On the evening of November 12, 1918, the citizens of Cap Pelé gathered together to celebrate the end of the war in Europe. The villagers had carefully constructed a remarkably life-like effigy of the now-defeated and exiled German kaiser, Wilhelm II. Then, using one of the cannon that originally had defended Fort Beauséjour against the British in the 1750s, the citizens shot the effigy. The drinking, dancing and singing went on well into the night, as Acadian celebrations usually do. The symbolism of this spontaneous act by Acadian New Brunswickers should not be overlooked, for it represented the true feelings of the province. The defeat of Germany was celebrated in similar ways from St. Stephen to Caraquet, and welcomed everywhere with relief.
The armistice that preceded the Cap Pelé celebration became a peace agreement with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. In the meantime, since no one could be sure that the armistice would hold, conscription remained in force until the treaty had been signed. As a result, deserters remained in hiding throughout early 1919, and nearly 15,000 Canadians served prison sentences for dodging conscription or aiding deserters. In Kent county, one seventy-five-year-old farmer was given six months in prison and fined $350 for sheltering his son, an alleged deserter. It was not until December 22, 1919, that the federal government announced a general amnesty for all Military Service Act dissenters. The long negotiations between the Allies and the Germans also kept the soldiers overseas far longer than they wanted to be there. The Canadian Corps returned from Europe only in stages from March 1919. Soldiers with new families arrived in Saint John, while most troops disembarked in Halifax, usually a long train ride away from homes located across the vast expanse of Canada.
When they got home, New Brunswick’s soldiers were barely recognizable from the naive and excited young men who had sailed away to the great adventure in Europe. The 26th Battalion, for so long the province’s most visible contribution to Canada’s war effort, had no individual heroes who advertised Victory Bonds, no famous authors who recounted the battalion’s exploits and no soldiers who had won a Victoria Cross — although two New Brunswickers, Lieutenant Milton F. Gregg of Mountain Dale, Kings county, and Corporal Herman James Good of Bathurst, won the British Empire’s highest military decoration while serving with other units. But the 26th nevertheless had distinguished itself overseas, having been in the vanguard of the attacks on Courcelette, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele and the Hundred Days. In the end, thousands of New Brunswickers, both anglophone and francophone, had represented their province and their country with pride, despite the great turmoil at home.
Winning the war certainly brought great benefits to Canada. The country signed the Treaty of Versailles as an independent nation, the first international recognition of its kind, which would lead to the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and full independence. But four years of brutal warfare had also changed the country itself. The bitterness of the conscription crisis drove deep and lasting divisions between Canada’s two founding peoples. In Quebec, the effects of the war and the conscription crisis linger with us still. Canada, as a nation, may have been born at Vimy Ridge in 1917, but Quebec intellectuals later identified 1917 as a key date in defining their own nationalism. For its part, English Canada took solace in its achievements during the war, despite the dreadful losses. In the collective memory, responsibility for these achievements soon came to include Quebec, for all Canadians had fought the war together and no one wished to tarnish Canada’s new international status or its war dead.
Quebec never forgave those who supported the Unionists, however, and the Conservative party was all but destroyed in the province. Time and again, in the international crises before the Second World War, Quebec staunchly resisted calls to support Britain, fearing the reimposition of conscription to fight another “British” war. During the Second World War, Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King — who had voted against conscription in 1917 — carefully handled a second conscription crisis, this time without completely alienating Quebec. Only in 1958, when John Diefenbaker won a massive majority, did the province again vote for the Conservatives in even small numbers. To this day, Quebec nationalists reference the conscription crisis as evidence of English Canada’s failure to understand or respect Quebec and its distinctiveness.
This much is already well recorded in Canadian history books. But the crisis also drove Acadian New Brunswickers away from the Conservatives, while heightening their own distinctiveness from both English New Brunswick and Quebec. Indeed, ever since the conscription crisis, the northern counties have been bastions of Liberal support. At the same time, however, there was less bitterness among Acadians about the conscription crisis of 1917 than among francophone Quebecers. Even in the most heated moments of the conscription crisis, Acadians sought to temper the gross generalizations being used to slander them, and stressed unity and their support for the overall war effort. Acadians were certainly in no mood to continue arguing about ethnic and language issues once the great upheaval had ended in an Allied victory. Instead, Acadians worked quietly but unceasingly to earn their rights. During the Second World War, they again enlisted in the military in large numbers — at a rate equal to that of English New Brunswickers — forestalling another conscription crisis in the province. By the 1960s, Acadians’ hard work had paid off. The election of Louis Robichaud as premier in 1960 led to additional advances in the northern counties and brought long-neglected Acadian issues into the mainstream. In 1969, New Brunswick became officially bilingual. When Conservative premier Richard Hatfield, from Carleton county, came to power in 1970, he not only respected these changes, he entrenched them still further.
Clearly, the 1917 conscription crisis resonated differently in New Brunswick than in Quebec or Ontario. In the end, opposition to military service in the Great War among New Brunswick’s large locally born and predominantly rural population had more to do with occupational factors than ethnic ones. The visceral reaction of many anglophone New Brunswickers to the results of the February 1917 provincial election suggests that the smear campaign directed at Acadians that year stemmed more from local politics than from the war. Certainly, the very real support of Acadians for voluntary enlistment — for some, even of the Military Service Act itself — suggests that the usual analysis of ethnic divisions between Quebec and Ontario during the war does not apply in New Brunswick. This is not to say that “race” — let alone religion and economic factors — did not play a part or that it was unimportant. Rather, “race” was not the only factor affecting individual responses to conscription.
Histories of the conscription crisis tend to overlook the fact that, in some areas — New Brunswick’s Acadian and rural anglophone communities, as well as Australia — strong support for the war effort and opposition to conscription coexisted. In such places, the more immediate concerns of maintaining ancestral land and fishing grounds or struggling in disparate ways to advance collective rights — whether Acadian, Black, Catholic, Irish republican or rural — were more important than fighting overseas, however lofty and commendable the cause. Moreover, despite the opposition of Acadian newspapers, Liberals and Acadians generally, to conscription, no accusations were made against the war itself — in stark contrast to Quebec, where the British Empire, the war effort and conscription were all regularly denounced in colourful terms.
The war also ended the traditional two-party political system in New Brunswick and elsewhere, as farmers’ and labour movements, as well as those representing the interests of places other than Ontario and Quebec, demanded a voice at the policy-making table. The authorities had fumbled attempts to gain rural support for enlistment, and farmers, whose support for the Union government had been fostered only cynically by the Military Service Act’s exemption promise and racial prejudice, long recalled the breaking of that same agreement in April 1918. Immediately after the war, a new movement called the United Farmers of Ontario, supported by independent labour representatives, swept to power in the country’s most populous province, largely on the basis of bitterness toward the establishment. The Progressive party, born on the Prairies from Westerners’ feelings that their contributions to the war had been overlooked by an Ontario too concerned with Quebec’s problems and vice-versa — the beginning of Western “protest” movements, another lasting legacy of the Great War — used the support of farmers to take fifty-eight seats in the 1921 federal election. The United Farmers and the Progressives also earned seats in the former New Brunswick Union strongholds of Carleton and Victoria counties, displacing the organization of the previously untouchable Frank Carvell.
Finally, despite occasional indifference to recruiting and concentrated opposition to conscription, New Brunswick had participated fully in the vast Canadian war effort. Considering the population’s loyalties — they were New Brunswickers, perhaps even Canadians, first; British second, if at all — the minuscule number of British-born, the province’s rural nature, the steadily improving job rate and the large number of its young men who had migrated elsewhere, New Brunswick’s enlistment rates were outstanding.
Yet New Brunswickers paid a hefty price for this incredible effort — when they ploughed their fields without help or laboured overtime at the factory, when they waited for word from volunteer citizen-soldiers suffering or dying overseas, when they voted for the first time, when they sought exemption from military service or when they deserted and hid from police. New Brunswick was proud to share in the victory in the First World War, but victory came at the cost of widening and deepening the province’s cleavages. For decades afterward, New Brunswickers consumed the bitter harvest of war.
Dedication of the Soldiers’ Monument, King’s Square, Saint John, June 1925. NBM 1989.83.183