12
UNFRIENDLY WORLDS, 1930–1945
Mackenzie King (top) and Ernest Lapointe address the Canadian public. These caricatures are by the pre-eminent cartoonist Robert La Palme.
In 1931, through the Statute of Westminster, Canada became sovereign to all intents and purposes. Not much changed as a result. Canada might be a sovereign state, but it was one among many. If Canada had a special identity, it was as a part of the British Commonwealth, linked to Great Britain by tradition and trade. All parts of Canada flew the Union Jack, although on festive religious holidays Quebec also flew the yellow and white papal banner.
One of Canada’s most important identifiers, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the “Mounties,” wore British red in their dress uniforms and, of course, in movies, for the American film industry was fond of the force. Canadians in turn appreciatively watched Hollywood’s regurgitation of a version of a Canada composed mostly of ice, snow, and trees and populated on the criminal side by mad trappers and claim-jumpers instead of the standard movie-issue bootleggers and gangsters.1
The gangsters, of course, belonged in the United States as far as most Canadians were concerned. Canada did have its own bootleggers and gangsters, but they never achieved the level of notoriety of the American Al Capone or John Dillinger. No one knew what the RCMP would do if confronted by a Dillinger; the Mounties were too busy acting as provincial police, or keeping an eye on radicals and communists.
Radicals and communists were the other part of the iconography of the 1930s. They were often presented to the public as aliens, speaking with thick accents and displaying dubious standards of hygiene. They preyed on innocent citizens, deceiving them into disaffection or even disloyalty toward Canadian institutions. The cardboard radicals were at least a little closer to reality than the cinematic Mounties, though there was a connection to the national police force. The Mounties dealt with a world of primary products, furs and gold and sometimes timber—what economists then and later dubbed “staples.” Their main task was to prevent people from stealing these valuable items, and on the grand scale they were doubtless right to do so. Furs, gold, and trees were major components of the Canadian economy, to which could be added wheat and other grains, and a sprinkling of base metals. Canada’s exports—its staples—consisted largely of such commodities, dug up, chopped, and piled or baled.
There were other exports too, though, and different kinds of workers to produce them. In fact, compared with the populations in other Western countries—especially the United States—the Canadian workforce was regrettably prosaic. It lived for the most part in cities, worked in factories—or didn’t work, for in the 1930s the economy took its most serious and prolonged downturn in living memory. It was the downturn that helped make the 1930s a decade of crisis—“the Dirty Thirties” of popular memory. The poet W.H. Auden called it “the low, dishonest decade,” but Auden was referring to something besides unemployment, welfare, and discouragement. He meant the desperate efforts of democratic politicians to cope with a situation for which they had no training, no signposts, and no policies. Lacking real policies to deal with the crisis, they pretended to have them. The voters, for their part, had to believe them, for to do otherwise was to lose faith in society and the way in which society was organized. And so, in Canada and in many other countries, the 1930s was not a revolutionary spasm, but a rather conservative decade. In Canada this was symbolized by the politician of the longue durée, Mackenzie King, in office in 1930, and still (or rather again) in office in 1940.
Canadian politics are often taken to be a parochial affair, a collection of neighbourhood issues and minor personalities whose sum total demonstrates that, in the words of Tip O’Neill, “all politics is local,” meaning that all politics is limited. That was sometimes true, but it was definitely not the case in the 1930s.
Canadians had an alternative politics, brought to them by the newspapers, by movies and especially movie newsreels, if they could afford to view them, and over the radio. They knew that the Depression extended far beyond Canada, that the Americans had it, and that it existed in Britain and Europe. In Britain there were hunger marches, political crises, and a “National Government,” a coalition of patriotic politicians dominated, as during the Great War, by Conservatives. In Germany the Depression undermined democracy and spawned a dictator, Adolf Hitler. Hitler shrieked from the newsreels in front of ominously uniformed crowds, first carrying shovels and later rifles. It was meant to impress, and it did, but Germany was, after all, a very long way away.
Closer to home, and to reality as Canadians saw it, were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States, and his New Deal. Roosevelt told Americans that they had “nothing to fear but fear itself” when he took office in March 1933. He spoke at the depth of the Depression, when American national income had shrunk by half since 1929 and a quarter of the workforce or more were unemployed. Canadians could empathize with that—for the same things were true in Canada. They listened attentively to Roosevelt’s exhortations, and compared them with the barking speeches of Canada’s own prime minister, Richard Bedford Bennett—“R.B.”
OLD NOSTRUMS, NEW FAILURES
Bennett was a prisoner of his own limitations. An able lawyer, a masterful administrator, and a highly intelligent egotist, he liked to personalize his policies. “I will blast a way into the markets of the world,” he told the electors during the 1930 federal election. That resonated with his audience. They, like Bennett, understood that Canada must export or die, that prosperity came from Canadians producing abundance at home and selling that abundance abroad. It was a call to the staples theory—though it’s doubtful whether Bennett or his listeners or anybody other than a few academics had ever heard, much less used, the term. But the staples theory embodied what most Canadians understood about their country: that it was dependent on other people buying their exports. No exports, no money, no job—this they also understood.
So Bennett’s promise of blasting a way into the markets of the world offered hope, and hope bought votes. In what was essentially a two-party contest, his Conservatives won 48.5 percent of the vote to the Liberals’ 45.2 percent, and 137 seats in the House of Commons compared with the Liberals’ 91.2
Mackenzie King hadn’t expected to lose the election; he resentfully vacated his office and retired to his country home, Kingsmere, north of Ottawa, to await events. Bennett was the one, therefore, who had to confront a problem so far beyond his imagining that it would undermine his health, his government, and his career. Canadians’ choice of political leadership in 1930 meant that it was the Conservatives who would offer the first solutions for the Depression.
Of course, in 1930 no one called it that. There was an economic slump, certainly. There was a decline in the market and price for wheat, and for pulp and paper. The gross national income for 1930 was markedly lower—7 percent down—than that for 1929. It was still higher than 1927 though, a good year. Surely there was cause for confidence, if not exactly abounding optimism.
Yet the downward trend continued. The year 1931 was worse than 1930, and 1932 worse than 1931. Bennett raised Canada’s tariffs, the first step in his “blasting” program, with the idea that he could then bargain them away for concessions in other countries’ tariff schedules. It was an unfortunate strategy, because every other country was trying the same thing. The result was slowly to strangle what was left of international trade. Bennett’s blaster turned out to be a popgun.
The prime minister could argue that he needed the revenue increased tariffs produced—though on a diminished flow of goods—because he had to pay for the costs of unemployment. But technically, as Bennett knew, he didn’t have to. A British judge had once compared the federal–provincial division of powers in Canada’s constitution to watertight compartments on an ocean liner. The purpose of watertight compartments, the judge didn’t need to add, was to keep the ship afloat.
The 1920s had already shown that the provinces were struggling with inadequate revenues. Their solution was to borrow, and to count on an expanding economy to keep their finances buoyant. So when the economy started to contract the provinces couldn’t cope—at least not for very long. Their problems were multiplied by those of their junior governments, the municipalities. Towns and cities were exclusively a provincial responsibility, and the provinces allowed them to raise their own revenues through property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes. The municipalities found that issuing bonds was a good way to bring in the money to build schools and roads and sewers during the 1920s, and like the provinces they relied on continuing prosperity.
Municipalities weren’t the only institutions who gave hostages to fortune. In the Prairies, farmers embittered by struggles with the railways and private grain dealers had formed “pools” to manage their multimillion-bushel harvest. The federal government had established a compulsory pool during the Great War—the Board of Grain Supervisors, later the Canadian Wheat Board—but abandoned the experiment at war’s end. The later pools, one per province, were voluntary, but together they controlled about 60 percent of the Canadian wheat crop.3 The pools tried to bring regularity and predictability to the uncertain craft of farming: they advanced their farmer-members money based on the size of their crops, then sold the grain to recoup, settling up later when it was sold and the money was in. It all depended on the international market price, which during most of the 1920s was rising.
In 1929 the price fell and the pools were caught short. Unnerved, the three provincial governments bailed them out, but in 1930 the situation didn’t improve. Low prices now combined with the beginnings of drought in Palliser’s Triangle. It was Ottawa’s turn, for a sum determined by the flinty R.B. Bennett (ironically, a Calgary MP). Bennett paid, but at the price of taking over wheat marketing. The pools were relegated to being collectors of grain from the local elevators that dotted the prairies and fed into larger ones at Canada’s grain-shipping ports.4 Prices continued to fall and the drought worsened. By the mid-1930s the land was taking flight as hot winds blew the soil across the prairie. Observers as far away as Winnipeg, on the eastern edge of the prairie, saw the sky darken to the west. Farms were abandoned and their families fled. Those who were left suffered poverty and deprivation of a kind not seen in the settled parts of Canada since the previous century. (Poverty and deprivation were all too frequent, though, on Canada’s Indian reserves.)
The disaster overtaking the pools soon caught up with the provincial Prairie governments. They were already heavily indebted; now, to provide welfare for the unemployed and destitute, they had to borrow again. City finances, too, dried up. Taxpayers couldn’t pay, and although cities could foreclose their properties, the defaults were so widespread that property sales couldn’t hope to keep up with city debts. The banks became alarmed.
They were alarmed even in diversified and relatively more prosperous Ontario, where farmers were in desperate straits and where the pulp and paper industry was entering the long night of Depression. Idle factories exemplified the waste people perceived—trained workers, modern plants, and no money. Parts of the countryside in Ontario and elsewhere reentered a barter economy, paying for services—medicine, for example— in chickens or milk, which the service providers—doctors, for example—were happy to receive. The Canadian Medical Association began to print articles on socialized medicine for its members to read and ponder. Some things might be better than the market.
Even Prime Minister Bennett had to admit concern. Bennett specialized in public unpleasantness—he had “the manners of a Chicago gangster,” one British politician reported—but there was only so much humiliation he could dole out to his wretched provincial colleagues. Thanks to Mackenzie King’s unimaginative fiscal management during the 1920s, the federal government was the most solvent in Canada. Bennett knew that if any other significant government failed—went bankrupt—it would affect Ottawa’s own credit. He could not be indifferent to the plight of the provinces. Small cities might go bankrupt—and some did: Windsor and Saskatoon, to name only two—but not Toronto or Montreal. Some provincial governments were kept afloat, making payments to their bondholders, only with money from Ottawa. If the subsidy tap were ever turned off, four or five of the nine provinces would face bankruptcy.
The struggle over subsidy consumed Bennett’s domestic policy over his five years in office. His external policy was a distinctly secondary consideration, even though initially he’d made trade and trade policy the centrepiece of his election promises. Circumstances did allow the prime minister one accomplishment in trade. Fortuitously, Great Britain had reached the end of its tether with free trade. The pound had been forced off the gold standard and British trade was suffering from the high tariffs imposed by other, non-believing nations in defiance of the logic and dogma of free trade. The British government—the National Government—had to take action and, after crushing its opposition in an election in 1931, it did. It would impose tariffs. Temporarily, the dominions were exempt, since a system of imperial tariff preferences was anticipated. There would be an Imperial Economic Conference that would regulate the conditions of trade inside the Empire-Commonwealth. It would meet in Ottawa in July 1932.
The time and venue for the Ottawa conference were unfortunate. Only one room was large enough in the Canadian capital to accommodate the delegates from all over the empire—the House of Commons, in the recently restored Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings. The Commons chamber wasn’t set up for cooperation: its forte was confrontation and its design matched its function. Worse, nobody seems to have taken Ottawa’s climate into account; in July the capital is typically very hot and very steamy.
Tempers flared, especially between the British and Bennett, as the British delegation discovered that while Bennett believed in imperial economic unity, he thought it was somebody else’s job to pay for it. Canada already gave Britain a reduced tariff; it was up to the British and the other delegations to find the means to match it. The result was a series of agreements, bilateral in form, in which the various parts of the empire favoured one another in terms of trade. Despite their unpleasant origin in Bennett’s pressure cooker, the “Ottawa Agreements” were extensive and had a considerable effect. To take one example, automobiles, Canada could export on favourable terms all over the empire. The “Big Three” American automobile companies, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, already had plants in Canada, and now they expanded them. For years thereafter Canadian-made Fords and Chevrolets roamed the byways of the empire, testimony to the efficacy of the great (and last) Imperial tariff.
The Ottawa Agreements, like other Canadian tariffs, had the effect of encouraging American investment in Canada. They also impressed the American government—not by themselves, but in conjunction with the single greatest economic catastrophe to hit the United States as far back as anyone could remember. Seeking a reason for the severity and duration of the Depression, Americans found it in the United States itself—or rather in the U.S. Congress.
Congressional power over trade was a fact of life for all countries trading with the United States, none more so than Canada. Congressional tariffs in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1920s had regularly scythed Canadian exports. The most recent, called Smoot-Hawley after its sponsors, was more of the same. Canada had its own high-tariff policy, of course, though it allowed lower rates to countries who had signed trade agreements. There was no functioning agreement with the United States, to be sure, and hadn’t been since the expiry of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854–66. (Canada wasn’t alone in this: in the 150 years of the United States’ existence it had ratified only three trade agreements with other countries, so jealously did Congress guard American sovereignty.) So the United States faced not merely high but higher tariffs exporting to Canada. The Ottawa Agreements seemed to say to the United States that the countries of the empire would get along without them.
The American explanation for this was “We made them do it.” There was some truth in this, though there were certainly other factors and other explanations to be considered. To undo the damage required an expression of American good faith, if not repentance, and this was formulated in an early enactment of the Roosevelt administration, the Trade Agreements Act of 1934. The Act stipulated, for the first time, that the executive might make trade agreements with other countries, trading reductions (reciprocity) in tariffs for up to half the existing level of U.S. duties.
R.B. Bennett leapt at the opportunity. His negotiators laboured through 1935 to reach an agreement, and it was at hand when the fiveyear term of the Canadian Parliament expired and Bennett very reluctantly had to face a general election. He knew that Canadians in 1934–35 viewed the United States very favourably indeed, not merely as a rich trading partner but as a model for what should be done more generally about resolving the Great Depression.
Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had the great virtue of promising action. It spent public money, sometimes lavishly, on internal improvements. It sought to appeal to the “Forgotten Man.” It mattered not at all that the New Deal’s activities were sometimes contradictory, sometimes ineffective. The impression on the public—including especially the Canadian public—was of action and concern. The Depression disarmed and discredited Roosevelt’s enemies, the erstwhile leaders of business and their political friends. Roosevelt regularly took to the air waves and gave the nation “Fireside Chats.” The Chats reached Canada too.
Bennett got the message. To their amazement, in the winter of 1935 Canadians heard their prime minister rasping on the radio proclaiming a New Deal of his own. He would establish labour standards, he would legislate fair treatment for all, and he would use his government’s power on behalf of the unfortunate. In the spring session of Parliament, he did so.
Mackenzie King’s reaction is instructive. King believed, or so he told his diary, that Bennett had gone mad. If he hadn’t gone mad, then he’d become a fascist, like Hitler or the Italian dictator Mussolini. They, too, promised forceful action on behalf of the downtrodden, and to a traditional liberal like King this was the stuff of tyranny. King didn’t share Bennett’s new-found enthusiasm for Roosevelt or the New Deal. He had no proposals of his own, but that made no difference. He sat back and watched Bennett cook his own goose, counting on the suddenness of Bennett’s conversion to social action to undermine his established reputation for ruthless conservatism.
The Liberals ran in the general election of 1935 under the slogan “It’s King or Chaos.” It didn’t take much imagination to establish who Chaos was—certainly not soft, pudgy, familiar Mackenzie King. King won the election handily, though with a lower percentage of the popular vote than he had got in 1930. It was the collapse of the Conservative vote, to an unheard-of 29 percent, that gave King the victory. Two new parties also picked up seats in 1935: Social Credit, centred in discontented and impoverished Alberta, and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF hereafter), a socialist party that was strongest on the Prairies.5
KING AND CHAOS
King was, as we have noted, a very lucky politician. By the time he came to power, economic conditions were improving. Things were desperate on the Prairies, but Ontario and Quebec, with their diversified economies, weren’t doing too badly. There was still a crisis in provincial finance, meaning further bailouts of the provinces, which King managed in the same grudging and parsimonious spirit as his predecessor. But Bennett had already borne the burden of the Depression. Their resentment largely discharged, Canadians mostly didn’t blame King. That was just as well, for King had absolutely no idea how to fix the Depression, and it may have made matters worse that he was a trained economist, for orthodox economics had no solution to offer.
King did, however, sign a Reciprocal Trade Agreement with President Roosevelt—the one Bennett had negotiated. He then defended Canada’s position in triangular trade talks among the British, Canadians, and Americans in 1937–38. Believing that the British would look after their own interests first, and Canada’s a long way after, he insisted on compensation for any British concessions to the United States.
In dealing with the British and the Americans King was on familiar ground. He had spent time in both countries, and had a Ph.D. from Harvard. He’d been at Harvard at roughly the same time as Roosevelt, and the two men immediately invented a past that would justify their present official friendship. In a curious way King and Roosevelt were actually friendly. King had a range of acceptable social acquaintances, and was cautious and discreet. Best of all, the prime minister was careful not to make too many demands of the president, but when he did Roosevelt listened. Roosevelt even favoured King with political advice. Noting King’s difficulties in balancing French and English Canada, Roosevelt advised him to assimilate the French Canadians as quickly as possible. It was working in the United States, where there was a large French-Canadian population centred in New England; it should work in Canada too.6 King made no recorded reply.
Roosevelt was right to grasp that King spent much time managing relations between English and French Canadians. During the 1920s King depended absolutely on Quebec to produce Liberal pluralities in Parliament. Ernest Lapointe, his Quebec lieutenant, led a strong Quebec Liberal delegation into Parliament and into the cabinet in 1935. King relied on Lapointe, and the evidence suggests that, even when he didn’t sympathize with or even perhaps understand Lapointe’s arguments, he would accept them, such was his faith in his lieutenant’s judgment.
Lapointe knew that parts of Quebec were hard hit by the Depression, and that a great deal of social and political ferment was brewing in the province. The political direction signs in Quebec pointed right, not left, as on the Prairies. Lapointe, a man of somewhat liberal tastes, deplored the drift, but he concluded that, to keep Quebec relatively calm and cooperative inside Canada, he must work with Quebec as it was and not as he would like it to be. He sensed, and King knew, that the international situation was volatile and potentially very dangerous. A general war was a possibility, and if one occurred it would be hard to keep Canada out of it.
The Great War was an ever-present memory for Lapointe, and for King. It hadn’t had good press in Quebec, and if possible conscription was a livelier issue in 1935 or 1936 than it had been in 1917 or 1918. It’s plain that Lapointe feared, though he didn’t explicitly say so, that if another war came Quebec might not cooperate—or worse.
The rightward drift in Quebec wasn’t universal, but it’s probably true to say that in the 1930s the French-speaking part of the province was very nearly self-enclosed, apart from the dealings of a small political and business elite at the top and plentiful but inconsequential contacts among ordinary English and French Canadians. In parts of the province the English created management garrisons in company towns, with their own clubs, schools, and even golf courses, plunked down in a world where French Canadians couldn’t rise above the level of foreman in the plant.7 Westmount, the city on the hill above Montreal, dreamed its own dreams and lived its own, almost entirely English life, whether one was a socialist or the deepest Tory.
Nationalists especially lived in a world of their own. François Hertel wrote in 1936 of “a federal government with Protestant inclinations; the supreme domination of a Protestant empire; the radio, which has become a broadcaster of Protestantism; the cinema, a carrier of immorality; our French press itself which, for the most part, is Catholic in name only.”8 When a young and well-connected French Canadian, André Laurendeau, wanted to investigate the English, their views and their habits, he realized he didn’t know any of the hundreds of thousands of English speakers who lived within a few kilometres of his own house.
The stereotypical French Canadian of the period, the one to be found in representative fiction, is put upon when not downtrodden, and the English, though not generally malignant, were also stereotyped as insensitive and uncaring. This is not to say that there weren’t wealthy or privileged French Canadians who were anything but downtrodden, or that some regions such as Quebec City were run without much need of reference to the English. The phenomenon speaks to self-image, and such a self-image was not the stuff of cooperation or fellow feeling with the English majority in Canada.
Not all the English speakers were Anglais. There were also les Juifs, the Jews. They were seen by the French as distinct from the English—English Canadian anti-Semitism made sure of that, with quotas for admission of Jews to McGill University among other disabling considerations. Jews were also seen as clever, able, and vulnerable, for many of them, as recent immigrants, were still humbly employed—shopkeepers, rag merchants, or ordinary workers alongside their French-Canadian counterparts. Against the Jews was directed the achat chez nous movement of the 1930s, urging French Canadians to patronize their own stores and not those of the alien. And yet, paradoxically, there was a sense that the Jewish merchant was a better businessman than the French Canadian.
The Liberal party was the great beneficiary of immigrant votes in Canada. The Liberals had supported immigration, or were thought to have supported it. The great influx of immigrants to Canada, and Montreal, came during Laurier’s time, and it transformed the centre of Montreal. The immigrants supported Mackenzie King and Lapointe federally, and Taschereau provincially. One Jewish member of the Quebec legislature, naturally a Liberal, collected more than 100 percent of some polls in his riding, a fact that was duly noticed and denounced by the “bon” newspaper in Montreal, Le Devoir.
But the Taschereau government was old and corrupt and crumbling. In 1935 Taschereau lost most of the promising younger members of his Liberal party, and almost lost an election. The premier didn’t know how to cope, and an atmosphere of sauve qui peut overcame his cabinet and his caucus. The government disintegrated under the prodding of an alert and pitiless leader of the official Conservative opposition, Maurice Duplessis. Taschereau resigned in May 1936, as crowds surged around the legislature. “La foule conspue Taschereau et les Juifs,” Le Devoir reported.9
In August 1936 the Liberals were swept from power in Quebec. It’s easy to concentrate on the Liberal defeat, but the Liberal party survived the election, though with a narrower, more urban political base than in the past. What was really important about the political events of that year was the disappearance of the provincial Conservative party, and its absorption into a new political formation, the Union Nationale. “Nationale” didn’t really mean “national” in English, though that was the official translation; it referred and was understood to refer to the French-Canadian nation.10 It was that fact that worried Lapointe, for if the Union Nationale was allowed to consolidate its grasp on power it would rival not the provincial Liberals in Quebec City but the Mackenzie King Liberals in Ottawa, and by extension the whole system of political accommodation on which Ottawa’s politics was founded.11 Premier Duplessis understood the point well. An accomplished orator and an equally skilful demagogue, Duplessis was determined to stay in power come what may. The Ottawa Liberals accurately appraised his willingness to extend the bounds of what was permissible in politics. Should he do so, they were anxious that he should lose.
All this had political consequences. It meant that the Liberal government hesitated to make decisions that might aggravate the situation in Quebec. “National unity”—meaning, this time, Canadian unity—became King’s watchword. It had a particular meaning for the Jews: frightened by the nationalistes’ willingness to exploit the Liberals’ links with the Jewish population of Quebec, King and Lapointe drew back from any action— admitting Jewish refugees—that could reinforce that connection in the minds of the electorate.12
What did “national unity” mean? How was it put into practice? King was as likely to act by omission as by commission—he created the illusion of calm waters by steering around storms, avoiding debate, and (his specialty) shrouding controversies in a fog of vague words.13 His favourite formula was “Parliament will decide,” a phrase mockingly echoed by his critics.14 There was a paradox here: King prided himself on his democratic roots, as the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, that tribune of the people. But King had experienced the vagaries of public opinion, losing personally in the 1911 election and again in 1925, and watching Canada convulsed by ethnic and provincial hatred in 1917. These were lasting impressions.
King paid unusual attention to public opinion, as far as he could. It was the hallmark of the good politician to divine what people were thinking, since there were no opinion polls to shape the political art. The rash politician presumed that if he was right, the public would follow. That was Meighen’s style, which King despised. Instead, the prime minister rightly feared what public opinion might say, the more so because he realized that several publics existed in Canada, whose views were, sadly, contradictory. That was a problem to be managed and shaped, cautiously and slowly— or as slowly as events outside King’s control allowed.
THE COMPLICATED POLITICS OF APPEASEMENT
Time hadn’t healed all wounds between English and French Canada. The situation in the late 1930s was more volatile than it had been before 1914 on the French-Canadian side, and somewhat less so on the English Canadian. The French side was a spectrum, from a minuscule leftist fringe, denounced by the Church and shunned by most of society, through moderate liberal, still small, through a large clerical-conservative majority, until finally there was another fringe on the right. Nationalism was superimposed on this spectrum, but while it was probably true that most on the right were nationalist in some sense, the very furthest right, the fascist followers of the Parti National Social Chrétien, were in fact pan-Canadian, joined to far-right-wing English Canadians by anti-Semitism.15
The English-Canadian counterpart to French-Canadian nationalism was imperialism. In the absence of public opinion sampling—the first “scientific” polls didn’t appear in Canada until after 1939—we must rely on the guesswork of observers, including the politicians. The politicians and their associates, journalists and civil servants, certainly believed that imperialism was alive and well. Dr. O.D. Skelton, a political scientist by training before he became undersecretary for external affairs (1925–41), hoped that death would solve the problem, as the older generation passed away with its political beliefs. Dr. Skelton himself believed that Canada wouldn’t survive another bout of imperial warfare along the lines of the Great War, but even he was obliged to admit the importance of Canadians’ British attachment as a political factor.
Skelton wasn’t opposed to imperialism alone, but to any kind of international activism. Some Canadians put their faith in “collective security” and the League of Nations, hoping and expecting that the nations that had signed the League’s founding document, the Covenant, would honour their promises to join in the fight against international aggression, should any occur. There was a League of Nations Society with thousands of members which sought to pressure the Canadian government to do the right thing and support the League. Skelton regarded them as a nuisance, though not especially dangerous. League supporters were found among all the federal political parties, but they were never distributed or configured in a way to guarantee the allegiance of any party. Enthusiasts for foreign policy discovered that the Canadian electorate and the politicians who guided it thought in terms of a multiplicity of issues, and that foreign affairs as such were seldom crucial in the public mind.
What was crucial was the economy. There was too little money, too little work, too many jobless, too few employed. These considerations affected two foreign policy–related issues, trade and immigration. Politicians and economists were agreed that prosperity would revive only with trade; where they disagreed, or threw up their hands in despair, was how trade could be revived. As for immigration and immigrants, the country didn’t want any more. The police scoured the backstreets for radical immigrants who could be deported, and were. No more need apply.
Anti-immigrant sentiment reinforced the views of Canada’s director of immigration in the 1930s, Fred Blair. Blair was indeed an anti-Semite, and he held his office just as Hitler began his campaign to persecute the Jews of Germany. Jewish refugees could go somewhere else as far as Blair was concerned. He was certain that no politician would publicly advocate the admission of refugee Jews to Canada, and he was right.16
Mackenzie King had other reasons for hesitation about foreign policy issues. A generation of sceptical commentators had dissected the reasons for the outbreak of the Great War. The confidence that Britain’s cause was just and right wasn’t quite as firm as it once had been. In the United States a congressional committee was examining, with the fullest publicity, whether the war hadn’t been a conspiracy of bankers and munitions-makers. King himself doesn’t seem to have been influenced by these speculations, but Canadian opinion wasn’t impervious to waftings from the United States, and there was some support for the notion that North America was qualitatively different from Europe, and ought to remain aloof—isolated—from European machinations.
King did his best to avoid a crisis over foreign policy. He repudiated his own envoy to the League of Nations when the latter tried to make the League’s regime of sanctions work to arrest and reverse Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Canadian opinion was divided on the issue, along linguistic and religious lines, a clear signal to the prime minister that Canada must avoid involvement. A similar division occurred the next year, when right-wing, monarchist, and Catholic forces began a civil war in Spain against a secular and socialist republican government. Canadians disagreed on the rights and wrongs of the question, again along racial and religious lines; and again King drew back, refusing to take a position except to urge Canadians not to become overtly involved. Despite his warnings, some did, fighting for the Spanish republic in the “Mackenzie-Papineau battalion.” There is no sign that King was moved by the invocation of his revolutionary grandfather’s name.
King visited Europe several times in 1936 and 1937, and became a regular caller at the White House, where in this period he was the most frequent foreign visitor. King called on Roosevelt before attending an Imperial Conference in London in 1937, but Roosevelt, trapped by his own isolationist public opinion, was unable to offer any aid or promise of aid to the British, who were increasingly worried by the rise of Nazi Germany and the defection of fascist Italy from alliance with Britain after the Ethiopian incident. Only France remained a steadfast ally to the British and that, as the French might have said, was faute de mieux. The British vainly sought promises of aid from King in 1937, but he refused to give them explicitly. Yet during a visit to Berlin, King then told some of Hitler’s disbelieving ministers that, if Germany attacked Britain, Canadians would swim the Atlantic to come to the aid of the mother country.17
The signs were there for the British to read: in an international crisis of the kind fast approaching, Canada would once again go to war for the British Empire. (King sent a memorandum of his Berlin conversations to the British government, including his remark that Canadians would wish to come to Britain’s aid.) The British, however, didn’t read the signs, and spent 1938 and 1939 in a fog about Canada’s intentions.
In fact, King strongly approved of the policy of the latest British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain (1937–40). Neville was the son of Joe, Laurier’s old bête noire, but in King’s eyes that was a remediable defect. Though imperious, even arrogant, in his own government, Chamberlain strongly believed in the art of conciliation—appeasement—in foreign affairs. It was a familiar strategy for the British during the 1920s and 1930s. Anything seemed better than war and its horrendous casualties, costs, and disruptions. The Great War had undermined Britain’s financial position, so that Britain would start any new war worse off than in 1914. (King and his colleagues had exactly similar fears about Canada’s economic position.) No one could tell how Britain would survive another conflict, and it was entirely rational to avoid one.
Chamberlain proceeded to try. He avoided a confrontation when Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, and actively sought a compromise when Hitler concocted a crisis with Czechoslovakia the following September. In a conference at Munich, conducted in the glare of extreme publicity, Chamberlain gave Hitler most of what he wanted, made what was left of Czechoslovakia indefensible, and ensured that Hitler could swallow the rest when he wanted. That bill came due in March 1939.
Seen from a purely diplomatic perspective, appeasement in 1938–39 is a sad story of naïveté, deception, and folly. There is, however, another perspective—that of the politicians at the time. Chamberlain and King were mindful that the British government of 1914 had been criticized for not doing all it could to avoid war, that the diplomacy of July and August 1914 was secretive, and that millions were subsequently sacrificed for a cause they couldn’t have hoped to understand, much less resolve. The diplomacy of 1938–39 didn’t do that. Hitler’s perfidy, brutality, and recklessness were on display for all to see; even the blindest critic had to admit that the allies, Britain and France, did not seek war. When war came, and Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, there was no argument that could claim the Germans were provoked, or the British too belligerent.
Before war came, there was one last imperial entr’acte. In May–June 1939 King George VI and his consort, Queen Elizabeth, arrived in Canada for a long-planned royal tour. George was the respectable younger brother of the raffish Prince of Wales, who had briefly served as king in 1936 (under the name Edward VIII) and then passed on the crown to his brother when his ministers (including Mackenzie King, who was asked his opinion) opposed his choice of an American divorcée as royal consort.
The visit was, in the view of a Saskatchewan historian, “the event of the decade” on the drought-stricken and impoverished Prairies. The reception of the royal couple speaks volumes about the attitudes and loyalties of Canadians in the 1930s. In Regina on 25 May 100,000 people waited in the rain for the king and queen. The crowd was larger than the city, but what was truly astonishing was their reception in Melville, Saskatchewan (population four thousand), on 3 June: 60,000 people drawn from as far away as Manitoba and North Dakota waited for hours under a sign painted on the local grain elevator—“Welcome to their majesties.”18
In Quebec City, as in Vancouver and Halifax and every point in between, Canadians enthusiastically received the king and queen. It may have been merely a spectacular counterpoint to a drab decade, but it was surely much more. Canadians understood its significance, even Canadians like the diplomat Lester B. Pearson, who cynically observed that it was one way for the British to firm up Canadian support for the war that must come. Come it did, just two and a half months after the royal couple set sail back to England.
In 1914 Canadians went to war easily and reflexively; in 1939 they went reflectively. Their hesitations were behind them, part of the chronicle of miserable events of the spring and summer of 1939. If enthusiasm was muted, there was also a sense that no other course was possible. Mackenzie King matched up the residual imperialism of so much of the Canadian population with a cause that anti-imperialists (including most of French Canada) could accept.
On the question of war and peace, the partnership of Lapointe and King worked smoothly. They seem to have drawn the conclusion early in 1939 that war was more likely than not, and within the year. Lapointe accordingly made a speech in Parliament outlining why the Canadian people would accept war, if it came, and King made one that emphasized that he would bar the door against any useless or frivolous adventure.
The signal that war was inevitable came at the end of August, when Hitler’s Nazi Germany signed a public “non-aggression” pact with Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union. The treaty actually opened the door to German aggression, and divided the spoils with the Russians. The Canadian government summoned Parliament, proclaimed the War Measures Act, and prepared to call for volunteers for the armed forces.
The Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September; and the Canadian Parliament met on 7 September. The government presented a resolution declaring war on Germany. Duly passed against minimal opposition, the declaration of war, Canada’s first, was signed by George VI on 10 September.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR BEGINS
Canadians in 1914 were confident when they embarked on the Great War. It was of course a confidence born of ignorance; and the same could not be said of 1939. Aerial bombardments, poison gas, submarine warfare— developments of the Great War—were available for the Second World War. As if to underline the point, the Germans promptly sank an ocean liner, the Athenia, carrying British evacuees bound for Canada.
The Canadian government followed the course laid down in 1914, but it could study the mistakes made by Borden’s government, and try not to repeat them. The government assumed control over Canada’s foreign exchange reserves and imposed controls over international transactions. Thanks to R.B. Bennett, there was a government-owned Bank of Canada to manage the currency and advise the government. The government promptly raised taxes, and thanks to Borden’s income tax it had the means to do so. As in 1914 there was a burst of “national unity” sentiment, but it lasted an even shorter time than in 1914.
The problem came first with the provinces. Most of them were pensioners of the federal government: British Columbia, the three Prairie provinces, and the Maritimes. Two were not: Ontario and Quebec, although they too appreciated federal help when they could get it. Quebec, under the Union Nationale premier Maurice Duplessis, needed to borrow money, and it wanted to borrow it in New York. Thanks to the untimely outbreak of war, it could not. Duplessis had the option of telling his electors that he had mismanaged their finances (which was true) and that consequently he needed to raise taxes. That would have been political suicide, so the premier took another course. He called a provincial election. He blamed Ottawa, he attacked the war, and he told a public meeting that Quebec would not participate—whatever that meant. It was a dramatic gesture, however foolish, and once made it could not be retracted.19
Duplessis’s threat could mean a great deal. To the Quebec delegation in King’s cabinet it was a challenge, and under Lapointe’s direction (and over King’s objections) they decided to meet it. The federal ministers would intervene directly in the provincial campaign (the taboos against doing so weren’t as strong in 1939 as they would later become, even though there is still no absolute rule or firm practice). They would go all out to beat Duplessis, and if they lost they would resign. That would mean that Mackenzie King and the English-speaking Liberals would govern Canada without any French-Canadian mediation—more or less what Borden had done in 1917. As long as they were in the cabinet, the Quebec ministers promised, there would be no conscription. If they were out, could Duplessis then protect his province against that possibility? It was an effective threat, and it was backed up by money raised by the federal Liberals. In the result, Duplessis lost. Quebec would have a Liberal government, friendly to Ottawa and supportive of the war effort, for most of the war.
Next there was a challenge from Ontario, where, paradoxically, there was a Liberal government. Unfortunately the Liberal premier, Mitchell Hepburn, hated Mackenzie King. Hepburn was prey to impulse, and prone to overestimate his own importance and that of his provincial government. He too challenged Mackenzie King’s right to run the country, and demanded instead a business-dominated government of national unity, a proposition that was very well received on Bay Street, Toronto’s financial district.
King promptly called a federal election, in which the Conservative opposition had little choice but to run as the cat’s paw of Bay Street, as a future government of national unity. The electorate found their arguments unconvincing. The Liberals—and the Conservatives too—promised that there would be no conscription, which of course resonated in Quebec; but in 1940 it did no harm elsewhere either. King won a majority of the popular vote and three-quarters of the seats in the House of Commons in the election of March 1940. Not enough was left of the Conservatives to mount an effective opposition, and to make matters even worse, King and his ministers shortly and easily recruited some of Canadian business’s hottest talents to help run the war effort. (The recruits, known as “dollar-a-year men,” even included Sir Robert Borden’s very able nephew Henry.)
It was a prescription for success, but success only as measured in domestic Canadian terms. Success in the war depended on the senior allies, Britain and France, and their prospects appeared cloudy. The British were short of cash, and tried to save money on orders to Canada, and indeed on any orders outside Britain’s own currency zone (known as the “sterling area”). As a result, Canadian industry in 1939–40 did little. Recruitment for the armed forces soaked up many of the unemployed, and still there were workers to spare, especially if willing women workers are counted in the total available. A Canadian Expeditionary Force did sail for Britain in December 1939, and by the spring they were almost ready for deployment alongside the British army in France.
Events moved too swiftly for the British government, still headed by Neville Chamberlain. The Germans, after conquering Poland in September 1939, gobbled up Norway and Denmark in April 1940, driving the British back across the North Sea. Defeat in Norway caused Chamberlain to be replaced by Winston Churchill on 10 May 1940, the same day the Germans launched an invasion of France and the Low Countries. Five weeks later the British army was driven from France, and the French sued for peace. A remnant of the French government, headed by a junior minister, General Charles de Gaulle, fled to London, where they tried to inspire resistance in the French Empire under the title “Free France.” For the time being, however, Britain stood alone against Germany, with only the empire to support it. Of the nations of the British Empire, Canada was the closest to Britain, and the most significant in terms of economic and short-term military support. It was a sobering thought, given the state of Canadian mobilization in June 1940.
In Canada the newly elected Parliament was meeting as catastrophe rained down upon it. It was fortunate that just at this point one of King’s talents came to the fore. Unlike Borden during most of the Great War, King had an unusually strong cabinet, which he reinforced in 1940. In charge of war production—which the British had had to take over during the Great War—he placed C.D. Howe, who possessed an unmatched ability to make varied decisions quickly and a managerial competence so often lacking among politicians. The minister of finance, J.L. Ilsley, was similarly endowed and enjoyed the ability to explain and justify the government’s decision to adopt a “pay-as-you-go” policy for the war, which enforced a program of high taxes and low inflation, backed up by a stringent wage and price control program. Wage and price controls became necessary toward the end of 1941, as war industries and military recruitment vacuumed up the unemployed20 and material shortages developed because scarce supplies were diverted to the war effort. Lapointe, as minister of justice and senior minister, headed a strong contingent from Quebec, though in 1940–41 his health was beginning to fail; he would die in November 1941.
Howe and Ilsley, backed by King, decided to risk the government’s credit by embarking on a full war-production program. Recruiting for the armed forces—army, navy, and air force—was voluntary until June 1940, but after that it was backed by a modified conscription law, passed after the fall of France, which provided for compulsory enlistment for home defence, with service limited to the North American continent. Volunteers continued to proceed overseas, until by 1942 an army of four divisions was assembled and waiting in Britain.
No amount of reinforcements or recruits from Canada would have made a sufficient difference to help the British win the war. Britain itself couldn’t raise enough troops to do more than defend the periphery of the empire in North Africa, while keeping a watchful eye on what Japan, an ally of Germany since 1940, could do in the Far East. Fortunately, Hitler couldn’t easily cross the English Channel; equally fortunately, his attentions were diverted, to the Balkans and then to confront Stalin and the Soviet Union. Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941 gave the British Empire an unwilling but extremely important ally, as long as Stalin and his commanders could avoid complete defeat at the hands of the German army.
The Russian army did manage to hang on against fierce German attacks until December 1941, but even the Soviet Union with its huge reserves of manpower wasn’t necessarily enough to turn the war against Germany. Then, on 7 December, Japan attacked the Pacific possessions of Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. The United States immediately declared war on Japan, to which Japan’s ally, Hitler, riposted by declaring war on the United States. Canada, naturally, declared war on Japan. Canadian troops, who formed part of the imperial garrison of Hong Kong, had been among the first to be attacked; regrettably, there was no way of rescuing Hong Kong, deep behind enemy lines, or salvaging the soldiers, who passed into almost four years of captivity on Christmas Day.
The politicians and officials who administered the war effort were pleasantly surprised in 1941–42 to find that Canadians on the whole accepted their rules and regulations, paid their taxes, and endured shortages of everything from food and clothing to automobiles. This was in part because so many Canadians had experience with endless and intractable unemployment, and in part because jobs in war factories paid well, so that despite heavy taxation hundreds of thousands of Canadians were better off than they had been in the 1930s, and possibly ever. With unemployment down to 2 percent in the fall of 1941—effectively nil— there appeared to be jobs for anyone who wanted one.
The government attempted to use existing resources by subcontracting production in what was called a “bits and pieces” program. This meant that war production could be widely dispersed, and in a regionalized country of vast distances, such a program was politically as well as economically important. It’s nevertheless true that the greatest concentration of war industry was in the large metropolitan areas, Montreal especially, then Toronto and its surrounding region (“the Golden Horseshoe” spanning the northwest shore of Lake Ontario), Winnipeg, and Vancouver.21 Population flowed to Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, and also Nova Scotia, owing to the concentration of military bases in that province. It flowed out of the Prairies, especially Saskatchewan and Alberta, and out of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. It flowed from the country to the city.
In many cases, service in the military was considered preferable to life in existing jobs. Mining and forestry were especially unpopular, but because so many industries depended on them, the government made a special effort to keep miners and lumberjacks in their existing jobs. Recruiters were instructed not to accept miners and forestry workers, and those who had already enlisted were in some cases sent back to their civilian occupations.
The war wasn’t supplied exclusively from forests, factories, or mines. Agriculture was one of Canada’s great strengths, even if it had been devastated by low prices and drought in the 1930s. Canadian wheat had fed the Allies in the Great War, and it seemed reasonable to expect that it would do so again. But the customers, thanks to Hitler, weren’t there. Occupied Europe couldn’t buy Canadian wheat, and that meant that a good wheat crop in 1940 went largely unsold and unexported. The answer was to diversify prairie agriculture—more coarse grains, which fed more meat production. Steak didn’t need to be rationed in wartime Canada, which made the dominion an attractive destination for touring American and British officials. Money again flowed to the prairies, and the farmers bought machinery such as tractors and combines (not rationed because of their importance for production), and paid off their tax arrears.
The figures for gross national product tell much of the story. In 1939 Canada’s GNP stood at $5.621 billion. In 1945 it was $11.863 billion. Put in terms of constant dollars, using 1971 as a base, gross national expenditure rose from $17.774 billion in 1939 to $29.071 billion in 1945, a 61 percent increase.22 Household income rose steadily, from $731 in 1939 to $992 in 1945, although the gains in consumption were mainly in the first three years of the war. Shortages thereafter limited purchases, but benefited the nation’s ability to save for a better day, whenever that might be.23
Because the government was proactive in regulating and controlling the economy, it was less surprised than the Borden government had been by incidents of labour unrest. There were fewer labour troubles, though they did occur. To supplement lower incomes, the government contemplated a “baby bonus,” payable to mothers, not fathers, in families with children. The baby bonus (children’s allowances) was enacted but didn’t actually take effect until after the end of the war, when its origin as an income supplement that could get around wage controls had been forgotten.
The federal government did more: using the War Measures Act it regulated labour relations in all war industries, superseding the usual provincial jurisdiction. A federal labour code was implemented by order-in-council in 1944: it liberalized the rules governing trade unions, which were, in any case, expanding their appeal and signing up workers from coast to coast.
THE CURSE OF CONSCRIPTION
The Second World War was accepted as a fight against a real evil. It did not take much propaganda to present Hitler and his allies as monstrous, their governments as vicious, and the prospect of their victory as appalling. If anything, Allied propaganda, still reeling from the rhetorical exaggerations of the Great War, underestimated the atrocities of the Nazis and the villainy of their regime. It followed that against a great enemy great means should be employed. The phrase of the day was “total war,” meaning total commitment from all segments of society. Newspapers and politicians preached sacrifice, but to justify it they had to promote equality of sacrifice.
To a much greater extent than in 1914–18 the government mobilized Canada’s economic resources, with stringently high tax rates that in the upper income brackets approached 100 percent. Even in the middle tax ranges the government dug deep into taxpayers’ pockets. Some Canadians did notably less well during the war, especially those on fixed incomes. Only those who earned little or nothing before the war did better—but, of course, there were many of those. Company profits were controlled, in a well-publicized effort to prevent war profiteering.
Conservative Canadians accepted the inevitable. Perhaps, in addition to the war experience, they had been shaken by the 1930s. Not only were they paying their taxes, but they were sending their children to war, or into war work. And it wasn’t just conservative Canadians who began in 1941, that year of defeat and disaster, to bring up the subject of conscription—and not merely the limited conscription for home defence that the King government had introduced, but full compulsory service. Given the military situation as it existed at the end of 1941, the demand that Canada resort to compulsory service had a strong resonance.
The resurgence of conscriptionist sentiment was captured by opinion polls, some public, some conducted in secret for the government’s eyes alone. Over Christmas 1941 the prime minister worried, but as he worried he began to make certain dispositions against the future.
First, Mackenzie King needed to replace Ernest Lapointe as minister of justice and Quebec lieutenant. After some hesitation, he selected a prominent Quebec City lawyer, a former president of the Canadian Bar Association, Louis St. Laurent. St. Laurent accepted the offer, and was duly elected to Parliament for Lapointe’s old seat in February 1942. Given the Liberals’ dominance in Quebec that was practically a foregone conclusion, but there was one feature of the by-election that was much commented upon in Quebec. St. Laurent did not repeat his predecessor’s pledge against conscription. He wasn’t bound by the same promises as Lapointe and the other Quebec ministers had been since 1939.
English Canadians were paying close attention to another contest, held in suburban Toronto at the same time. The Conservatives, leaderless since the 1940 election, asked Arthur Meighen, the former prime minister and King’s bitter enemy, to return to lead them. Meighen accepted, and took his stand, as he had in 1917, on the issue of conscription. Conscription was meant for all, and there should be equal sacrifice in the great cause. He meant what he said, of course, but he also knew that his supporters understood that equality of sacrifice meant Quebec, and Quebec recruits. French Quebeckers, they believed, were enlisting at much lower rate than the national average; conscription would equalize matters. That was less true than during the Great War—19 percent of the armed forces were French-speaking, as opposed to 12 percent in 1914–18; and the King government had made a major effort to create and sustain French-speaking units.24
King was alarmed. His diary bears witness to his torment as he contemplated having to spend the rest of his political life—which might be brief—with Meighen. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. Liberal party organizers refused to run a candidate against Meighen, and instead threw their support and money to the socialist CCF. The CCF beat Meighen, whose political career was abruptly terminated. King rejoiced, but as he gloated he was preparing the next step.
The government called a national plebiscite to release it from its election pledges of 1939 in Quebec, and of 1940 to all of Canada, not to enact conscription. In that plebiscite French Canadians voted “non,” by and large, and English Canadians voted “yes.” There were exceptions, naturally. In the little Quebec town of Shawinigan, one unilingual French Canadian, with the very unusual name of Wellie (for Wellington) Chrétien, voted “oui.” Wellie Chrétien was a contrarian, and across Canada there were undoubtedly a fair number of Wellies, distributed on both sides of the question. Another very prominent French Canadian, the minister of justice, St. Laurent, also voted “oui,” and St. Laurent proposed to take the consequences of his stand. He backed King when the prime minister introduced a bill that would legalize conscription for overseas service. One of the other Quebec ministers resigned, while the others shuffled uneasily. For them, King had an answer, which has entered Canadian political lore as a classic: there would be “not necessarily conscription but conscription if necessary.” The law was on the books, but it wouldn’t be applied—yet.
The reason was simple: there was as yet no need for reinforcements. The Royal Canadian Air Force suffered heavy casualties in certain categories, particularly in the bombing campaign over Germany, and the navy was also heavily engaged. The great fear was what would happen when the army was engaged—but until 1943, except for Hong Kong and a bloody failed raid on the French seaside town of Dieppe, the Canadian army wasn’t directly fighting the enemy. Its main enemy was boredom, so much so that the Canadian government agitated to have the army take part in the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. At the cost of dividing the army, leaving some in Britain and sending the rest to the Mediterranean, this was done.
There was another factor that deserves emphasis. The horrendous casualties of the Great War made the British generals of the next generation—men who had been mid-ranking officers in the earlier war— exceedingly cautious about expending the lives of their soldiers. Canadian generals, serving under overall British command, absorbed the lesson, and if they did not, they were removed, as happened with the general commanding the Canadian army in Britain at the end of 1943. The British advised that continuing him in command would be dangerous, and the Canadian defence minister agreed.
The Italian campaign, in which the Canadians participated from the summer of 1943 to the winter of 1945, was bloody but in the largest sense indecisive. Italy was a sideshow. The Germans could mount an effective defence and manage a very gradual withdrawal to the north. They had plenty of difficult terrain to force the Allies to fight over. The Canadians distinguished themselves in this fighting, but they were far from the main action.
That was in France, in Normandy, where the Allies—the United States, Britain, and Canada—landed on 6 June 1944. The Allies enjoyed overwhelming air superiority, and as time drew on they could exploit their advantages in equipment. The Germans had an excellent army to fight them off, but not enough of it, and they had the handicap of Hitler’s mad interference with the direction of combat. The Canadians and the neighbouring British held their own against the Germans, but little more, until an American offensive outflanked the Germans and opened the way to Paris in early August.
The Normandy battles lasted nine weeks, and for the Canadian army they were exceedingly costly in terms of casualties. Where there had been no reinforcement crisis before, there was one now, just as the army moved up for the next series of battles, opening the approaches to the great Belgian port of Antwerp so that supplies could easily flow to the Allied armies. The defence minister, J.L. Ralston, visited the troops at this point, and, shocked at what he found, returned to Canada to tell his colleagues that conscription must be applied, right away, for the army to be able to fight effectively. It wasn’t just a matter of efficiency, but a matter of honour.
This was unwelcome news for Mackenzie King. The prime minister twisted and turned. He dismissed Ralston, and replaced him with the general whom Ralston had dismissed from the command of the army in Europe. The general, A.G.L. McNaughton, promised he’d secure the necessary reinforcements by appealing to the conscripts in their camps in the rainy and frigid mountains of British Columbia and other unpleasant places across the country. But they refused. King had no alternative: after firming up St. Laurent’s support and receiving the resignation of another Quebec minister, he told his cabinet that he would bring on conscription after all. It seemed undignified, but in King’s desperate manoeuvring there lurked the germ of political survival.
Canadian Army Engagements in Europe, World War II
King’s sense of timing and his mastery of political infighting bought him and the government time. They were also in luck, for the war wouldn’t last much longer. The Germans surrendered in May 1945. The Canadian army was then fighting in the Netherlands, and so it was the Canadians who had the satisfaction of accepting the surrender of the German army and liberating Holland.
By the time the Germans surrendered, Canada was engaged in a general election. King posed as a veteran international statesman whose experience and talents were indispensable for the peace sure to come. In Quebec, he was remembered as the man who had opposed conscription, until finally overwhelmed. King hadn’t necessarily kept his promise not to have conscription, but for Quebec he was the man who was necessary. Quebec’s votes kept King in office, with a narrow majority, but when all was said and done he hadn’t done too badly in the rest of the country, even though—for the third time—he lost his seat. He now had a chance—a third political life, so to speak.
THE THIRD LARGEST ARMY
Canada’s accomplishments in the Second World War were considerable. In the first place, the country survived, and survived to emerge richer and more stable at the end of the fighting than at the beginning. This was primarily a political achievement, owing to a combination of experience— the lessons of the Great War—circumstance, and personality. Political stability ensured that domestic political quarrels were limited in scope and importance.
Just as important, Canada fielded armed forces and produced munitions and other supplies in astonishing quantities given the population of the country. Canada’s 11.5 million people, in the 1941 census, produced 1.1 million enlistments in the armed forces, though not all served at the same time. At its peak, the army numbered about 500,000, including 15,000 women; the air force just under 100,000; and the navy around 200,000. These were large numbers, and in 1944 they placed Canada third among the Western Allies in military personnel.
That said, it was a distant third. The United States and Great Britain had far more troops than Canada. If the economic contribution is measured, again Canada was third, and again it’s a long way back, representing perhaps 5 percent of the Allied war production total. The Canadian government was conscious of these ratios, and in its favour it should be said that it seldom reached for exaggeration as a weapon. Canada’s contribution was enough to get attention when needed. Credibility and influence were resources to be rationed, not dissipated, in Mackenzie King’s Canada.
The prime minister was virtually the only significant minister in terms of political foreign policy. Other ministers, such as Howe, the munitions czar, or Ilsley, the finance minister, had contacts outside the country, enough to ensure the smooth functioning of their departments. They didn’t try to go beyond them; indeed, Howe resisted attempts by Canada’s political diplomats to use his munitions supply as a bargaining tool to pry greater recognition for Canada from the senior Allies, the British and the Americans. What the Allies did with the supplies after they got them was their affair; if Canada started dictating conditions, in Howe’s opinion, it would not long remain an important source of supply.
Canada’s greatest concern was with the United States. In the Great War American supply and, initially, American loans had been crucial in keeping the Canadian economy afloat. In 1939 Canada was largely dependent on the United States for coal and oil; and in 1940 Canadian war administrators discovered that Canadian industry couldn’t tool up for production without American components, such as machine tools and aircraft engines. Canadian foreign exchange reserves were drained to pay for American supply, and no help was forthcoming from the British, who faced the same dilemma. It was at this point, in April 1941, that King cashed in on his good relations with Roosevelt, and supervised a deal (the Hyde Park Agreement, named after Roosevelt’s country estate) in which the United States, tooling up for war, bought what it needed from Canada, on the same basis that it would have bought war materiel in the United States. Canada’s foreign exchange problems were essentially solved for the duration of the war because of American purchases, and a precedent was set for integrating Canadian and American war production. At the same time Canada was able to draw on American aid to Britain for components in manufacturing supplies for the United Kingdom.
King and his ministers and other officials were gratified that the Canadian–American trade and foreign exchange imbalance was solved on the basis of trade, not aid. There was an exchange of goods, not a donation of money, nor the accumulation of debt to a large, powerful creditor next door. As a result, Canada did not end the war indebted to the United States, and Canada’s sovereign equality in dealing with the Americans was not impaired. The disparity in population, wealth, and power remained, naturally, but as with the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 and the subsequent International Joint Commission, Canadian–American relations were conducted on a level playing field, according to agreed rules that were supposed to work impartially on both sides of the border.
As for the other great power ally, the Soviet Union, relations were materially significant, but politically important only in a particular sense. Canadians—that is, English Canadians—were by and large pro-British and pro-American, admiring both Allies and inspired by their leadership, Churchill and Roosevelt. The same wasn’t generally true of the Soviet Union, but there was a faction of Canadians, the Communist Party of Canada, that deeply admired Stalin and saw the Soviet Union as the hope of the human race. Canadian communists were faithful foot soldiers of international communism, which meant accepting every twist and turn of Stalin’s sometimes convoluted and frequently self-defeating policies. Between 1939 and 1941, when Stalin and Hitler were friendly, Canadian communists did what they could to obstruct the war effort. After 1941, with the Soviet Union under attack by the Germans, the communists evolved into hyper-patriots and enthusiasts for total war.
The Soviet Union opened an embassy in Ottawa, and used it to solicit Canadian supplies, which were provided under a program called Mutual Aid. The aid sent to Russia was dwarfed by the supplies sent to Britain, but it was nevertheless important. The Soviet embassy’s other program was equally official, but was carefully concealed from the Canadian authorities. Using their sympathizers in Canada, the Soviets set up an espionage network to discover what the Canadians and the other Western Allies were up to. This network, Canada’s first, was revealed only after the war, and its importance will be explored in the next chapter.
After Russia, there was France. France also had a domestic political importance not matched by any other ally, because of its significance in Quebec. Two versions of France contended for support in Quebec, and in Canada. There was the France of Marshal Pétain, whose government had ended the war with Germany, and which lived on German sufferance in an unoccupied district in southern France. Pétain promised to cleanse France of the decadent and impure elements that had—so he claimed— undermined and left it ripe for defeat. The Pétain government was underpinned by right-wing Catholicism, as well as outright fascism, but its official values, “Travail, famille, patrie” (Work, family, country), had a strong appeal in right-wing Catholic circles in Quebec.
On the other hand, there was Free France, run by General Charles de Gaulle out of London. It condemned the peace with Germany, and promised to restore France by helping the Allies defeat Germany. At first painfully weak, de Gaulle’s movement grew in strength in 1941, as parts of the overseas French Empire rallied to his cause. Stern, visionary, and uncompromising, de Gaulle was a difficult partner for the British and Americans; President Roosevelt detested him, while Churchill, originally his patron, admitted that the general wasn’t easy to live with. Mackenzie King did rather better, even though for a time Canada actually had relations with both Vichy France and Free France. English Canada proved a hospitable environment for the Free French, and bilingual Montreal was at least a base from which de Gaulle’s emissaries could proselytize. The Canadian government favoured de Gaulle’s capture of St. Pierre and Miquelon from Vichy in December 1941, and proved a remarkably reluctant partner when the U.S. government demanded the islands be restored to Pétain (they were not). In June 1944 de Gaulle paid a triumphal visit to Ottawa, and gave every sign of sincere friendship for Canada, which was preparing to assist him with material aid and credits when he returned to Paris later that summer.
Canada’s wartime diplomacy was modest, proportionate, and effective. Canada was not a great power, and did not manifest great power pretensions. But its government was able to act effectively in the Canadian interest by not overstretching its reach and not abusing its credibility.
But what, after all, was Canada, and what was the Canadian interest? Just at the end of the war, King’s subordinates decided that they would break with tradition. Canadian troops, sailors, and air personnel had fought in British uniforms but with a “Canada” shoulder patch. King’s subordinates decided to try the equivalent, and flew the Canadian red ensign instead of the Union Jack from the Peace Tower of Canada’s Parliament Buildings on the day of the German surrender. It was a timid gesture, but it gave Mackenzie King palpitations, both on his own behalf and because he feared the wrath of traditionally minded voters. Could Canada have a symbol distinctly its own? Had Canada become a country?