be killed, at 10:58 a.m.) The Germans and the Allies signed an armistice, a ceasefire, not a treaty of peace. The peace would come some months later, after a conference in Paris.
THE RESULTS OF THE WAR
The Great War seemed to have strengthened the British Empire. The German naval menace was finished. British red encircled maps of the world: in 1919 British Empire forces occupied more than a quarter of the earth’s land mass. British troops patrolled the Turkish capital, Constantinople; Baghdad and Jerusalem were under British occupation; there were Canadian troops in Vladivostok and Murmansk, as part of Britain’s intervention against the Bolshevik government of Russia.
The leaders of the Allies and their “Associated Power,” the United States, met in Paris to set the terms of peace, which the Germans would be obliged to accept. Sir Robert Borden attended the Paris Peace Conference as a member of the British Empire Delegation, but also as the Canadian prime minister. Canada had a place of its own in Paris; Borden insisted upon it, and Lloyd George secured his allies’ consent to the arrangement. Borden argued that Canada’s sacrifices during the war demanded recognition, making the point that Canada was now a significant power in terms of both its military accomplishment and its economic importance.
Borden did not bring to Paris a fully evolved plan for the independence of Canada. The idea of independence would have horrified him; what he wanted was a British Empire condominium in which the dominions and the British government shared responsibilities. In 1917 Borden and the South African General Smuts had persuaded an Imperial Conference to recognize the autonomous governments of the empire, abandoning any claim to British superiority or supervision. They left until after the war a thorough revision of the empire’s constitutional arrangements, and until that happened the legal position remained as it always had been, with the ultimate authority in the hands of the British Parliament, and the British government of the day.
Lloyd George didn’t mind. Cooperation with the dominion prime ministers got him what he wanted and needed—an advantage over the Conservative politicians who otherwise dominated his government. If Lloyd George spoke for the empire beyond the seas, the prime ministers’ imperial synapses could be counted on to fire appropriately. Realistically, he may simply have thought it made little sense to try to retard a constitutional development that couldn’t be prevented.
Borden had misgivings about the conclusions of the Paris Peace Conference. Its principal fruit, a League of Nations, which was intended to enforce perpetual peace, offended his sense of the practical. If the definition of peace was the settlement of 1919, and the perpetuation of the international system as it existed at that point, Borden had his doubts. The League of Nations was, however, the particular project of the American president, Woodrow Wilson, and Borden was not the man to stand in Wilson’s way. Canada needed Wilson’s acquiescence in its new international standing, and got it. Canada, by virtue of its presence at the Peace Conference and its signature on the final treaty (the Treaty of Versailles), became a founding member of the League of Nations in its own right and not merely as part of the British Empire.
Borden returned to Canada before the treaty was signed. There were problems at home. “Bolshevism invades Canada,” the New York Times told its readers, and Borden’s ministers tended to agree. The world had been swept by a wave of radicalism at the end of the war, and Canada was no exception. The Russian Revolution of 1917 inspired radicals and socialists everywhere, with Lenin’s seizure of power as a model for the future—the near future. Only terror would keep the bourgeoisie at bay, Lenin believed, and terror became the signature of Communist power.
Radicals in Canada were ecstatic. The Canadian bourgeoisie, including Borden and his government, were apprehensive. Borden withdrew Canadian troops from Siberia,29 but he and his colleagues were determined to suppress bolshevism at home. The government confronted romantic would-be revolutionaries in Winnipeg, where a general strike occurred in May 1919. The strike was a graphic demonstration of labour’s power, and as such was intended to intimidate the opposition. It potentially superseded existing governments by allowing only such activity as was authorized by the strike committee. All this was backed up by gusts of revolutionary rhetoric.
There is good reason to believe that the strikers did not intend to overthrow constituted authority, and that their objectives were primarily economic and relatively modest. But much could happen by accident, and precedents were also important. No one forgot that hundreds of thousands of troops were coming home within months, and that in Russia demobilized soldiers had been a crucial factor in Lenin’s revolution. The authorities acted firmly. They arrested the strike leaders, and confronted the strikers with the North-West Mounted Police. Shots were fired, two demonstrators fell dead, thirty were wounded, and the crowds scattered. Within days, if not hours, the strike was over.
The Winnipeg General Strike was one strike among many in the last years of the Great War. Without intending it, the Borden government had presided over a boom economy—full employment, full production, scarcity of supply, and rising wages and prices. Prices, however, rose faster than wages, so that after 1916 Canadian workers were falling steadily behind in terms of their purchasing power. Small wonder that unions grew and flourished and strikes multiplied.
The composition of the workforce was also changing. Female employment had been growing even before the war, and some professions, such as school teaching, and secretarial and stenographic services, were now dominated by women, and remained so. Labour shortages during the Great War had stimulated the hiring of female replacements for males gone to the war, but when the war ended almost all of these reverted to males and males only.
The greatest change was political. Women had been agitating for the vote for years, linking female suffrage with non-partisanship and reform. Manitoba and Saskatchewan gave in first, in 1916, and then it was Borden’s turn. The Borden government first enlisted certain classes of women voters for the 1917 election, but the next year granted the federal suffrage to all women over the age of twenty-one, just like men. All the other provinces except Quebec followed suit. Quebec, like France and Switzerland, retained, for provincial purposes, a male-only franchise; this “peculiar institution” would prevail until the next great war swept it away.
There was another political change. Sir Wilfrid Laurier died in February 1919, and the Liberal party held a convention in August to replace him. In his last years Laurier had been a symbol of division for Liberals. Dead, he could be honoured as a symbol of past glory and a benchmark for Liberalism’s future aspirations. His successor was Mackenzie King (aged forty-four), who was preferred over the party elders because he, unlike them, had been publicly loyal to Laurier in 1917. Many dissident Liberals returned to the fold in 1919, or, like Borden’s minister of agriculture, T.A. Crerar, moved away from Borden’s “Union Government” into opposition.
That was especially the case with farmers, or farming members of Parliament. Like labour radicals, farmers called for the recognition and implementation of their own class interests. There was an analogy, certainly, but there the resemblance ends. “United Farmers” governments were formed in Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario, usually at the expense of the Liberals who until then were the usual harvesters of the agrarian vote. In Ottawa, farmers’ representatives coalesced as “Progressives,” determined to implement a platform that favoured themselves.30 That meant lower tariffs, especially on farm equipment, and other concessions to the farming interest. It definitely did not mean labour-friendly policies or anything else that might inhibit the free practice of agriculture, such as the pasteurization of milk merely on the grounds that it might prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis.
Borden retired before the full blast of the farmers’ movement affected national politics. His successor, as of July 1920, was the talented and acerbic minister of the interior, Arthur Meighen. It was easy to admire Meighen’s administrative capacity, easy to fear his wit and his ability, and difficult to love him. He wasn’t a natural fit as a political leader, for he believed, in the teeth of all current political manifestations, that the old policies that had shaped and governed Canada since the 1870s were actually the best policies. Meighen was a high-tariff man and there was no room in his party for anyone who was even slightly wobbly on the issue. “I was impressed by his eloquence but repelled by his policies,” a young Conservative wrote, just before becoming a Liberal.31
As often happens in politics, Meighen inherited the resentments generated by his predecessor. Borden had offended many by his efforts to reform traditional politics. Patronage, the elixir of life for Canadian political parties, had been practically abolished, and the politicians hadn’t had time to find a substitute. The wartime marriage between Liberals and Conservatives was for many an unnatural union, and there was no time to generate loyalty to Meighen’s hybrid government. Conscription was a fresh memory for French Canadians and farmers, dooming government candidates almost before they were heard. Finally, Meighen allowed his own prejudices to run away with his judgment. He had for many years disliked and despised Mackenzie King, whom he’d known at university. He couldn’t believe the electorate would take the shapeless, formless King seriously. And so the results of the election were all the more unbelievable for Meighen, who sat dumbfounded in his office for weeks on end, and had to be nudged by his staff to resign. He had won only 50 out of 235 seats in the House of Commons, while King had got 116. With the help of 64 Progressives, not to mention five independents, King was assured a functioning majority.
POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY IN THE TWENTIES
Mackenzie King had that most useful political attribute: luck. Canada had suffered a sharp economic downturn in 1920–21. Unemployment and economic misery had contributed to Meighen’s defeat; a slow recovery would assist King’s political prospects.
King was in many respects an American- or British-style Progressive, with all that implied in favouring state responsibility for economic and social policy. Yet one of the controlling factors in King’s politics was a deep aversion to deficits and debt. Canada in 1921 had a debt of $3.018 billion, compared with $750 million in 1914. It was the conservative King, not the reforming King, who gnawed away at its fringes during the 1920s. As a percentage of gross national product, though not in absolute terms, the federal debt fell as King’s early cabinets, composed largely of politicians senior to him in age and experience, approved a policy that rejected new and dangerous opportunities for expenditure and instead paid down the national debt. Naturally they understood that King must lower some taxes—tariffs on farm machinery for example—in order to buy off the Progressives and corral their support. As a result, most of the time, the Progressives backed the Liberals. As time passed, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish some Progressives from Liberals; never strong on party discipline, the Progressives quarrelled among themselves while their party fractured. In the background, King quietly assisted his most senior ministers to retire and recruited prominent provincial Liberals to take their places.32
King was later remembered as a political master, but that wasn’t the impression he created in the 1920s. In 1925 his party came close to defeat at the hands of Arthur Meighen and the resurgent Conservatives, but in a Parliament of minorities, King could scrape by with the support of the Progressives and a few Labour members. He won the early votes of confidence in Parliament, watching from the sidelines because he’d gone down to personal defeat in his own constituency and had to wait for his Saskatchewan allies to open up a safe seat for him. At that precise moment a scandal broke out in the Customs department and the revelations proved too much for the minor parties to bear. They deserted King, who promptly went to the governor general, Lord Byng, and asked for a dissolution of Parliament.
Lord Byng, without entirely understanding what he was doing, refused. King resigned, and Byng sent for Meighen to form a government. The problem, politically, was that while the Progressive and Labour members might have been willing to vote against King, they were unwilling to vote for Meighen.33 Meighen was therefore defeated in the House of Commons, then asked Byng for Parliament to be dissolved, and got his wish.
King did not hesitate to grasp the opportunity of a lifetime. The election issue was simplified to the fact that Byng had given Meighen the dissolution he’d refused to King. It was the People versus the Peer, and it proved a most unequal contest. King, representing the People, won and Meighen, carrying the can for the Peer, lost. Byng soon departed, and Meighen resigned as Conservative leader.
It was Mackenzie King who would preside over Canada’s diamond anniversary, in 1927. (The half-century mark actually fell in 1917, which was not considered a good year to celebrate anything.) Everyone came, at least everyone who mattered. From Great Britain there was the glamorous Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who could then proceed to his Alberta ranch. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin came too, the first serving British prime minister to visit Canada, “the Britain of the West,” in the words of an enthusiastic Canadian bard. Choirs sang, cannons boomed, bands played, and it was all broadcast over the radio, coast to coast. Mackenzie King budgeted $250,000, a very large sum, for the event and himself helped to prepare the ceremony, inserting his Presbyterian sensibilities. (The celebratory booklet was found to be offensive to Catholics, a point that had not occurred to King.)
DIPLOMACY, INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL
King was by profession a labour negotiator. Conciliation came naturally to him, as did compromise and half-measures. “Do nothing by halves that can be done by quarters,” a Canadian poet wrote of the prime minister. It was a shrewd assessment, and one that King might even have agreed with. He would have seen quarter measures as contributing to his success, eking out the minimum level of satisfaction for the maximum number of interests across his very diverse country.
His most important task was to find means of conciliating French Canada, and especially the 90 percent of French Canadians who lived in Quebec, where they in turn formed 80 percent of the population. He was visited in his dreams by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who would periodically reproach him for not learning French. But King did the next best thing: he early acquired a prominent and capable Quebec lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe. Lapointe bridged the gap between the Catholic allegiance of French Quebeckers and liberalism—Catholic enough to satisfy most of the clergy, liberal enough to keep abreast of contemporary political currents.
Certainly Lapointe was more liberal on most issues than the very conservative-minded Liberal premier of Quebec, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau. Lapointe had a better and more natural political touch than Taschereau, the latest representative of a provincial Liberal dynasty first elected in 1897, and who held office as premier from 1920 to 1936. It was to Lapointe and beyond him to Mackenzie King that younger and socially minded Liberals in Quebec looked. “Rouge à Québec, rouge à Ottawa” was the watchword. Strong in themselves, the Liberals had the added benefit of a Conservative opposition discredited by the memory of conscription. Conscription conferred an endless electoral advantage on the Liberals, who ran on the issue whenever they could—which was always. At the same time, the Liberals’ exploitation of conscription weakened the old party system in Quebec by turning the Conservatives, the alternative party, into an unelectable rump. But for the time being the political sun shone on Mackenzie King, as it shone on Taschereau.
Ottawa and the provinces shared responsibility for development during the 1920s. It might have seemed that prosperity would mask if not solve jurisdictional quarrels between the federal and provincial levels, but such was not the case. Prosperity there was, if one looks at aggregate figures. Canada’s gross national product increased steadily after 1921, spurred by an export boom, up from an estimated $3.5 billion in 1921 to $6.1 billion in 1929. Canadian governments, federal and provincial, applauded and did what they could. They didn’t much care that the exports were going to the United States, for the most part, and that Britain’s share of Canada’s trade was declining. So was British investment in Canada, both because Britain had less available capital to export, and because British investors lost heavily in the crash of the Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern railways.
Pulp and paper, minerals, and wheat led the boom, encouraged by provincial trade restrictions that demanded processed rather than raw exports. As a result, pulp-and-paper production moved north of the border from the United States; American threats of retaliation did little to arrest the process. The federal government saw a golden opportunity to expand wheat acreage and accommodate veterans, who got very favourable terms for their acreage and easy loans to begin farming. Settlement spread into marginal areas on the prairies, to the parklands in the north and to the arid Palliser’s Triangle in the south, which had been previously considered fit only for ranching. Wheat acreage and wheat production grew, until in 1928 Saskatchewan harvested a record 321 million bushels. Railways built branch lines to bring grains and minerals and paper to market. New power projects were constructed to bolster electricity supplies to mines and mills, and to Canada’s expanding cities.
As far as Mackenzie King was concerned, prosperity encouraged trouble. The Prairie provinces gained confidence during the decade, and became more and more impatient with the fact that the federal government retained control over crown lands and settlement, and their revenues. They demanded that it surrender the lands, and the resources and revenues derived from them, and they were supported by the older provinces, especially Ontario and Quebec.
Ontario was in a state of jurisdictional war with the federal government, as it had been virtually since Confederation. Governed first by the Conservatives (1905–19), then the United Farmers (1919–23), and then by the Conservatives again (1923–34), its government had little in common with Mackenzie King, who couldn’t even get elected in his native province. The Maritime provinces, more reliably Liberal, had their own discontents: they were stuck in an economic slump through the 1920s, and they wanted help from Ottawa.
All the provinces, except perhaps Quebec, faced a real revenue problem. They had highways and schools and hospitals to build, welfare obligations in times of recession or depression, and limited tax resources. Like other North American jurisdictions, they found a gasoline tax a new and lucrative well of money, but what they made on the gas tax would be spent on the highways. Morality, too, had a price, as far as the provinces were concerned. Prohibition might be well and good, but liquor taxes soothed most political consciences. Sin turned out to be profitable, and not only for the sinners. But even with gas and booze, the richest and most diversified province, Ontario, ran regular deficits and borrowed to pay its way.34
Conservative Ontario and Liberal Quebec wanted the same thing from Mackenzie King: money, an objective shared with all the other provinces. Ontario led the demand that Ottawa vacate the income tax field that it had invaded in 1917.35 Ottawa refused. There was a billion-dollar debt from the war, and the federal government had to carry it alone. There followed endless, fractious negotiations. The federal government had hopes of its own, securing a means to amend the Canadian constitution, the British North America Act, inside Canada. That was the last thing on the provinces’ mind, and ultimately neither King nor Lapointe, by then his justice minister, could devise an acceptable formula.
In the end King gave the provinces what they would settle for. The Prairies got their natural resources, like any other provinces, plus some additional subsidies. Ontario and Quebec were appeased with concessions over water power. The Maritimes got a royal commission, ventilation of their grievances, some fiddling with the Interprovincial Railway, and more subsidies.
Mackenzie King had more than the usual rhetorical reasons for desiring a formula to amend the constitution. He knew that changes were coming in Canada’s external standing. The British in 1926 conceded effective independence to the dominions, and they promised to match the principle with formal legislation.
This was a major change from the situation as Borden had left it in 1920. Resolution IX of the Imperial War Conference of 1917 had provided for equality among the nations of the British Empire, but had also promised a great constitutional conference after the end of the war, with no commitment as to the outcome of that conference. Canada did, it’s true, become a separate member of the League of Nations along with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India (though India was hardly independent from Britain). In general terms, the Canadian delegation to the League cooperated with its British counterpart, but received its instructions not from London, but from Ottawa.
The Unionist Borden and Meighen governments nevertheless tried as best they could to place Canada within a common Imperial foreign policy. That suited their understanding of Canada’s traditions, and they believed as well that Canada would have a greater voice internationally if it acted as part of a great imperial power rather than as an ex-colony isolated north of the United States in an unfamiliar hemisphere. Their policy was put to the test in an Imperial Conference in 1921. The British prime minister was still Lloyd George, and his government, like Meighen’s, was an uneasy continuation of his wartime coalition. Lloyd George wanted the Imperial Conference to ratify his decision to continue Britain’s alliance with Japan, which was due to expire. Such a decision meant much to Australia and New Zealand, which needed the protection the alliance could give, and it would relieve Britain of some of the expense of protecting the Pacific dominions. But in taking this decision, Lloyd George ignored signs of hostility in the United States, whose government asked, reasonably enough, against whom the Anglo-Japanese alliance could be directed, now that the German navy was at the bottom of the ocean. Canada was the part of the empire closest to the United States, and the most exposed to American wrath.
The Imperial Conference produced a clash between two imperial strategies—Canada’s, promoting harmony with the United States above all else; and Lloyd George’s (and Australia’s), arguing that a rational appraisal of the empire’s defence needs must take into account the danger of offending Japan. Meighen told the conference plainly that Canada could not and would not accept a policy that offended the United States. At first Lloyd George stuck to his guns. Let the Canadians go, if they must.
But Lloyd George’s position was more the product of folly and misinformation than of principle. He did not believe that the Americans were actually irritated. When, very belatedly, he learned that they were (and that Meighen had been right all along), he executed a 180-degree turn. The Anglo-Japanese alliance was put on hold, and the British Empire agreed to a naval conference with the United States and other interested powers in Washington. After that conference, in 1922, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was no more, replaced by a multilateral naval disarmament pact and agreements for specific disarmament around the Pacific Ocean. Australia had to be content with the result; Canada certainly was.
By the end of the Washington conference there was a new government in Ottawa. Mackenzie King hadn’t experienced imperial solidarity during the war; unlike Borden, he saw the war primarily as divisive at home, though he certainly had no intention of calling into question the sacrifices Canadians had made to win it. King inherited Laurier’s distrust of imperial scheming, although—also like Laurier—he didn’t doubt that Canada’s identity was primarily British. But being British had limits, which King early on explored when Lloyd George attempted to drag the empire into an ill-conceived war with Turkey in October 1922—called the Chanak incident after its geographical focus. Chanak ruined Lloyd George, and destroyed his government. There was no war with Turkey, but if there had been, King made it clear, in public, that Canada would not be an automatic participant.
King explained his views to the new British prime minister, the Conservative Stanley Baldwin, at an Imperial Conference in 1923. If, he said, “a great and clear call of duty” came, then Canada would be at Britain’s side, as in 1914. Chanak hadn’t been such a call, and by extension no other minor imperial adventure qualified either.
He reinforced his position by appointing as his senior civil-service adviser the very nationalistic dean of arts of Queen’s University, Dr. O.D. Skelton. Skelton shared King’s tendencies toward Canadian isolation, which during the 1920s were in the ascendant. He hoped that in a peaceful decade the “great and clear call of duty” would not put King’s Anglo-Victorian traditionalism to the test.
King and Skelton were lucky. The British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, had no intention of conducting “an imperial foreign policy” if that meant he had to consult the dominions about British foreign plans. The dominions could put up or shut up. Since King chose to put up resistance, he could be written out of British policy, and under the guidance of Curzon and his successors, Canada and any other reluctant dominions were written out of British treaties. Canada could join if it wished, but it didn’t have to. In the future as in the past, Britain would inform but not consult the empire; and in the meantime Britain, like Canada, would trust to luck.
The culmination of this process was reached in another Imperial Conference in 1926. That conference formally recognized, through a report presented by a respected ex–prime minister, Lord Balfour, the complete autonomy of the British dominions. Balfour’s report also recognized that the dominions chose to continue as members of the British Commonwealth, a term that was taking the place of “the Empire,” and that they were bound together by a common allegiance to the crown.
Mackenzie King was quite satisfied. He invoked, as he frequently did, the memory of his grandfather, the rebel William Lyon Mackenzie, smiling down in King’s vivid dreams on Canadian autonomy. King in fact loved the pageantry of monarchy, and remained British to the core. For the Canadian prime minister, the notion that Canada was “the Britain of the West” was no anachronism, but a deeply felt defining characteristic of Canada’s identity.
There remained details to be wrapped up. Discussions among the members of the new Commonwealth in the late 1920s led to another Imperial Conference in 1930. That conference put the finishing touches on a new constitution for the self-governing empire—the Statute of Westminster passed by the British Parliament in 1931.
By the Statute of Westminster the British Parliament renounced forever its right to legislate for the empire. The self-governing dominions were henceforth completely self-sufficient, legally and constitutionally— with a couple of notable exceptions. First, the right of appeal to what was effectively the imperial supreme court, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, continued unless and until abolished. Second, the Statute recognized that the components of the Canadian federation, the federal government and those of the provinces, could not agree on how to amend the Canadian constitution. Yet the constitution did need to be amended from time to time, and against that eventuality the Statute continued the power of the British Parliament to amend the British North America Act.
Canada thus entered on its autonomous—its independent—existence a qualified country. It could take any necessary political decisions; it could exercise its own jurisdiction over whatever Canadian subject it chose—as long as it fell on the right side of the division of powers, federal and provincial, in the British North America Act. Perhaps it was fortunate that by the time the Statute of Westminster took effect, Canadians had something else to worry about. It was, after all, the second year of the Great Depression.