Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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shot down the notorious “Red Baron” von Richthofen. Canadians were

engaged in the Atlantic Coastal Patrol, which evolved into the Royal

Canadian Navy after the war. By the end of the war, some 625,000

Canadian men and women were mobilized for the armed forces, over

two-thirds of whom served overseas. The toll of Canadian casualties

included upwards of 60,000 killed in action (comparable to the losses

suffered by the United States) and more than 200,000 wounded. The

Canadian ﬁ ghting effort was truly remarkable for a country of only 8

million people.

While the Canadian armed forces were distinguishing themselves on

the battleﬁ eld, the civilian population on the home front was geared up

for a level of war production that would have a profound and lasting

effect on the national economy. With the extraordinary demand for

food by European allies, the export of Canadian agricultural products,

meat, and livestock soared beyond all expectations. The amount of

prairie wheatland under cultivation almost doubled, while grain prices

rose over 50 percent. The German blockade of the Baltic region

increased the need for Canadian lumber and wood pulp. European

munitions factories consumed more and more minerals, especially base

metals such as copper, lead, zinc, and nickel, leading to the opening of

new deposits and the development of new methods for processing low-

grade ores. Under the pressure of war, Canada expanded its range of

manufacturing output, particularly in the realm of heavy industry,

including ammunition, weaponry, steel ships, and aircraft frames. With

one-third of its manufacturing capacity absorbed in munitions produc-

tion, Canada emerged from World War I as a major industrial state.

The expansion of agriculture and industry so overwhelmed the east-

west trading system that, for the moment, the building of three trans-

continental railway networks appeared justiﬁ ed.

Organizing the nation’s resources for wartime production required

an unprecedented degree of government intervention in the economic

and social spheres. Munitions production was brought under the direc-

tion of a Shell Committee established by the minister of the militia, Sir

Sam Hughes. When Hughes was accused of corruption, patronage, and

proﬁ teering in 1915, the committee was replaced by the Imperial Muni-

tions Board acting under the British Ministry of Munitions. As rising

wartime demand led to shortages of basic commodities such as food

and fuel and to price inﬂ ation—which increased the cost of living by

about 50 percent from 1915 to 1918—the Canadian government was

compelled to impose a system of rationing. Among the public agencies

established to regulate the production, sale, distribution, and consump-

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tion of a variety of essential products and raw materials were the War

Purchasing Commission and Munitions Resources Commission in

1915, the Cost of Living Commission in 1916, the Food Control Board

and the Fuel Control Board in 1917, and the War Trade Board in 1918.

Of enduring signiﬁ cance was the government effort to control wheat

production and marketing through the formation of the Board of Grain

Supervisors in 1917, which became the Canada Wheat Board in the fol-

lowing year. Likewise, the federal government’s decision to take over

major Canadian railways except for the CPR in 1916 was a prelude to

the formation of the Canadian National Railway (CNR) system by 1920.

The most enduring intrusion of government into the lives of its citi-

zens, however, resulted from the ﬁ nancial burdens imposed by World

War I. The traditional sources of federal government revenue, customs

duties on imports and the sale of bonds primarily in the London mar-

ket, proved insufﬁ cient to conduct the war effort. Consequently, as a

result of a sustained campaign appealing to patriotism, the government

sold over $2 billion worth of “victory bonds” over the duration of the

war. During the war, New York replaced London as the main market

for Canadian securities. The federal government also invaded the ﬁ eld

of direct taxation, which had hitherto been left to the provinces, with

the imposition of a business proﬁ ts tax in 1916 and the ﬁ rst national

income tax in 1917. The federal government promised that its levy of 3

percent for a family earning more than $3,000 or an individual earning

more than $1,500 was merely a temporary wartime measure.

Even more critical than the government’s monetary requirements

was the need for human resources. As the war progressed, Canada

experienced a shortage of “manpower” not only to serve in the armed

forces but also to work on farms and in factories and ofﬁ ces. So the

country called upon its great reservoir of “womanpower” (Strong-Boag

1994; Prentice 1996). About 2,500 women made a signiﬁ cant contribu-

tion on the battlefront by serving in a nursing capacity in the Canadian

Army Medical Corps; 56 women died while in the service of Canada.

Women also served the country through voluntary organizations such

as the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire (IODE), the Red

Cross, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and the

Canadian Patriotic Fund, incorporated by the federal government in

1914 to assist families of soldiers overseas. The demands of recruiting

and war production created labor shortages that allowed women to

enter the workforce to ﬁ ll ofﬁ ce positions and factory jobs previously

held by men. Employers actually found it advantageous to employ

women, not only because of their capabilities but also because they

THE CONFIRMATION OF NATIONHOOD

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

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were paid less than half the wages that men earned. But labor unions

objected to women joining their ranks because they were considered to

be merely temporary, cheap workers. An important consequence of the

active involvement of women in the war effort and the workforce was

the extension of voting rights by federal and provincial legislation

passed during and immediately following the war.

The Conscription Crisis

The shortage of recruits for enlistment in military service jeopardized not

only the war effort but also national unity. In his New Year’s message for

1916, Prime Minister Borden promised that Canada would contribute

500,000 soldiers to the war effort, well over double the number of

recruits who had already enlisted. But the drain on human resources

resulting from brutal trench warfare on the European battleﬁ eld had

already dampened enthusiasm for the war, which was reﬂ ected in the

steadily dwindling monthly recruitment ﬁ gures. Moreover, farm produc-

tion and the expanding munitions industry competed with the armed

forces for human resources. By the end of 1916, enlistments were still

70,000 short of Borden’s goal, and controversy was brewing over relative

contributions to the war effort. Rough estimates indicated that volunteers

were nearly one-half British-born, about one-third native-born English-

speaking Canadians, while French Canadians and non-Anglo-Saxon

immigrants equally comprised the remainder of the recruits. Differential

rates of enlistment intensiﬁ ed imperialist passions and prejudices, while

provoking a renewed defensive nationalism within the French-Canadian

community (Armstrong 1974; Granatstein and Hitsman 1985).

The reluctance of French Canadians to participate more actively in

the war effort was partly related to their North American cultural out-

look. Long cut off from their ancestral homeland, French Canadians

did not share a strong emotional attachment to France or Britain.

Canada was their homeland, and many French Canadians saw no rea-

son to become entangled in Britain’s imperialistic war. Moreover,

French Canadians were discouraged by the superior attitude and unin-

formed prejudice of Minister of Militia and Defense Hughes, who pre-

sided over the recruitment, organization, and training of

French-Canadian volunteers with little consideration for their distinct

language and culture. Few French-speaking ofﬁ cers were appointed,

particularly in the higher ranks, and the chief recruiting ofﬁ cer in Que-

bec was an English Protestant clergyman. Other than the Royal 22nd

Battalion, better known as the “Vandoos,” which served with distinc-

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tion on the battleﬁ eld, no French-speaking regiments were formed, and

English remained the sole language of the Canadian armed forces.

The question of language was aggravated by the revival of the sepa-

rate schools controversy. On the eve of World War I, the substantial

French-speaking population that had settled in northern and eastern

In a prelude to economic liberation, women solder fuses at British Munitions Company Limited,

in Verdun, Quebec, during World War I to alleviate the shortage of manpower.

(Department of

National Defence/Library and Archives Canada C-018734)

THE CONFIRMATION OF NATIONHOOD

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

244

Ontario near the Quebec border had built up a system of state-sup-

ported separate schools in which French was a major language of

instruction. Opposition to French language schools arose from the

Orange Order, which believed that the English language was essential

to imperial unity, and from the Irish Catholics seeking to control the

separate school system by favoring religious but not bilingual educa-

tion. In 1913 Regulation 17 of the Ontario Department of Education

made English the ofﬁ cial language of education and restricted the use

of French as the language of instruction to the ﬁ rst two years of elemen-

tary school while permitting French as a subject of study for one hour

a day. French-Canadian outrage was most vehemently expressed by

Henri Bourassa who compared Ontarians to the Germans, remarking

that it was not necessary to go to Europe to ﬁ ght tyranny, since the

enemy lived next door. Reinforcing French-Canadian alienation, the

Manitoba Education Act of 1916 overturned the bilingual clause of the

Laurier-Greenway compromise by abolishing French as the language of

instruction within the provincial school system. By then, Bourassa was

openly condemning the war, and riots had erupted in the wake of

recruitment efforts in some Quebec communities.

The anti-French sentiments expressed in the schools controversies

and the recruitment campaigns were symptomatic of the prevailing cli-

mate of nativism and cultural repression fostered by wartime patriotism.

The federal government used the War Measures Act to control the

movement of “enemy aliens,” which meant that all German or Austro-

Hungarian immigrants were viewed with suspicion and threatened with

internment; by the end of the war, 83,000 alleged German and Austrian

sympathizers were interned in camps. Public antipathy toward Germany

led to the town of Berlin, Ontario, being renamed Kitchener in 1917.

As Canadian casualties mounted overseas and the system of volun-

tary enlistments could not keep up with the demand for troop rein-

forcements, Borden concluded that conscription was imperative. The

Military Service Act introduced in July 1917 made military service com-

pulsory for all able-bodied British subjects from 20 to 45 years of age,

with the exception of those in vital industries, those who were consci-

entious objectors, and those to whom service would pose “serious

hardship.” Prime Minister Borden hoped to avoid dividing the nation

on the issue of compulsory service by forming a coalition government

with both Conservative and Liberals in his Cabinet. Laurier realized

that to support Borden might mean sacriﬁ cing Quebec to his rival,

Bourassa, whereas to oppose conscription and a coalition government

would risk alienating many English-speaking members of the Liberal

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Party. Laurier declined Borden’s offer to form an alliance and decided

to lead the campaign against conscription.

While opposition to conscription was most passionate and at times

violent in Quebec, farmers and industrial workers in English Canada had

reason to object to compulsory military service. Farmers who were

already hard pressed for help were reluctant to sacriﬁ ce their sons into

the armed forces, while workers saw military conscription as a prelude to

compulsory industrial service that would limit their labor mobility and

rights. Both groups demanded “conscription of wealth” in the form of

higher taxes and government control of business to ensure that the entre-

preneurs who were beneﬁ ting from a booming war economy made their

sacriﬁ ces. Opposition also came from paciﬁ st groups such as Quakers,

Mennonites, and the Canadian Women’s Peace Party. Nevertheless, the

Military Service Act passed through Parliament on the strength of both

Conservative and Liberal support but at the expense of national unity.

To enforce conscription, Borden proceeded with his plan to form a

coalition government and then to call a national election. While Laurier

remained in opposition, a large contingent of English-speaking Liber-

als, particularly in Ontario and the West, followed Clifford Sifton to

join Borden in a Union government in October 1917. In preparation for

an election, the government passed the Military Voters Act, which

extended the franchise to all men and women in the armed forces and

denied it to conscientious objectors. Furthermore, the War Times Elec-

tion Act gave the right to vote to the widows, wives, sisters, and adult

daughters of Canadians serving overseas while disenfranchising citi-

zens from enemy countries who had been naturalized since 1902. The

rationale behind these legislative measures was that the enfranchised

would be inclined to vote for the Conservatives while the disenfran-

chised had tended to vote for the Liberals. During the election cam-

paign, Borden sought to secure more votes by promising to exempt

farmers’ sons from conscription. When the government reneged on this

pledge after the election, thousands of farmers staged an angry demon-

stration in Ottawa, further indicating that opposition to compulsory

military service extended beyond the French protest.

Bolstered by campaign rhetoric that claimed that voting for Laurier’s

fragmented Liberals amounted to support for Germany, Borden’s

Union government predictably carried every province but Quebec in

the federal election of December 1917. That the Liberals won 62 out

of 65 seats in Quebec but only 20 out of 140 in the rest of the country

highlighted the depth of ethnic division between English and French

Canada incited by conscription. The implementation of conscription

THE CONFIRMATION OF NATIONHOOD

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246

triggered more protest demonstrations and riots in Quebec, including

one in the provincial capital on Easter weekend of 1918 during which

four people died. Ultimately, only about one-quarter of the 100,000

Canadian soldiers recruited through conscription reached the Euro-

pean front by the end of the war in November 1918. Thus, while the

conscription crisis was short-lived in military terms, its political and

social legacy would prove to be enduring.

New Economic Directions in the Roaring Twenties

At the end of World War I, Canadians expected to reap the rewards of

having fought so courageously to “make the world safe for democracy.”

However, their optimism was immediately dampened by the outbreak

of the Spanish inﬂ uenza epidemic of 1918–19, which killed some 21

million people worldwide, including 50,000 in Canada. Indeed, almost

as many Canadians died from this “silent enemy,” which was almost

certainly brought back home by returning soldiers, as had been killed

overseas during World War I. The epidemic, which overtaxed all med-

ical facilities and personnel, brought not only death but also social and

economic disruption. In an effort to control the spread of the disease,

municipal and provincial governments closed all but necessary services

and enacted laws to quarantine afﬂ icted families and communities as

well as to enforce the wearing of gauze masks in public. Business suf-

fered from the lack of demand for products or the lack of healthy work-

ers to meet production needs (Brown and Cook 1974). The Canadian

government responded to the crisis by establishing the Department of

Health in 1919.

Canadians were further plagued by postwar economic instability.

The renewed demand for consumer goods in the wake of the reabsorp-

tion of over half a million war veterans into civilian life raised the cost

of living by 1919 to double the level it had been ﬁ ve years earlier. But

as the demand for war supplies declined and wheat prices dropped by

more than half, inﬂ ation gave way to recession in 1920. Looking upon

the recession as an inevitable cyclical slump accentuated by the transi-

tion from wartime to peacetime production from which the free enter-

prise economy would naturally recover, the federal government

responded by merely restricting immigration and inaugurating a pro-

gram for assisting the provinces in the provision of relief to unem-

ployed urban workers. The return of prosperity by 1923 seemed to

conﬁ rm this laissez-faire faith in the unlimited prospects of the Cana-

dian economy based upon the National Policy (Fawke 1957).

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As in the past, wheat production ﬁ gured prominently in the eco-

nomic boom that prevailed for the remainder of the 1920s. War-rav-

aged Europe still needed food supplies, and postrevolution Russia was

temporarily in decline as a grain-exporting nation. With prices recover-

ing to within two-thirds of the wartime peak, western farmers extended

the agrarian frontier into the semidesert regions of southwestern Sas-

katchewan and southeastern Alberta and as far north as the Peace River

valley. The 1928 crop, which proved to be the largest on record, estab-

lished Canada as the leading wheat-exporting nation in the world.

Western farmers beneﬁ ted from reduced railway freight rates that

helped to make the price of Canadian wheat attractive in European

countries. Indeed, the 1920s proved to be the high tide of Canadian

railway transportation, not only because of the organization of the CNR

system but also because the CNR and its private competitor, the CPR,

spent over $700 million to build branch lines, improve passenger ser-

vice, and modernize equipment. Although Canadian railways became

renowned for their comfortable and luxurious passenger service, wheat

shipments from western ﬁ elds to eastern grain elevators and markets

remained the backbone of the transcontinental system. This postwar

wheat boom, however, would not be the economic catalyst that its pre-

war predecessor had been, primarily because Canadian farmers were

increasingly competing with other wheat-growing countries, such as

Argentina, Australia, and a rejuvenated Soviet Union, for a shrinking

world market.

Furthermore, the Canadian government was no longer as committed

to the centralized economic direction embodied in the National Policy.

Indeed, by the 1920s the original purposes of Confederation had been

achieved: a ﬂ ood of settlers had ﬁ lled the vacant lands of the West, a

vast transcontinental transportation network was complete, and a pro-

tective tariff had stimulated a substantial manufacturing industry.

Although immigration resumed in 1923, the federal government no

longer undertook extensive advertising and recruitment campaigns.

The age of free land grants had passed, and immigrants to the west had

to purchase farms. Thousands of immigrants still came to complete the

settlement of the western prairies during the 1920s, but the inﬂ ux

never reached the levels of the prewar wheat boom. The majority of the

approximately 1 million immigrants who came to Canada during the

decade tended to settle in the expanding urban centers, where they

became part of the growing industrial workforce.

Postwar immigration continued the trend toward multiculturalism

initiated by the prewar inﬂ ux of non-British and non-French people. By

THE CONFIRMATION OF NATIONHOOD

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1931 the Canadian population was less than 52 percent British, a little

over 28 percent French, and 20 percent “other.” In other words, ethnic

groups other than English and French had increased by three-quarters

since the turn of the 20th century. These new ethnic groups were still

a distinct minority, but they continued to raise concerns about the

changing character of Canadian society.

The greatest developments in the postwar Canadian economy were

not in wheat farming on the western prairies but in the extraction and

processing of pulpwood, minerals, and hydroelectric power from the

northern resource frontier (Zaslow 1988). The ample softwood timber

stands of the Canadian Shield and the Western Cordilleras sustained a

pulp and paper industry that made Canada the world’s leading exporter

of newsprint by the end of the 1920s. With much of its own softwood

timber stands depleted, the United States offered a lucrative market for

Canadian newsprint to sustain its mass-produced daily newspapers,

magazines, advertising copy, and cardboard packaging. At ﬁ rst, unpro-

cessed pulpwood was converted into paper in American factories. But

as the decade progressed, American entrepreneurs found that the avail-

ability of cheap hydroelectric power and good transportation facilities

made it more economical to establish branch plant paper mills in

Canada. Added incentives came from the provincial governments of

Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, which strategically restricted

the export of pulpwood, while providing a welcoming environment for

the establishment of branch plants. By the end of the decade, three

giant companies—International Paper Paper Co., Abitibi Paper Co.,

and Canadian Power and Paper Co.—controlled more than half the

pulp production, and Americans owned and controlled more than one-

third of Canada’s pulp production.

The United States also needed Canadian base metals to produce con-

sumer goods such as automobiles, radios, and electrical appliances. As

prices for base metals such as copper, zinc, lead, and nickel rose high

enough to encourage northern exploration and to reopen some mines

with lower-grade ores, American capital was vital to ﬁ nance purchases

of complex and expensive mining equipment. Canada’s greatest mining

ventures during the 1920s included the gold and copper operations of

Noranda Mines in Quebec; the copper and zinc operations of the Hud-

son Bay Mining and Smelting in Flin Flon, Manitoba; and the Interna-

tional Nickel Company of Canada (INCO) of Sudbury, Ontario, which

controlled 90 percent of world nickel production. The discovery of oil

and natural gas in the Turner Valley south of Calgary in 1914 heralded

Alberta’s future role as a major energy producer.

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Mining and the pulp and paper industry stimulated and were stimu-

lated by the development and use of hydroelectric power. The numer-

ous rivers and lakes of the Canadian Shield were harnessed to produce

cheap and efﬁ cient supplies of electricity for home lighting and for

manufacturing goods such as appliances, automobile parts, and chemi-

cals. Realizing the importance of hydroelectric power in the process of

industrialization and urbanization, the provincial governments and the

business community accepted public ownership as the most economi-

cal means of maintaining an efﬁ cient power supply.

In addition to the new staples, new technology relating to transpor-

tation and communication contributed to the prosperity and growth of

the 1920s (Thompson 1985). The advent of the automobile and the

industry that it spawned had a spectacular impact on the Canadian

economy. By the end of the 1920s, more than 1.2 million automotive

vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles) were in operation on

Canadian roads, about triple the number at the beginning of the decade.

About three-quarters of these vehicles were manufactured by branch

plants of the “big three” American companies—Ford, Chrysler, and

General Motors—which had absorbed most of their smaller Canadian

competitors. The more automated American giants could make mass-

produced and less expensive models, such as the popular Ford Model

T, which sold for under $400. At such a reasonable price, the automo-

bile evolved from a play toy of the rich into a necessity of life that one

out of every two Canadian families owned.

The automobile revolutionized the Canadian landscape of the 1920s

as the railway had done in the 1850s. Road-building became more

important than ever, particularly in the cities, where asphalt-paved

streets became more commonplace. By the end of the 1920s, Canada

had more than 75,000 miles of roads, 10,000 miles of which were paved

in asphalt. The automobile and better roads boosted the tourism indus-

try by encouraging ownership of summer cottages and facilitating

travel to northern vacation lands, particularly for Americans. By the

end of the 1920s, some 4 million American visitors were spending over

$300 million a year in Canada, as they enjoyed the unspoiled beauty of

the vast natural landscape. Increased automobile travel also stimulated

factories that manufactured tires and spare parts as well as service sta-

tions and petroleum reﬁ neries.

Aviation also expanded greatly in the 1920s as veteran World War

I pilots, using surplus war planes, opened up the northern resource

frontier. They ﬂ ew geologists, prospectors, equipment, and minerals

into remote areas, in addition to providing supplies and services for

THE CONFIRMATION OF NATIONHOOD