Canadian History Questions Paragraph Answer

During World War II, thousands of women worked in Canadian industrial plants manufacturing war materials. Taken in December of 1943, this picture shows Cecilia Butler working in a munitions plant in Toronto, Ontario. Obviously staged, the photograph presents war-time Canada as a racially tolerant, multi-ethnic society. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque, LAC, e000761869.

Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–19458

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1914 Canada and Newfoundland enter the Great War.

1925 United Church of Canada is formed. Pacific Coast Hockey League folds.

1915 Canadian Expeditionary Force fights in the first Battle of Ypres. Ontario introduces

Regulation 17.

1926 Governor General Byng refuses Prime Minister King a dissolution for a new election; a

constitutional crisis ensues.

1916 Canada introduces a business profits tax. The Newfoundland Regiment is decimated at

Beaumont Hamel.

1929 Stock market collapses. Aird Commission report on public broadcasting favours nationalization

of radio.

1917 Canadian Expeditionary Force suffers heavy losses at Vimy in April. Canada introduces an

income tax. Conscription crisis emerges over

introduction of Military Service Act. Much of

Halifax is destroyed in an explosion.

1930 Great Depression begins. R.B. Bennett’s Conservatives are elected to power in Ottawa.

1918 The Great War ends. Spanish influenza epidemic begins.

1931 Canadian government arrests and imprisons eight leaders of the Communist Party.

1919 “Red Scare” begins. Government suppresses Winnipeg General Strike. First Congress of the

League of Indians meets in Sault Ste Marie.

Canadian Bookman is founded.

1932 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation is founded in Calgary. Bennett government forms

the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission.

1933 Depression sees huge unemployment rolls. Regina Manifesto is adopted by the CCF.

Maurice Duplessis becomes leader of the

Conservative Party of Quebec. T. Dufferin

Pattullo wins election in British Columbia.

1920 Progressive Party is formed. First issues of Canadian Forum, Canadian Historical Review,

and The Dalhousie Review appear. The Group

of Seven holds its first exhibition of paintings.

1921 In a federal election, the Progressive Party wins 64 seats. William Lyon Mackenzie King’s

Liberals form the government. The Maritime

Rights Movement is organized.

1935 R.B. Bennett announces a “New Deal” for Canada, but is defeated by W.L.M. King in the

election. Social Credit under William Aberhart

sweeps to power in Alberta. Duplessis forms

the Union Nationale. The On-to-Ottawa Trek is

suppressed at Regina.

1923 Famous Players’ Canadian Corporation takes over Allen Theatres.

1936 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is formed. 1924 William Aberhart begins the Prophetic Bible

Institute broadcasts over Calgary’s CFCN.

1937 General Motors strike in Oshawa. Royal Commission on Dominion–Provincial Relations

is appointed. Lord Tweedsmuir creates the

Governor General’s awards.

1939 Canada declares war on Germany. British Commonwealth Air Training Plan is founded.

1942 Dieppe raid sees 2,700 Canadians killed or captured. National plebiscite held to release

government from non-conscription pledge.

1940 Royal Commission on Dominion–Provincial Relations recommends restructuring of public

finances.

1943 Marsh report on social security is tabled in the House of Commons.

1941 Emily Carr wins Governor General’s award for Klee Wyck. Hong Kong surrenders to Japan.

Pearl Harbor attacked.

1944 Family Allowances Act and National Housing Act are passed.

Timeline

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324 A History of the Canadian Peoples

The entrance of Canada into World War I marked a triumph of sorts for Canadian imperialism, as one journal emphasized in 1915:

Your Birthright There is one race that is fast dominating the

world—the Anglo-Saxon race, represented by Great Britain and the USA, born rulers, exceed- ing all others in the capacity for governing. The only Empire of the present day which answers to this is the British Empire, a Christian Empire, which includes strong young nations that are federating into a company—which car- ries the gospel to all lands, in all languages— and which is growing and growing—and bids to fill the earth. Do you belong to the British Empire? Then you belong to the blessed race, the blessed Empire—God’s chosen rulers of the world. (Canada’s White Ribbon Bulletin, August 1915, in Cook, 1995: 107)

Canada did not make its own declaration of war, but simply joined the British war effort. Before it ended, the war would inflict extremely heavy Canadian cas- ualties: 60,661 killed in action and 172,000 wounded out of some 620,000 Canadians in uniform drawn from a population of only 8 million. The war gradually isolated French Canada and made possible sweeping national reforms on several fronts. Reform had always implied an interventionist state, and wartime condi- tions encouraged the Canadian government’s intrusion into many new areas of life and work. The government’s expenditures were enormous, but it managed to find the money to keep going, mainly through extensive borrow- ing. One of the new developments was a business profits tax, retroactive to the beginning of the war, introduced in 1916. Another was an income tax, first levied in 1917. Yet another was the nationalization of the railways. The war also accelerated and distorted virtually every eco- nomic development that Canada had experienced dur- ing the previous 40 years.

Canadians entered the war with no idea of its ultimate length, intensity, or futile savagery. The initial enthusiasm of English-speaking Canadians assumed a swift defeat of Germany and its allies. By 1917 support

for the war effort emphasized the extent of the sacrifi- ces already made. Families of the dead soldiers could emotionally rationalize their losses only by calling for more effort towards a final victory. Canada’s military contribution was substantial. Nevertheless, Canadians who fought in Europe were almost exclusively volun- teers. Serving as the shock troops of the British Empire, Canadians achieved an enviable reputation for bravery and fierceness. Their commanders continually placed them in the most difficult situations, and they per- formed well. The list of battles at which they fought heroically (and at heavy cost) was a long one, beginning at Ypres in 1915 and continuing through to the Belgian town of Mons, where fighting ended for the Canadians at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918.

Life in the trenches—which was the main battle experience of most Canadian soldiers in World War I— was a nightmare, so hard to describe that most returning veterans did not really try. Loved ones at home seldom heard accounts of the trench experience, either in let- ters from the front or after the war. The social world of the trenches was a bizarre, surrealistic experience like no other to be found anywhere in the world. It is true that troops were rotated in and out of the front lines, but almost all experienced the danger and discomfort of life in the trenches at some point. Artillery shelling was con- stant, and reserves in the secondary and tertiary lines of fortifications were if anything shelled more heavily by large guns than those in the front lines; artillery crews always fired at longer-range targets for fear of hitting their own men. Periods of rotation were not standard- ized, and during times of crisis the stay in the front line could seem a lifetime. Actual attacks and offen- sives were relatively rare, but life in the trenches was extremely wearing; men faced not only the shelling and continual risk of sniper fire but difficulties in sleeping, bad food, and the ubiquitous mud, in which many men drowned. The worst thing about the mud was having to move through it. Most Canadian soldiers carried more than 60 pounds (27 kg) of equipment, and a mud-soaked greatcoat could weigh another 50 pounds (23 kg).

While in the front trenches, soldiers had to be con- stantly on the alert. They were regularly employed on “fatigues,” moving rations, stores, and wounded men, and repairing the trenches. Sleep deprivation was common.

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Soldiers suffered from the heat in summer and the cold in winter, and from rain virtually year-round. Corpses lay everywhere in the trenches and outside them, attracting rats and lice in great numbers. One Canadian remem- bered, “Huge rats. So big they would eat a wounded man if he couldn’t defend himself ” (quoted in Ellis, 1975: 54). The trenches also stank of chloride of lime (a dis- infectant), creosol (for the flies), human excrement and human sweat, and the putrefaction of decomposing bod- ies. Most soldiers were conscious not only of the stench but of the noise, especially the sounds of various sorts of artillery fire that were part of the continual bombard- ment in the trenches, particularly during offensives. Some could distinguish the various weapons by the noises they made. Dr Andrew Macphail, who served at the front with the 7th Canadian Field Ambulance, com- mented in his diary:

I amuse myself finding words to describe the sounds made by the various classes of guns. The 18 pounders thud, thud. The 4.7s bark like an infinite dachshund. The howitzers smash. The machine-guns rat-tat like the wood-pecker or the knocker of a door. A single rifle snaps like a dry twig when it is broken. Rapid rifle fire has a desolating sound; it is as if a load of small stones was being dumped from a Scotch cart. A large shell sounds exactly like a railway train; and shrapnel bursts as if boiler-plate were being torn into fragments, or as if the sky were made of sheet-iron, and had been riven by a thunderbolt. The whistle of the passing rifle bullet is unmistakable. (Macphail, 1915)

Many thought the worst things about the guns were the vibrations and the “solid ceiling of sound.” By 1918 soldiers were also exposed to aerial attacks and bom- bardments. The Great War produced a new form of nerv- ous illness, which came to be called “shell shock,” but which was really a combination of various assaults on the human nervous system.

Given the conditions under which the men oper- ated, it becomes easier to understand how they could, from time to time, be led “over the top” in open mass assaults or in raids in small parties—either way to risk

death. Sleep-deprived and in a constant state of shock, most troops who actually engaged in battle were numb to virtually everything going on around them. They fought in a zombie-like state, and those who managed to return were totally exhausted. High command never really understood what the war was like in the trenches. The generals never appreciated that defensive firepower from a dug-in enemy meant that most attacks were noth- ing but human carnage. Field officers believed in the mystical value of intestinal fortitude. In April 1915, a Canadian regiment at Ypres withstood one of the first poison gas attacks, using for protection nothing but handkerchiefs soaked in urine. After beating back the enemy at great human cost and with other units retreat- ing all around them, the regiment’s colonel, supported by those remaining of his junior officers, volunteered to hold the line. He telephoned divisional headquarters and reported modestly, “The 90th Rifles can hold their bit.” And they did. The casualties in this one unit in this one battle ran at 20 officers and 550 men killed, wounded, missing, or gassed—out of a total complement of 900.

While dispatches spoke reassuringly of the value of the assaults and the heroism, the soldiers knew per- fectly well that their sacrifices were achieving very little. Canadian casualties, like those of other settlement col- onies, tended to run considerably higher than those of the armies of the European allies. Whether the coloni- als had less experience as soldiers, or were placed in the most dangerous places, or simply fought more sav- agely, is not entirely clear. On one horrible day in 1916 at Beaumont-Hamel, 780 Newfoundlanders were trapped by barbed wire and mowed down by German machine guns; 310 died. While it was possible to be invalided back to Britain (“Blight”) or even Canada with a ser- ious enough wound (often called “a blighty”), most of the Canadian soldiers sent to Europe either died on the battlefield or remained on the lines until the Armistice.

Despite these sacrifices, the Canadian government had to fight hard for a voice in imperial war policy. It also worked hard to maintain separate Canadian unit and command structures. The arguments for autonomy—and the manpower necessary to sustain them—dragged the government ever deeper into the quagmire. By the time of Vimy in April 1917, Canada could no longer recruit new volunteers to replace the mounting casualties.

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326 A History of the Canadian Peoples

The government saw conscription as the only solution. Conscription was a policy intensely opposed by many French Canadians. From the standpoint of Anglo-Canadians, French Canada had not borne its fair share of the burden of war. English Canada argued that less than 5 per cent of the Canadian volunteers had

come from French Canada. On the other hand, French Canadians came to feel increasingly under attack by English Canada. As a symbol of their position they focused on the plight of francophones in Ontario, where in 1915 Regulation 17 had seemingly imposed unilin- gualism on the elementary school system. Virtually all

Monday, Dec. 7, 1914

Leaskdale, Ont. A Globe headline today was “The Germans

Capture Lodz.”

This war is at least extending my knowledge of

geography. Six months ago I did not know there was

such a place in the world as Lodz. Had I heard it men-

tioned I would have known nothing about it and cared

as little. To-day, the news that the Germans have

captured it in their second drive for Warsaw made my

heart sink into my boots. I know all about it now—its

size, its standing, its military significance. And so of

scores of other places whose names have been let-

tered on my memory in blood since that fateful 4th

of August—Mlawa, Bzura, Jarolwav, Tomaskoff, Yser,

Lys, Aisne, Marne, Prysmysl. At the last mentioned

the newspaper wits have been poking fun since the

siege of it began. Nobody seems to know how it is

pronounced. I daresay the Austrians would think that

Saskatchewan and Musquodoboit were about as bad.

The Manse, Leaskdale, Ont. Thursday, Dec. 10, 1914

To-day at noon Ewan [her husband] came in

jubilantly. “Good news!” he said. I snatched the paper

and read that a German squadron had been totally

destroyed by a British one off the Falkland Isles.

Coming after the long strain of the recent series of

Russian reverses I rather went off my head. I waved

the paper wildly in air as I danced around the dining

room table and hurrahed. Yet hundreds of men were

killed in the fight and hundreds of women’s hearts will

break because of it. Is that a cause for dancing and

hurrahing? Oh, war makes us all very crude and self-

ish and primitive!

Saturday, Dec. 12, 1914

To-day’s war news was better than it has been for

some time—the second German invasion of Poland

seems to have been definitely checked. Ever since it

began—a fortnight or so ago—I have been wracked

with dread. If Germany should smash Russia and then

her victorious army back against the French and British

lines! That thought was the Dweller on my Threshold.

All through the forenoons I could manage to work and

hold my dread at bay. But when at twelve I saw Ewan

going out for the mail my nerve invariably collapsed. I

could not do anything—it was of no use to try. I could

not even read. I could only pace the floor like a caged

tiger, nerving myself to meet the worst. Then when he

came back I would snatch the Globe and desperately

tear over the headlines. It has been agonizing.

Lucy Maud Montgomery and the War The following are excerpts from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journal for late 1914.

Source: Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, eds, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, vol. 2, 1910–1921 (Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1987), 157–8. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Contemporary Views

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In the Trenches Document

The sergeant comes into the bay again and whispers to me: “Keep your eyes open now—they might come over on a raid now that it’s dark. The wire’s cut over there—” He points a little to my right.

I stand staring into the darkness. Everything moves rapidly again as I stare. I look away for a moment and the illusion ceases.

Something leaps towards my face. I jerk back, afraid. Instinctively I feel for my rifle in the corner of

the bay. It is a rat. It is as large as a tom-cat. It is three feet away from

my face and it looks steadily at me with its two staring, beady eyes. It is fat. Its long tapering tail curves away from its padded hindquarters. There is still a little light from the stars and this light shines faintly on its sleek

skin. With a darting movement it disappears. I remember with a cold feeling that it was fat, and why . . .

The sergeant rushes into the bay of the trench, breathless. “Minnies,” he shouts, and dashes on.

In that instant there is a terrible roar directly behind us. The night whistles and flashes red. The trench rocks and sways. Mud and earth leap into the air, come down upon

us in heaps. We throw ourselves upon our faces, clawing our

nails into the soft earth on the bottom of the trench. Another! . . . Still they come. I am terrified. I hug the earth, digging my fingers

into every crevice, every hole. A blinding flash and an exploding howl a few feet

in front of the trench. My bowels liquefy.

Charles Yale Harrison (1898–1954) was a Canadian writer who served with the Royal Montreal Regiment and was wounded at the Battle of Amiens in 1918. He wrote a powerful novel about his experiences in the war.

Source: Charles Yale Harrison, Generals Die in Bed (Waterdown, Ont.: Potlatch Publications, 1995), 22–4.

French-Canadian members of Parliament opposed the Military Service Act, which became law in August 1917. In its wake, and with a federal election coming, a Union government was formed out of the Conservatives and those English-speaking members of the Liberal Party who had broken with Laurier over his opposition to conscription.

French Canada was not alone in becoming isolated by the war. Members of Canada’s other ethnic minor- ities, many of them originating in parts of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, found themselves under attack. The government became increasingly repressive as the war continued. It interned “aliens” by Order-in- Council and suppressed much of the foreign-language press. The Wartime Elections Act of September 1917

ruthlessly disenfranchised Canadians of enemy origin. Organized labour found itself shackled. The govern- ment introduced compulsory arbitration into all war industries in 1916. In the crisis year of 1917, the govern- ment announced its intention to outlaw all strikes and lockouts. The Union government was simultaneously bipartisan and sectional. It was able to implement sev- eral national reforms favoured by its Anglo-Canadian supporters. Many provinces had allowed women the vote earlier in the war. The Wartime Elections Act in 1917 granted the federal electoral franchise to women with close relatives in the war. In 1918 all women got the vote federally. Prohibition also triumphed nation- ally in 1918, not only to keep the soldiers pure and to ensure that the country to which they returned would

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328 A History of the Canadian Peoples

The Sopwith Camel was a single-seat biplane air-

plane in service between June 1917 and 1920.

Although tricky to fly, it was extremely manoeuvrable

in the hands of a skilled pilot, and was responsible

for nearly 1,300 “kills” (enemy planes destroyed),

more than any other Allied aircraft. The Camel

weighed 420 kilograms empty and was powered by a

nine-cylinder rotary engine rated at 130 horsepower

(by comparison, the World War II Spitfire weighed

almost 2,300 kilograms empty and had a 1470 horse-

power engine). The light weight was achieved by a

flimsy construction, with plywood panels around

the cockpit, and with fuselage, wings, and tail cov-

ered with fabric. Obviously there was no protection

for the pilot, and the contemporary joke was that it

offered “a wooden cross, a Red Cross, or a Victoria

Cross.” The plane had two .303 Vickers machine guns

mounted for synchronized fire in front of the cockpit.

Nearly 5,500 Camels were built. Many were diverted

to home defence against German bombers, and the

Camel proved capable of flying at night when the

enemy shifted to night bombing. Towards the end

of the war the Camel was limited by slow speed and

poor performance at high altitudes, but was used as a

ground attack weapon, destroying many enemy air-

craft by strafing runs at low altitude. It was the favour-

ite aircraft of Major William Barker, one of the most

decorated Canadian pilots during the war.

The Great War was not a very romantic one, with

most destruction involving large numbers of casual-

ties inflicted by anonymous weapons. The war in the

air was one of the few places featuring one-on-one

combat opportunities and duels between skilled fly-

ers, and a number of fighter pilots, such as Barker

and Billy Bishop, developed substantial popular

reputations. Canadian pilots flew for the Royal Air

Force for most of the war, since a separate Canadian

unit (the Royal Canadian Air Force) was not created

until September 1918. Nevertheless, Canadians

were highly successful in the air, with over 80 “aces”

credited with 10 “kills” or more. The Sopwith Camel,

itself an adaptation of previous technology to a

more war-like purpose, was in fact a conglomer-

ate of early twentieth-century material culture.

The biplane, the internal combustion engine, and

the machine guns were all recent innovations. War

obviously leads to many of these advances, and the

material culture of conflict is one that continues to

garner interest.

A number of Camels were given to Canada as part

of an imperial gift following the war. Primarily used

for training and maintaining the skills of new and vet-

eran pilots, all of the Camels were decommissioned

by the mid-1920s. While they rather quickly became

obsolete for their original purpose, the romanticism

of early aerial combat led to these weapons having a

more lasting impact on society, and their legacy, both

for the skill of Canadian pilots and the nature of this

new form of warfare, remained.

Material Culture

Sopwith Camel. © Chronicle/Alamy.

The Sopwith Camel

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be a better place to live but also to prevent waste and inefficiency. Daylight savings added an hour of light to the workday. Previous arguments about infringing per- sonal liberty lost their cogency during wartime.

Canadian industry—at least in central Canada and industrial Nova Scotia—benefited directly from the war. By March 1915 over 200 firms had converted to muni- tions manufacture. Later in 1915 the government set up the Imperial Munitions Board, chaired by business- man Joseph Flavelle (1858–1939). Canadian munitions production increased dramatically, raising the export of iron and steel products from $68.5 million in 1915 to $441.1 million only two years later. The Canadian muni- tions industry employed 200,000 workers in 673 factor- ies. By 1917 the Imperial Munitions Board alone had an annual budget three times that of the federal govern- ment in 1914. In the latter years of the war nearly 40 per cent of Canadian manufacturing products found export markets. The high point came in 1918 when Canadian manufacturing exports reached $636 million and total exports peaked at $1.54 billion.

As for Canadian agriculture, it could not produce enough in the short run. From 1914 to 1919 in Canada as a whole, agricultural acreage under cultivation doubled. Wheat prices trebled, and western farmers expanded the size and number of their farms. The federal government created a national Wheat Board in 1917 to facilitate mar- keting. The number of prairie farms actually increased by 28 per cent between 1911 and 1921. Although the sons of Canadian farmers could gain exemption from conscription, by the time the draft was introduced in 1917 there were few young men left on the farms. Rural Canada, especially in the West, had outdone the remain- der of the country in volunteer enlistment. The result was an increase in labour costs, which forced farmers to buy more agricultural equipment. Increased produc- tion also pushed up the price of land. Farmers therefore increased production by borrowing money at high rates of interest. Farm debt increased substantially. High prices also encouraged farmers to move cultivation onto marginal land while abandoning most of the tested techniques of soil and moisture conservation hitherto practised. The result of all this expansion would be an inevitable disaster when the price of grain and other crops ultimately fell on the international market.

One of many casualties of the war was civil liberty in Canada. The War Measures Act, passed at war’s begin- ning, was a blank cheque allowing the government to censor writing and speech, as well as to arrest, detain, and even deport those regarded as obstructing the war effort. As a nation of immigrants, Canada inevitably contained citizens and residents whose homelands were part of the enemy, the so-called “enemy aliens.” Although the bulk of such people were German, most of those persecuted and interned were citizens of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, chiefly people of Ukrainian origin. After 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, the activities of radical ethnic organizations came under heavy scru- tiny, and the Dominion government was easily per- suaded that the Ukrainian community was the centre of Bolshevism in Canada. Thus, on the eve of the Armistice, two Orders-in-Council suppressed the foreign-language press and most socialist/anarchist organizations.

The Great War had a profound impact on Canada in almost all aspects of life. Its rhetorical side was one of

A recruitment poster. Archives of Ontario, MU 2052, #40, F 895 (1915). Recruiting Circulars. What does this poster tell us about public attitudes in Canada towards the war in 1915?

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330 A History of the Canadian Peoples

present sacrifice for future benefits. This “war to end all wars” would make the world safe for democracy. An era of full social justice would follow the great victory. That the Canadian government had ignored democratic civil liberties in fighting the war was an irony escaping most contemporaries.

The war’s conclusion amounted to a triumph for Protestant Anglo-Canada, with little thought given to the tomorrows that would follow the coming of peace. A nation that had drawn heavily on its resources was really not ready to deal with the negative legacies of its efforts.

Only days after the Armistice was declared in November 1918, Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden went to Europe to head the Canadian delegation at the Peace Conference. Canada’s participation at Paris beginning in January 1919 was less concerned with the disposition of European and international problems than it was with its own status in dealing with that disposition. This was a policy agreed upon in advance by the Union cabinet in Ottawa, although many Canadians would have pre- ferred that their government stay away from Versailles entirely. Canada and the other dominions banded together to insist on being treated as independent

The Newfoundland Regiment, D Company, near St John’s, 1915. On 1 July 1916 the Newfoundlanders would see their first action in France. Of the 780 men of the Newfoundland Regiment who entered the fray that day at Beaumont-Hamel, in the first engagement of the Battle of the Somme, more than 700 were killed, wounded, or reported missing. Since 1917, the first of July is observed in Newfoundland as Memorial Day, in remembrance generally of Newfoundland’s war dead and specifically of those who were slaughtered at Beaumont-Hamel. The Rooms, Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador, E 22-45.

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3318 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

nations at the Peace Conference rather than as part of the British imperial delegation. The principal opponent to this change of policy was not the British government, but the United States, backed by other participants, who insisted that autonomous dominions would enhance the British voice in the deliberations, which did not answer the dominions’ claim that their commitment of manpower (and casualties) during the war entitled them to a separate say in the outcome.

Sir Robert Borden proved to have an influence on the conference greater than Canada’s actual power in world affairs. The first breakthrough came in early January 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson con- ceded a representative from each dominion at the peace table. Sir Robert Borden responded by calling a meeting

of the dominions, refusing to accept one representative, and demanding two. Wilson agreed to two representa- tives from Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and one for New Zealand. Newfoundland would have to sit as part of the British delegation. The dominions sub- sequently got the right to separate membership on new international organizations coming out of the treaty, including the League of Nations, and a separate signa- ture on the treaty and conventions. Membership in the League, of course, implied liability for any commitments undertaken by that organization. Canada had achieved a new status in world affairs. Whether that status justified the numbers of dead and wounded was another matter.

Once the Great War had ended, most Canadians did their best to put the conflict behind them. Many

A Canadian battalion going “over the top,” October 1916. W.I. Castle, Canada. Dept. of National Defence, LAC, PA-000648

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332 A History of the Canadian Peoples

hoped for the emergence of a more just society. Stephen Leacock well expressed the ambivalence of the post- war period in The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1919). Recognizing that industrial society did not nor- mally employ its full potential, Leacock could only hope that the destructive energy of war could be har- nessed for peacetime reform. The unsolved riddle was simply stated: “With all our wealth, we are still poor.” Every child, Leacock insisted, should have “adequate food, clothing, education and an opportunity in life.” Unemployment should become a “social crime” (Bowker, 1973: 74–80). Leacock did not offer specific solutions. Such a collective transformation would not be easy to accomplish. There were too many unresolved economic, constitutional, and social problems. The development of Canada over the next quarter-century demonstrated

that at least in peacetime, Canadians still had great trouble coming to terms with the paradox Leacock had identified in 1919. During the Great Depression espe- cially, the state seemed impotent to improve conditions. The politicians blamed the Constitution. Beginning in 1939, however, Canada would again demonstrate its capacity for waging total war within the constraints of the British North America Act.

Returning to “Normalcy” During demobilization Canada experienced one of the most devastating epidemics of modern times, the

During World War I, Ukrainians were one of several nationalities dubbed “enemy aliens.” Many of these people were imprisoned in Canadian internment camps, such as the camp and internees shown here, at Castle Mountain, Alberta. Glenbow Archives, NA-1870-6.

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Sir Robert Borden on Canadian Representation at Versailles

Document

The subject [of representation] was first debated in- formally at conferences between the British and Dominion Ministers, and afterwards in the formal meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet. It was assumed that only five places could be secured for the British Empire at the Peace Conference. The panel system, under which the representation of the British Empire at the sessions of the Peace Conference would be selected from day to day, as the nature of the subject demanded, was not regarded as satisfactory in itself.

Finally, I proposed that in the general representation of the British Dominions, the panel system might be util- ized when necessary or appropriate but that there should be distinctive representation for each Dominion on the same basis as was to be accorded to the smaller nations of the Allied Powers. This proposal was eventually accepted at the preliminary conference in London between repre- sentatives of the British Empire, France, and Italy.

But all the difficulties had by no means been over- come. When the question of procedure, including that of representation, came before the Peace Conference on January 12, 1919, the proposal for distinctive rep- resentation for the British Dominions aroused strong opposition. The subject was further discussed in the British Empire Delegation, which was really the Imperial War Cabinet under another name; and the Dominions, standing firmly upon the principle recog- nized in London, declined to accept an inferior status. In the result, there insistence prevailed; and through a combination of the panel system together with their own distinctive representation, the Dominions secured a peculiarly effective position.

Elsewhere I have said, and here I emphatically repeat, that Canada and the other Dominions would

have regarded the situation as intolerable if they, who numbered their dead by the hundred thousands in the fiercest struggle the world had ever known, should stand outside the council chamber of the Conference, while nations that had taken no direct or active part in the struggle stood within and determined the condi- tions of Peace. . . .

We were lodged at the Hotel Majestic where I had a very commodious bedroom and sitting-room. The British had brought over an entire staff for the hotel as they were afraid to utilize a French staff, lest important information leak out. As a result, we had typical English meals, altogether too heavy for per- sons habitually deprived of normal opportunities for exercise. I used to escape the dinners two or three times a week and content myself with an apple, a glass of water, and a long walk. This regimen enabled me to survive. On one occasion I avoided dinner for ten con- secutive evenings.

[Feb. 4 1919] That evening, Foster [Sir George Foster] and I went with the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland to dine with Lord Brooke at the Café Escargot, where we had an excellent meal to which we did ample justice except the snails included in the menu. After dinner we attended the Theatre St. Martin to see Cyrano de Bergerac, beautifully acted but sad in its ending. We were invited to supper by the leading lady of the piece, “Roxanne,” and at her apartment we met Percival Langdon of the Morning Post. We had an excellent supper and a most enjoyable time. This was one of the friskiest evenings of Foster’s life, as we kept him up until 1:15. I told him I never would have embarked on such an adventure without his presence as chaperon.

In his Memoirs, originally published in 1938 and based on his diaries kept at the time, Sir Robert Borden wrote the following.

Source: Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, vol. 2, 1916–1920 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), 908.

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334 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Spanish flu outbreak of 1918–19. The situation was so desperate in November 1918 that the government actually attempted, without success, to postpone pub- lic celebration of the Armistice for fear of spreading infection. Canadian deaths from the flu ultimately ran to 50,000—only some 10,000 thousand fewer than the number of Canadians who had died in battle. Fatalities had shifted from the trenches to the home front.

Yet another form of infectious epidemic made its appearance in 1919 with the great “Red Scare.” The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917–18 in Russia provided the Canadian government and businessmen with an example of what might happen if popular unrest got out of hand. Political paranoia was as catching as the flu. Both the government and the business community became almost hysterical over the possibility that the revolution was nigh. The immediate focus of their con- cern was the Winnipeg General Strike of June 1919, but it had been preceded by the organization of the One Big Union, formed in Calgary in February amid consider- able anti-capitalistic rhetoric. As usual, the Canadian government responded to anything smacking of popu- lar uprising with repression.

Most of the conditions and issues that initially pro- duced labour unrest in Winnipeg in the spring of 1919 were traditional ones exacerbated by the war: workers sought recognition of union rights to organize, higher wages, and better working conditions. A walkout by workers in the city’s metal trades and building indus- tries was quickly joined by others (as many as 50,000) in a general sympathy strike. On 15 May the strikers voted to close down the city’s services. Much of the rhetoric of the strike sounded extremely radical. Some labour lead- ers hoped to use the general strike as a weapon to bring capitalism to its knees. Many, but not all, demobilized servicemen supported the strikers. Worried business- men saw the general strike as a breakdown of public authority. Workers in other cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, responded with declarations of support and threats of their own strikes. The Canadian government, represented locally by acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen (1874–1960), responded decisively. He supple- mented the army with local militia, the Royal North West Mounted Police, and 1,800 special constables.

The Canadian Naturalization Act was hastily amended in early June 1919 to allow for the instant deportation of any foreign-born radicals who advocated revolution or who belonged to “any organization entertaining or teaching disbelief in or opposition to organized govern- ment” (quoted in Avery, 1986: 222). Most strikers were British or Canadian-born, but the general public was easily persuaded that what was needed was to “clean the aliens out of this community and ship them back to their happy homes in Europe which vomited them forth a decade ago” (quoted in Bumsted, 1994: 66).

Arthur Meighen effectively broke the strike on 17 June when he authorized the arrest of 10 strike leaders on charges of sedition. On the 21st—“Bloody Saturday”—a public demonstration of strikers and returned soldiers, marching towards the Winnipeg city hall, was met by a charge of Mounties on horseback. The result was a vio- lent melee that injured many, killed two strikers, and led to the arrest of a number of “foreign rioters.” This degree of violence, precipitated by the authorities, was unusual during the strike, perhaps because provincial prohibition in 1916 had closed bars and beverage rooms, making it difficult to get drunk and disorderly in public. Bloody Saturday happened despite the best efforts of the strike leaders to prevent the demonstration from going forward. The Strike Committee subsequently agreed to call off the strike if a Royal Commission investigated it and its underlying causes. The Royal Commission, called by the province of Manitoba, found that much of the labour unrest in Winnipeg was justified and that the strike’s principal goal was to effect the introduction of collective bargaining.

On the other hand, the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench convicted most of the arrested leaders (who were either British- or Canadian-born) on char- ges of sedition. The Department of Immigration held deportation hearings for the “foreigners” in camera. The use of the civil arm to suppress radicalism, long a part of the Canadian tradition, was given a new meaning in post-war Winnipeg. Perhaps most signif i- cantly, the strike and its handling by the government demonstrated the fragility of the post-war readjust- ment. The next decade would further emphasize the problems.

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3358 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Regional Protest in the 1920s The decade of the 1920s is usually associated with pros- perity, but in truth the period faced great economic dif- ficulties. The boom did not begin until 1924 and it was quite limited in its influence. The depression of 1920–3 had seen world prices for resource products fall abruptly, while costs fell much more gradually. Prosperity finally came from substantial growth in new housing con- struction and a great wave of consumer spending, both understandable after the war and subsequent depres- sion. There was a major expansion of consumer credit facilities to finance the new spending. An advertising

industry quickly developed to promote consumerism. Speculative activities—in real estate, in the stock mar- ket, and in commodity futures—all flourished. So did gambling, both in the stock market and in games of chance; Canadians bet on almost anything. However, much of the boom was at best internal, at worst artifi- cial. International markets, except in the United States, were very soft. The traditional resource sectors of the economy had suffered most from the worldwide fall in prices, although they recovered somewhat in the lat- ter years of the decade. Only Ontario’s economy really prospered, chiefly on the strength of the manufacture of the motor car both for domestic consumption and for export into a British Empire protecting itself against the Americans. The economy of the Maritime provinces

Despite efforts to protect themselves from the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918–19, approximately 50,000 people died in Canada from the disease. CP PHOTO/National Archives of Canada.

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336 A History of the Canadian Peoples

James Shaver Woodsworth (1874–1942) was born in Etobicoke near Toronto. His father, a Methodist min- ister, moved the family to Brandon, Manitoba, in 1882, and James became a Methodist minister himself in 1896, subsequently studying at Victoria College and then at Oxford University. In 1902 he moved to Winnipeg and began questioning Methodist teachings. In 1907 he resigned from the ministry, but was instead given the superintendency of All People’s Mission in Winnipeg’s North End, spending six years working with immigrants and the poor. Two books—Strangers within Our Gates (1909) and My Neighbour (1911)—resulted from his work at All People’s Mission and established his reputation as a social reformer. Beginning in 1913

he spent some years travelling in western Canada, becoming a socialist in 1914 and espousing pacifism during World War I. In 1919 he returned to Winnipeg to become editor of the Western Labour News when its editor was arrested for seditious libel. He, too, was briefly arrested but was never charged. The publicity made his reputation as a labour radical and in 1921 he was elected as an Independent Labour Party MP for Winnipeg North. In 1925 Woodsworth used his vote in a deadlocked House of Commons to force the Liberals to promise to create a plan for old-age pen- sions, later introduced in 1927. In 1932 he helped found a new political party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, based largely on British Fabian socialist principles, although he insisted the party’s socialism would be distinctly Canadian. He was easily chosen as first leader of the CCF, and spent the remainder of the Depression attempting unsuccessfully to challenge the two established parties and supplant the Liberals as the major party of the left. When World War II broke out, Woodsworth refused to support it and was repudiated by the majority of his party as a result. He was re-elect- ed to Parliament in 1940, but was old and sick, dying in early 1942. Although Woodsworth advocated many of the major social policies of the modern welfare state, he was largely unsuccessful in implementing any of them, and both his socialism and his pacifism were aban- doned by his party and its successors. Nevertheless he is generally venerated as one of the early leaders of the Canadian left.

James Shaver Woodsworth. National Archives of Canada, C-057365.

James Shaver Woodsworth

Biography

continued to decline precipitously, since both the power revolution and the new industrialization bypassed them while foreign markets (especially for fish) con- tinued to decline.

Despite the government’s brutal suppression of the Winnipeg General Strike, industrial unrest remained high through 1925. The One Big Union, a radical and

militant industrial union, flourished briefly in western Canada. In 1921 labour representatives sat in seven of nine provincial legislatures. In the federal election of that year, more than 30 labour candidates ran for office, although only four were actually elected. Labour unrest after Winnipeg was most prevalent in the geographical extremes of the country. There were a number of notable

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3378 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

I had a little bird

And its name was Enza.

I opened the window

And in-flew-Enza.

(children’s skipping song of 1918)

The wild card in Canada’s post-war experience

in late 1918 and early 1919 was the pandemic always

known as the Spanish flu. There are no real questions

about the incidence, the extent of sickness, or even

the number of deaths caused by the disease, which

ran rampant across Canada between September 1918

and March 1919. The problem is that it is impossible

to document any real correlation between the flu and

anything else going on in Canada at the time. Disease

has always seemed to exist separately and independ-

ently from other historical factors. Contemporaries

talked openly about the connection between the high

cost of living and popular discontent, for example,

but advanced few arguments about any relationship

between fatal illness and the socio-political dissatis-

faction of 1919.

Few historians dealing with the unsettled condi-

tions in North America in 1919 mention the flu and

popular attitudes in the same breath. The flu’s almost

unthinkable extent and impact across Canada at the

end of the war seems to have eluded historical atten-

tion, perhaps partly because it was obviously not of

human agency and was seldom seen by those who

lived through it as anything other than a disease

that struck at individuals and families. It was seen by

its victims as a danger to their bodies but not as a

social problem menacing the body politic. Even the

rediscovery of the virulence of the pandemic by his-

torians beginning in the 1980s—resulting in a major

increase in information about it—has not produced

many attempts to connect influenza in a careful way

to other events occurring at the same time or only a

few months later.

The likelihood is that more than one virus was

responsible for the epidemic’s course worldwide.

The likelihood also is that the several viruses either

mutated, or became much more virulent, during their

travels around the world, or that other strains suc-

ceeded in jumping from animals to humans by either

adaptation or hybridization. Early evidence of the

beginnings of the flu in its milder forms can be seen

in various parts of the world. One outbreak occurred

in San Sebastién on the northern coast of Spain in

February of 1918. The Spanish experience gave the

disease its name, unfairly since there was no real evi-

dence that its actual origins were Spanish. In its early

incarnations, this “three-day fever”—as the American

Expeditionary Force called it—was not terribly

menac ing. The symptoms were typically flu-like in a

way familiar to all of us. The victim suddenly became

ill, running a high fever. The face became red, every

bone in the body ached, the body perspired consider-

ably, and there was usually an accompanying head-

ache. The period of feeling really sick usually lasted

only 72 to 96 hours, during which time the victim was

practically comatose, although after rising from his or

her bed the victim remained weak for a further seven

to 10 days. The disease was highly contagious.

At some point over the summer of 1918, this rela-

tively mild influenza (with low mortality rates), which

had affected Europe and the United States up to

this point, mutated or morphed into a more virulent

disease. The new variety (or varieties) was far more

deadly. Some victims became extremely ill almost

instantly with symptoms of extreme pneumonia,

exhibiting high fevers and lungs full of fluid. Others

gradually developed pneumonia after a few days of

what appeared to be the ordinary flu. Associated with

BACKGROUNDER The Spanish Flu Pandemic

Continued...

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338 A History of the Canadian Peoples

strikes in Cape Breton, Alberta, and British Columbia. In the coalfields, 22,000 miners were on strike in August 1922. Several unions were broken in some of the bitterest labour violence that Canada had ever seen. Tactics in the mining communities made Winnipeg seem like a Sunday school picnic. A number of movements, mainly regionally based, sprang up to protest inequalities in the national system. Their collective inability to effect much change—though they tried a variety of approaches— was, and is, instructive. One of the principal problems was the very difficulty of working together despite com- mon complaints.

Certainly nobody felt harder done by after the Great War than the farmer. The movement of farm pro- test reached its height in the 1921 election, before the final wheat market collapse and the spread of drought conditions. Farmers in Anglo-Canada disliked infla- tion and had two specific economic grievances beyond the wheat price collapse of 1920. First, the wartime wheat marketing system had been abandoned by the government in 1919. Second, the government had failed to introduce serious tariff reform to lower the costs of farming. Behind these complaints was a long-stand- ing farmer conviction that the political system oper-

ated to the advantage of profiteering central Canadian capitalists. Farmer discontent was national in scope, although western farmers were the most alienated. The new Progressive Party, formed in 1920, won 64 seats in the 1921 federal election in six provinces: 37 on the prairies, 24 in Ontario, one in New Brunswick, and two in British Columbia. Joining 50 Conservatives and 117 Liberals, the Progressives broke the established two- party tradition. But despite occasional farmer–labour alliances, the two major groups of malcontents were unable to unite politically for change

Though they were entitled to become the official opposition, the Progressives were badly divided. Former Liberals wanted free trade, while the farm protest- ors sought more radical reform. The farm wing, led by Alberta’s Henry Wise Wood (1860–1941), wanted to scrap the existing party system. It sought instead to focus on farmer grievances. The only actions the two wings could agree upon were negative. The Progressives would not become the official opposition, and they would not join in coalition with the Liberals, now led by William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950). As a result, the inexperi- enced farmer MPs were unable to accomplish anything substantial in Ottawa when economic conditions in

the new influenza was a cyanosis that discoloured

the face and the feet with a dark bluish, almost black,

cast and a cough bringing up blood-stained sputum

and mucus. Unlike the earlier outbreaks, these new

ones were highly fatal. There were reports at hospi-

tals of corpses stacked up like cordwood.

Canadian troops returning home in the late spring

and early summer brought the flu back to Canada

from Europe. How many of the troops were carry-

ing the earlier strains of the virus and how many the

newly mutated ones will never be known, although

clearly the virulent form was being introduced into

the nation from somewhere. Troop ships, military

camps, and soldier movement via the railroads were

probably the major means of spreading the flu across

Canada. The flu apparently did not usually hit on the

whole very hard at the very old and the very young,

who were the typical victims of most epidemic dis-

eases. It hit hardest at young adults, who were in

most epidemics the most immune.

The flu devastated most large cities in Canada. In

the rural districts, where houses were often far apart

and isolated but relatively safe from infection unless

it was introduced from outside, farm people often did

exactly the wrong thing, fleeing to towns and villages

to find companionship and medical assistance and

thus increasing the likelihood of the spread of infec-

tion. Certainly the pandemic hit with especial fury

against the First Nations. The death rate from influ-

enza among Canadian Native peoples in these years

overall was 37.7 per thousand, while the flu death rate

per thousand was 14.3 in Toronto, 16.7 in Winnipeg,

and 23.3 in Vancouver. Before it was over in the spring

of 1919, approximately 50,000 Canadians had died.

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3398 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

western Canada worsened. The King government pro- vided token programs to gain the support of moderate Progressives. Meanwhile, drought and the worldwide collapse of wheat prices beginning in 1921 produced a widespread inability to meet mortgage payments. Much of the land in the dry-belt region reverted to the state for unpaid taxes. Its inhabitants went either to the cities or, in many cases, back to the United States. Surviving farmers became too disheartened to support a party that had accomplished little in Ottawa, and the Progressives quickly disappeared.

A similar fate befell the major eastern expres- sion of protest, the Maritime Rights Movement. Maritimers had difficulty joining western farmers in a common cause. The easterners sought not free trade but increased protectionism, as well as lower rail- way freight rates. The region was acutely conscious of its increasing impotency in Confederation, as its population base continued to decline proportionally to central Canada and the West. By the end of 1921, regional discontent found expression in the Maritime Rights Movement, which combined an insistence on

The Winnipeg General Strike, 21 June 1919. This photograph shows the crowd gathered in downtown Winnipeg on Bloody Saturday, before the Mounties charged the crowd to break it up. Does this well-dressed crowd appear to be looking for trouble? Provincial Archives of Manitoba, N2771, Foote Collection 1705.

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340 A History of the Canadian Peoples

equitable freight rates with a series of particular prov- incial demands. The result was a widespread, if brief, public agitation. Eschewing the third-party route of the Progressives, the Maritime Rights leaders decided in 1923 to appeal to the remainder of the country over the head of Ottawa. Although a major national advertising and public relations campaign on behalf of Maritime concerns had some success, it was not enough. When Maritimers started voting Conservative

in 1923 by-elections, this merely annoyed the King government. After a Royal Commission investigated Maritime grievances, the Liberals bought off the region with concessions on freight rates, subsidies, and port development. None of these concessions touched fun- damental economic problems. In the end, working through the two-party system achieved no more than the creation of a third party. The inability of regional protest in the Maritimes and the West to find common

In 1916, feminist activist and author Emily Murphy

(1868–1933), who wrote under the name “Janey

Canuck,”was appointed a police magistrate in Alberta,

thus becoming the first female judge in the British

Empire. Her appointment was challenged on the

grounds that only males were persons as stated in

the British North America Act of 1867. A year later

the Alberta Supreme Court found that women were

persons in a ruling that applied only within the prov-

ince. Murphy was subsequently ruled ineligible by

Prime Minister Robert Borden to be appointed to the

Canadian Senate, and in 1927 she gathered a consor-

tium of four other Alberta women to sign a petition

to the Supreme Court of Canada, which asked the

question: “Does the word ‘persons’ in section 24 of the

British North America Act, 1867, include female per-

sons?” Murphy’s four collaborators were: Irene Parlby

(1868–1965), a former president of the United Farm

Women of Alberta and an Alberta cabinet minister

in 1921; Nellie McClung (1873–1951), author, female

suffrage advocate, and Alberta MLA (1921); Louise

McKinney (1868–1931), the first woman elected to a

legislature in the British Empire in 1917 and a temper-

ance supporter; and Henrietta Edwards (1849–1931), a

founding member of the Victorian Order of Nurses and

a leading member of the National Council of Women.

The Supreme Court brought down its decision

on 24 April 1928. The Court’s answer to the ques-

tion was that women were not persons, because

at the time of the drafting of the BNA Act, women

could not vote or hold political office. Moreover, it

pointed out, the Act used male pronouns through-

out. The five women appealed this decision to the

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England,

which declared on 18 October 1929 that women

were indeed persons eligible to become Canadian

senators. The Privy Council argued that “the exclu-

sion of women from all public offices is a relic of days

more barbarous than ours,” adding: “to those who

would ask why the word ‘persons’ should include

females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?”

This decision was not only important for women’s

rights, but also because it enunciated the princi-

ple that the BNA Act was “a living tree capable of

growth and expansion within its natural limits.” The

Constitution thus required progressive interpretation

that was different from that applied to ordinary stat-

utes. This principle remains an important compon-

ent of modern Canadian constitutional law. Prime

Minister Mackenzie King responded to the decision

a few months later by appointing Cairine Wilson

(1885–1962) to the Senate.

BACKGROUNDER The Famous Five and the “Persons” Case

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3418 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Mother had filled another lunch can. At five-thirty in the

morning I slung it over my shoulder and tramped with

a few others over the familiar path along the washer

drain, past the old wash plant, through the woods to

Morrison Lake, and along the lake to No. 22 Colliery. In

the wash house Newfoundlanders, Frenchmen, Poles,

Hungarians, MacDonalds, MacRaes, and Smiths, bleary-

eyed and sleepy, flailed a writhing mass of limbs in

all directions as they wrestled on their pit clothes.

Bearlike torsos, dirty backs (many miners washed

only their faces), clear backs, bristly backs incred-

ibly muscular, small retracted penises, huge flopping

penises—obscene, good natured kidding in a dozen

dialects—these were the men who worked in the coal

mine, and I was to become one of them. . . .

When a week or so had passed, it no longer

seemed strange to walk down out of the brilliant

sunlight, out of the fresh air, into total darkness that

took five or ten minutes before one’s eyes adjusted to

the reduced light of one’s headlamp and one’s nose

accepted the fetid, mouldy air of decay common to a

mine. Air from a huge compressor on the surface was

driven down a carefully constructed air course, circu-

lated slowly through all the work areas, and returned

up the main haulage way, ensuring that no significant

accumulation of deadly gasses could occur. Yet in

most places you were unaware of any body change.

When you were working, sweat streamed from your

body, but when you sat down for five minutes, you

were shivering. Add to this the fact that you could

seldom stand up without stooping except where the

“roof” had been “brushed”; the coal seam was five feet

thick, but in the air course, the chief haulage areas, an

extra foot of shale was taken down chiefly to ensure

that it would not fall down and block traffic or slow

air circulation. This left a roof of solid stone gener-

ally considered safe. As coal seams went, the Gowrie

seam was of generous thickness; the harbour seam

on which Glace Bay collieries nos. 11 and 24 oper-

ated was only three and a half feet thick and required

a good deal more stooping. . . .

At No. 22 Colliery the coal seam emerged to the

surface, and . . . the main slope had been driven down

the seam. At one-thousand-foot intervals, landings or

levels were broken off east and west from the slope; the

term “level” is a relative one, for convenient operation

preferred a slight slope in the level. At similar intervals

along the level, “headways” were driven up and “deeps”

driven down the slope of the seam, each conforming

to the twenty degree angle. This might be more easily

visualized by picturing a level as a road built horizon-

tally across the mid-slope of a mountain; roads going

up the mountain from it are headways, those leading

down from it are deeps. At one-hundred-foot intervals

up the headways and down the deeps, “rooms” were

broken off, assigned numbers, and turned over to a

pair of miners known at that time as “butties”; these did

the actual mining. The average headway or deep could

employ thirty pairs of miners paid by the ton for the

coal they mined. A miner at the “face” could earn fif-

teen to twenty-five dollars per day, which in 1926 was

a lot of money, considerably more than the mine man-

ager earned. Within their room a pair of miners were

the lords of creation, and God help anyone or anything

that prevented them from “getting their coal out.” This

was free enterprise, indeed.

Coal Mining in Cape Breton In 1990 Earle Peach wrote a memoir of what he called his “childhood,” which included an account of his first days at Number 22 Colliery, Birch Grove. He began working in the mines at the age of 17.

Source: Earle Peach, Memoirs of a Cape Breton Childhood (Halifax: Nimbus, 1990), 112–13. Reprinted with permission.

Contemporary Views

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342 A History of the Canadian Peoples

ground was palpable—and significant. Neither side could see beyond its regional interests. Clever federal politicians, like Mackenzie King, could play the game of divide and rule with impunity.

While the West and the Maritimes produced their ineffectual protests, Quebec turned increasingly inward. It pursued a nationalism that was at least partly a reaction against its increasing sense of isolation from the remainder of Canada. The chief outlet for this nationalism was the journal L’Action Française, founded on the eve of the Conscription Crisis by the Ligue des droits de français. This movement began with a crusade to save the French language, but gradually shifted into broader issues. Inspiration for both movement and

journal came from Abbé Lionel Groulx (1878–1967). Groulx worried about the survival of the traditional religion and culture in the face of an ever more mater- ialistic environment. From the French-Canadian per- spective, that environment was increasingly “in the middle of an immense Anglo-Saxon ocean” ( quoted in Cook, 1969b: 193). In the 1920s Groulx denied that he was a separatist, although his arguments pointed in that direction. He called for a commitment to build the Quebec economy, preparing for a future in which Confederation would come to an end. By the late 1920s, Groulx had proved more successful at refashioning the history of French Canada than at gaining widespread public support.

The “dust bowl”: the prairies in the 1930s. Images of these lands were not only stark in comparison to what they had been only years before, but also in comparison to Canada’s image of what the prairies were. How do they compare to what you think they are today? Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

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3438 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

The Depression and Responses to It The stock market failed in October 1929, with Wall Street leading the way in a record collapse of stock prices every- where in North America. Contrary to popular opinion,

this disaster was fairly independent of the Depression that followed it. That Depression was really the cumula- tive result of the worldwide fall in prices, which had never readjusted from the inflation of wartime and the deflation of the post-war period. An international inability to buy left Canada and other resource producers, such as Argentina and Australia, with decreased orders for their products.

Ernest Lapointe (1876–1941) was born in St-Eloi, Quebec. He attended Rimouski College and then Laval University, being called to the bar in 1898. Six years later he became Kamouraska’s Liberal MP. He was a

staunch supporter of Wilfrid Laurier, but remained on the back benches for many years, although in Laurier’s last days he was becoming more prominent, leading the Liberals in the debate over the Ontario Schools Question. In 1919 he was elected to Laurier’s old riding in Quebec East. He came into his own under Mackenzie King, who appreciated his loyalty to the party and to the administration. King placed him in two patronage portfolios—Marine and Fisheries, 1921–4, and Justice, 1924–30 and 1935–41—and treated Lapointe as his lieu- tenant in Quebec. As Fisheries Minister, he signed the Halibut Treaty with the United States in 1923, the first treaty signed by Canada itself rather than Britain.

Lapointe went with King to the Imperial Confer- ences of 1926 and 1931, supporting Canadian auton- omy in international matters all the way. Domestically, Lapointe was in favour of tariff reduction and provincial rights, although he was the Minister of Justice who dis- allowed Social Credit’s reformist legislation in Alberta because it infringed on federal rights. He was very cau- tious about federal interference in Quebec. But he also used federal patronage to great effect in the province, leading many to call Quebec a Liberal fiefdom. At the beginning of World War II, Lapointe promised Quebec there would be no conscription, and thus brought the vot- ers of the province on side for the Liberals and the war. His death in 1941 left Mackenzie King without a French- Canadian lieutenant of stature during most of the war.

Ernest Lapointe. J. Russell & Sons, LAC, C-019104.

Ernest Lapointe

Biography

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344 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Trade deficits quickly mounted. Nations that owed Canada money were unable to pay. The dollar fell, and in 1931 so did a number of major Canadian financial institutions,

brokerage agencies, and insurance companies. The country would not recover until after the eruption of another war in 1939. For most Canadians, the Depression of the 1930s

While living at the BLOCK, I heard my first radio broad-

cast. It occurred in the living room of our apartment.

There were other adults present besides Mom and

Dad. I can recall Bart and Marg Collins and the Bastable

family from the second floor being there. It seems as

if it was a special occasion. At any rate, all were sitting

around the dining room table. There was a device on

it with a pair of earphones attached. Dad did some tin-

kering with the device and eventually we all took turns

listening to the earphones. We could hear music and

talking! To overcome the limitations of two earphones

being passed from person to person Dad placed the

earphones on a metal pie plate and by being very quiet

we could all hear simultaneously. It was magic! The

magic of this lay in the fact that there was no wire con-

nection. The sound was being plucked from the air by

means of this little device called a crystal set. It was the

beginning of radio as home entertainment. The group

wanted to know where this sound was coming from.

Dad explained, as best he could, about electric waves

coming through the air. They originated from two tall

transmitting towers set up on the City Hall grounds at

8th St. and Princess Avenue. There was a small, stuc-

co-covered building beside the towers. This housed

all the devices needed to work the magic. It was called

a radio station and it identified itself as CKX [on air, 1

December 1928]. It had just begun operations. Music

came, without wires, more than three blocks to our

apartment! We were impressed.

Listening to Early Radio The radio was one of the few sources of inexpensive entertainment in Canada during the Depression. It was usually the last personal item families retained as they slid into poverty.

Although this photo was staged, it conveys the avid interest that radio aroused uring the Depression. A receiver like this walnut- veneered Canadian General Electric model was a luxury that not many Depression-era Canadians could afford. National Film Board of Canada, Photothèque, LAC, C-080917.

Source: Raymond R. Bailey, Tadpole to Little Frog (in a big pond): The Memoir of a Young Man Growing Up in Manitoba

during the Depression and War Years (Winnipeg, 2005), 111.

Contemporary Views

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was always the Great Depression. Canadians lived in its shadow for decades to come. Those generations who had experienced its effects were always sympathetic to calls for social justice.

What the Depression meant, first and foremost, was unemployment. Official statistics are totally meaning- less as a measure of the extent of joblessness, much less its significance. According to the publication Historical Statistics in Canada (1983), reflecting contemporary government data, unemployment in Canada rose from 116,000 in 1929 to 741,000 in 1932 to 826,000 in 1933, ultimately declining to 411,000 in 1937 and increasing to 529,000 in 1939. These figures, while substantial enough in a nation of only 10 million, hardly reflected the real- ity. No farmers or fishers, or their families, counted among the ranks of the unemployed at this time. The government regarded them as self-employed business- men. Women out of work did not count either. Thus unemployment in the depths of the Depression, around 1933, ran to more than 27 per cent in the non-agricul- tural sector, but probably more than 50 per cent overall. At the same time, a farmer whose expenses exceeded his income was probably better off than a jobless city dweller whose expenses similarly exceeded his income. Farmers at least had some land on which food could be grown. Moreover, provincial governments tended to respond to the plight of the farmers, who made up a substantial proportion of the electorate in many prov- inces. The rural population actually grew in this decade as members of farm families returned from the city to the family farm.

The fall in prices meant that times were good for those with jobs, although almost everyone held their breath each time payday rolled around. As for Canadian business corporations, outside the financial sector there was little permanent damage. Most large corporations ruthlessly retrenched and waited for better times. Canadian business corporations actually suffered losses only in 1932 because they had been too slow to limit operations. In 1933, the lowest point on the eco- nomic curve, they ended collectively in the black.

The real victims of the Depression were the urban unemployed, who found that their relief became the great political football of the period. Traditionally,

Canadian municipalities and private charities had cared for the poor and jobless. The challenge in the 1930s was more than any city could handle, at least without the full co-operation and assistance of senior levels of government. R.B. Bennett (1870–1947), Prime Minister from 1930 to 1935, personally assisted from his own pocket many people who wrote him begging letters while he was in office, but Bennett had long opposed the dole system and insisted that the provinces were responsible for social welfare. The provinces, in turn, maintained that they lacked the appropriate taxing power. They passed the problem to the municipalities, which had to support the unemployed on declining rev- enue from property taxes that provided about 80 per cent of municipal revenue. Municipal assistance was grudging, almost always taking the form of credit vouchers to be redeemed at local stores rather than cash, which might be spent on “frivolities” or worse. The relief lines were not called “the dole” for nothing. Cities often advised single unemployed men to go elsewhere and even paid their rail tickets out of town. The consti- tutional wrangling between the provinces and the fed- eral government seemed quite irrelevant to Canadians looking for help.

Only in 1935, on the eve of a federal election, did R.B. Bennett become a convert to interventionist strat- egies. He announced his new policy, a “New Deal” for Canada, in a live radio address to the nation early in January 1935, saying, “I am for reform. I nail the flag of progress to the mast. I summon the power of the state to its support.” Bennett spoke of legislation regulating working condi- tions, insuring against unemployment, and extending credit to the farmer. Unfortunately for Bennett, his radio proclamations ran well ahead of the practical legislative program he and his cabinet had ready for Parliament. The Canadian electorate, moreover, was understandably suspicious of last-minute conversions. Instead, the voters brought back Mackenzie King’s Liberals, who offered few promises but had the solid backing of Quebec.

R.B. Bennett’s “conversion” to New Dealism (after the New Deal of public works and welfare state pro- grams introduced beginning in 1933 by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) involved more than a des- perate wish to return to office. It also represented a

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346 A History of the Canadian Peoples

growing realization by large parts of the Canadian business and professional communities that stabilizing the nation’s economy was necessary to prevent a more serious upheaval. Many leading businessmen and finan- ciers were in favour of state intervention, not so much because they believed in social justice as because they wanted economic stability for capitalism. The prevail- ing political and economic system of Canada was under attack from many directions in the 1930s. Canadian politicians and businessmen did not need to look to Germany or Italy to find examples of radical responses to economic problems. What European experience did point out, however, was that radicalism was not neces- sarily confined to the traditional left, to be associated with organized labour, socialism, or communism. The great fear was that a demagogue of any political persua-

sion would emerge, offering simple but final solutions to a frustrated electorate. Canada had its share of pro- spective demagogues. Most of their success came on the provincial rather than on the federal level, however. All were advocates of provincial rights. This blunted their national effectiveness. Agreeing to bash Ottawa together was never a very creative strategy unless agree- ment could be reached on what to do next. About all these leaders had in common were their own curious mixtures of radical rhetoric and fundamentally con- servative attitudes.

Perhaps the most successful radical response came in Alberta, where the Social Credit Party mobilized a population that had suffered heavily from drought and depression. The leader of Social Credit in Alberta was a Calgary radio preacher, William Aberhart

By 1933, unemployment in Canada had risen to 50 per cent overall, forcing people to line up for jobs, food, and social assistance. Toronto Star Syndicate 2003. All Rights Reserved.

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(1878–1943), who since 1924 had used his Sunday broadcasts for the Prophetic Bible Institute over CFCN (Canada’s most powerful radio station at the time) to build up a substantial personal following attracted to Protestant fundamentalism. In 1932 Aberhart added a secular dimension to his broadcasts, following his personal conversion to the economic ideas of a Scottish engineer named C.H. Douglas. An unconventional monetary theorist, Douglas claimed that capitalism’s failure lay in its inability to translate its production into purchasing power for the mass of people. Douglas advocated distributing money—“social credit”—to bridge the gap between production and consumption. Neither Aberhart nor his Alberta audience ever truly understood Douglas’s monetary theories, but both understood that the state would issue a social divi- dend, eventually set by Aberhart at $25 per month, to all citizens as part of their cultural heritage. With the assistance of Ernest Manning (1908–96), Aberhart organized the Social Credit Party early in 1935. The

new party swept to success at the polls, taking 56 of 63 seats and winning 54 per cent of the popular vote in the 1935 provincial election. The federal government (and courts) opposed much of its original legislative pro- gram, particularly mortgage, debt, and banking legis- lation, eventually disallowing 13 Alberta Acts. Social Credit moved to more traditional fiscal practices, blam- ing Ottawa and eastern big business for its inability to enact its program. (Under Aberhart and, following his death in 1943, under Manning, Social Credit won nine successive elections in Alberta and governed the prov- ince until 1971.)

The emergent popular leader in Quebec was Maurice Duplessis (1890–1959). Duplessis came from a family of Conservatives. In 1933 he became leader of the highly fragmented Conservative Party of Quebec. He found allies in two burgeoning Quebec move- ments of the early 1930s: the Catholic social action of the École social populaire, and the Liberal radicalism of the Action libérale nationale (ALN). From Catholic

In this Depression-era photo, four men share a bed and three others sit on the floor. How would you interpret this obviously staged image? CBC, LAC, C-013236.

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348 A History of the Canadian Peoples

social action Duplessis took a program of government intervention to redistribute wealth, protect farm- ers and workers, and regulate large corporations, all within the context of the Christian law of justice and charity. From the ALN he took an emphasis upon eco- nomic nationalism that called for liberation from col- onial oppression through agrarian reform, new labour legislation, the promotion of small industry and com- merce, and the destruction of the great financial estab- lishments of the province. Duplessis negotiated the merger of the ALN with the Conservatives in 1935 to form the Union Nationale. The new party campaigned on the ALN’s reform platform, winning an easy victory in the 1936 provincial election with 76 out of 90 seats and 58 per cent of the popular vote. Now “prime minis-

ter” of Quebec, Duplessis quickly abandoned the reform program that had brought him to power. Instead, he concentrated power in his own hands. His considerable success in office relied on a nationalistic concern for provincial autonomy in federal–provincial relations, anti-communism, and calculated paternalistic grants and patronage for the disadvantaged. He carefully culti- vated the Catholic hierarchy in the province. The Union Nationale’s economic program consisted chiefly in giv- ing American entrepreneurs a free hand to develop the province’s resources.

Other provinces besides Quebec and Alberta also produced populist political leaders, although within the context of traditional party labels. In British Columbia, T. Dufferin (Duff ) Pattullo (1873–1956) had led his

Among the buggies and wagons, there stood always

a few examples of that symbol of the Depression, the

Bennett buggy. The Bennett buggy was named, much

to his chagrin, after R.B. Bennett, who had the mis-

fortune to be Conservative Prime Minister of Canada

from 1930 to 1935, during the worst years of the

Depression.  . . . There probably couldn’t be a more

fitting symbol of the Depression than the Bennett

buggy. Originally it had been an automobile, most

often a Model T Ford, and it is difficult to say whether

the buggy evolved or the car devolved. At first it was

nothing more than the automobile fitted with a tongue

and whiffletrees so that a team of horses could be

hitched to it for economical motive power. As time

went on and it began to seem that the Depression

would never end, various segments and parts were

removed and those remaining re-arranged until little

was left but the chassis with its rubber-tired wheels.

With engine, transmission and radiator removed, the

front seat might migrate forward until it was between

the strong wheels, or the cowling, windshield and

front seat might move forward as a unit. Some form of

box was built on the chassis to make a general utility

vehicle. Whatever form each might take, all were called

Bennett buggies. From the standpoint of the horses,

their greatest advantage was that they pulled much

more easily than wagons with steel-rimmed wheels—

that is, until the tires wore out. Nor were the left-over

parts all discarded. Automobile seats became  sofas

or seats on farm wagons. Generators became wind

electrics, propeller-driven to generate power for

primitive six-vo[lt] farm lighting systems. Worn out

tires were sliced in two longitudinally to make circular

watering troughs for poultry. Engine blocks and other

steel parts that hadn’t rusted away disappeared in the

scrap drives of the Second World War.

The Bennett Buggy In his autobiographical account O Little Town: Remembering Life in a Prairie Village, Harlo L. Jones recalls the “Bennett buggy.”

Source: Harlo L. Jones, O Little Town: Remembering Life in a Prairie Village (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1995), 170.

Contemporary Views

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Liberal Party to power in 1933 without sounding very radical. In office, however, Pattullo gradually became a convert to state activism of the New Deal variety. His government was arguably the most interventionist in Canada, held back only by the province’s shortage of revenue. In Ontario, Mitchell Hepburn (1896–1953) led a Liberal government with a series of flamboyant pol- itical gestures designed chiefly as self-advertisement. He achieved national prominence in April 1937, in the midst of a strike at the General Motors plant in Oshawa. More than 4,000 workers struck for an eight-hour day, better wages and working conditions, and recognition of the new union of United Automobile Workers. This union was an affiliate of the recently formed Congress

of Industrial Organizations, which was organizing throughout the United States. Hepburn sided with General Motors and clashed publicly with the Prime Minister over Mackenzie King’s refusal to send RCMP reinforcements for the local police. The Premier organ- ized a volunteer force called Hepburn’s Hussars. Both Pattullo and Hepburn got great political mileage out of their well-publicized clashes with Ottawa.

None of the prominent provincial political lead- ers of the 1930s had any serious socialist leanings. The most important alternative political response of the Depression years based in the socialist tradition came from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). A convention in Calgary in 1932 founded the

Premier William Aberhart (front row, third from left) and cabinet, Edmonton, Alberta, 1935. “Bible Bill,” as he was sometimes referred to, took advantage of the radio to increase his profile, and his prospects. Glenbow Archives, ND-3-7103a.

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350 A History of the Canadian Peoples

CCF as a coalition of farmers’ organizations, labour unions, and labour-socialist parties in the four west- ern provinces. The League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) served as the CCF’s midwife. The LSR, organized in 1931 by a number of prominent Canadian academics, believed in Fabian socialism. Like the Fabians, it was proudly non-Marxist and non-revolutionary, although vehemently committed to a welfare state and the state’s takeover of key industries. At its first annual convention at Regina in 1933, the newly founded CCF adopted a pol- itical manifesto that promised a heady brew of political

reform. The Regina Manifesto called for the nationaliz- ation (with compensation for the owners) of all indus- try “essential to social planning.” It advocated a series of universal welfare measures for Canada—hospitaliz- ation, health care, unemployment insurance, and pen- sions—after amendments to the British North America Act to remove these areas from provincial jurisdiction.

The new party was an uneasy alliance of academ- ics and public activists. It chose as leader the former Methodist minister James Shaver Woodsworth. Pacifist, idealist, and moralist, Woodsworth had since 1921 led

Thomas Dufferin Pattullo (1873–1956), usually known as “Duff,” was born in Woodstock, Ontario. He worked for Ontario newspapers before moving to Yukon in 1897 as secretary to the commissioner of the territory. He sub- sequently became acting assistant gold commissioner before leaving Dawson City in 1908 to open a brokerage firm. In Prince Rupert, he became a municipal political leader and then a member of the BC assembly (1916) and cabinet minister. He became provincial Liberal leader in 1928 and set about re-energizing the party and turning it from its previous conservative position to one of progres- sive liberalism far to the left of the federal Liberal Party. In 1933 Pattullo’s Liberals won a large majority in an election fought chiefly against the newly founded CCF. The issue was socialism versus capitalism, and many vot- ers failed to realize on how many points the Liberals and CCF were in agreement, with the CCF offering “Humanity First” and the Liberals a “New Deal” under the slogan “Work and Wages.” Pattullo was something of a swash- buckler, and his insistence that the people were entitled to a decent standard of living guaranteed by government owed more to Franklin D. Roosevelt than to William Lyon Mackenzie King, the federal Liberal leader.

But the social reconstruction of British Columbia depended to a large extent on a new constitutional arrangement with the federal government, and Pattullo

ended up fighting bitterly with Ottawa. He was unable to implement most of his ad hoc Keynesian views about pump-priming. In his early years in office, Pattullo was easily able to pass reform legislation that did not cost very much, but it was harder to find the money for social programs providing a decent standard of liv- ing. Pattullo settled for a program of public works. The defeat of the federal Tories in 1935 led Pattullo to hope for more assistance from Ottawa. Instead, Pattullo and King became involved in an unseemly struggle over provincial debts to Ottawa. British Columbia could not afford to implement Pattullo’s cherished compre- hensive health insurance scheme in 1937, the year the Liberals again faced the electorate. Although Pattullo’s party was returned to office, he became more cautious and increasingly more hostile to the federal govern- ment. Standing foursquare for provincial rights, he was one of the chief critics of the Rowell-Sirois Commission when it recommended a transfer of functions to the federal government and a shift in taxation powers. Pattullo continued to advocate an enhanced role for government in the economy and in society, but by “government” he meant government at the provincial level, not the federal level. The only exception was the responsibility for unemployment, which he always saw as a national and federal matter.

Thomas Dufferin Pattullo

Biography

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a small cadre of labour-supported MPs in Ottawa. The new party attracted over 300,000 votes in the 1933 British Columbia provincial elections, more than 30 per cent of the popular vote. In the 1935 federal election it obtained 8.9 per cent of the popular vote, which trans- lated into seven CCF seats. During the 1930s the party would flourish only in BC and Saskatchewan, however. It did not attract broad-based popular support, particu- larly east of Ontario.

The nation’s politicians and businessmen grimly viewed the CCF as a threat from the radical left, failing to appreciate that the new party provided a far more restrained left-wing approach than the Communist Party of Canada (CP). At the outset of the Great Depression, only the CP had sought to organize popular discontent, especially among the unemployed. The Communists operated under several disadvantages, however. One was the charge that they were members of an international conspiracy. The other was the Canadian government’s willingness to repress the party in any way possible. Ottawa used section 98 of the Criminal Code, introduced in 1919 at the time of the first “Red Scare,” to outlaw the advocacy of revolution. It arrested eight Communist leaders in August of 1931. The courts quickly convicted and sentenced them, although the government gradually released them from prison after continual public dem- onstrations on their behalf. Nevertheless, the repression checked the momentum of the party. After 1933 the CCF took away some CP support. By mid-decade the CP found itself caught up in rapidly changing orders from the USSR and by events in Europe. In 1937 many Canadian Communists entered the European struggle by joining the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

The CP took the credit for organizing, through the Workers’ Unity League, a mass march on Ottawa in 1935 known as the On-to-Ottawa Trek. The march- ers came out of the unemployment relief camps in BC, where unemployed young men found their only refuge. Conditions in the camps were degrading. Not even the Communists claimed that the discontent was any- thing but spontaneous. The trek began in Vancouver and moved eastward as the men clambered aboard freight trains. It ended in Regina. The RCMP allowed a delegation of eight “marchers” to take their grievances

to Ottawa. The talks broke down and the delegation returned to Regina. At that point the Mounties moved in with baseball bat batons. The ensuing riot reduced downtown Regina to shambles and put 120 protestors in jail. Most of the remaining trekkers accepted offers of transportation back home. While the 1930s were punctuated from time to time by outbreaks of public discontent that turned to violence, as in Regina, two points must be emphasized about these incidents. The first is that with most of the spontaneous popular dem- onstrations, most of the harm to persons and damage to property resulted from the authorities’ efforts to break up what they regarded as ugly crowds. The second point is that much of the violence of the period resulted from confrontations between organized labour and the authorities. Clashes between police and strikers were common, as they always had been.

Canadian Society between the Wars For more than half a century before 1919, Canada had been making a gradual transition from frontier nation to modern industrial state. This process basically con- tinued unabated between the wars. Most of the emer- ging social patterns were not very different from those that affected all heavily industrialized countries. Urbanization advanced while rural (and especially agricultural) society declined in importance. The trad- itional family unit seemed under attack. Technology rapidly altered communication and transportation. It also profoundly affected the ways in which Canadians entertained themselves.

Immigration

Although the period 1914–45, which included two dis- ruptive world wars and a major depression, is often viewed in Canada as the lull between two rounds of mas- sive immigration, these years saw the admission of more than 1,700,000 newcomers, with more than 1,166,000 arriving between 1921 and 1931. The numbers were smaller during the Depression and World War II—140,000

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352 A History of the Canadian Peoples

from 1931 to 1941 and 50,000 from 1942 to 1945—but the most important feature of the period was the mounting negative attitude on the part of the Canadian author- ities and citizens alike towards extensive immigration, with racism expressed against many ethnic groups. Exclusionary policies seemed increasingly in vogue. The main task of the Immigration Department, especially after 1930, seemed to be to figure out ways to keep immi- grants out of the country, rather than of developing ways of allowing them to enter.

The Anglo-Canadian tradition had always been to reward soldiers with free land, and the Great War

provided no exception. Providing returned veterans with land would support an agricultural community experiencing difficulties after the war, and soldier settlement began even before the war was over. In May 1919 soldier settlement was revamped to expand the amount of land available and to provide for a more generous supply of credit. Land in the West was taken from Indian reserves, and much of this land proved to be only marginally viable. By 1923 the failure rate among soldier-settlers ran at 21.5 per cent. An even lar- ger problem was that soldier settlement absorbed a dis- proportionate amount of the money spent on veterans’

Strikers from the BC relief camps heading east as part of the On-to-Ottawa Trek; Kamloops, June 1935. LAC, C-029399.

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3538 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

benefits by the federal government. About 4 per cent of the total number of able-bodied Canadian veterans got about 14 per cent of the money allocated for ex-soldiers. In a related vein was Empire Settlement, by which large numbers of Britons were recruited to come to Canada. The Canadian government was never very keen about Empire Settlement (which was an imperial scheme), persuaded as it was that most of those recruited were “defectives” being dumped by the United Kingdom. Despite the arrival of more than 100,000 British immi- grants to Canada between 1922 and 1935—especially female domestics (20,000), intending farmers (10,000), and British farm families (3,500 families)—Empire Settlement did not work well, chiefly because the host country did not fully support it. British immigration became somewhat more popular after 1924, when the American government instituted a permanent quota system and exempted Canada from its provisions: between 1925 and 1932 nearly half a million Canadians would move to the United States.

The exodus of Canadians to the United States and boom conditions in Canada led in 1925 to the Canadian government signing an agreement with Canada’s two major railroads. The Dominion now agreed that the railroads could recruit genuine European agricultural- ists until 1928 from previously “non-preferred” parts of Europe. Over the next half-decade, nearly 200,000 immi- grants from Central and Eastern Europe were admitted to Canada, normally by co-operative arrangements among the railroads, their colonization companies, and various ethnic and religious organizations in Canada.

But exclusionary policies and practices were more common between the wars. One example of Canadian laggardness towards new immigrants can be found in the Canadian response to the persecution of the Armenian people by the Turkish government near the end of the Great War. Canadians responded to this geno- cide by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to assist the refugee survivors. But the Canadian immigration authorities managed to combine two different standards for exclusion—refugee status and racial classification— to keep the number of Armenians allowed into Canada to a mere 1,200, during a period when 23,000 were admit- ted to the United States and 80,000 allowed into France. Most Armenians lacked proper passports, and Canada

resolutely refused to recognize special identity certifi- cates in lieu of passports. The Canadian Immigration Service also insisted on treating the Armenians as Asians, bringing into play all of the regulations designed to exclude people from Asia. They were required to have $250 in cash, to come to Canada via a continuous jour- ney, and to meet Canada’s occupational requirements as farmers experienced with North American condi- tions. The 1920s saw a further tightening of Dominion immigration policy directed at Asians, including a new agreement with the Japanese government to restrict the number of their nationals going to Canada to 150 per year and to put a stop to the so-called “picture brides” (Japanese women coming to Canada to marry Canadian Japanese men whom they had never met).

Demographic Trends

Like all industrial countries, Canada experienced pro- found demographic changes. Some of these had been somewhat disguised by the federal government’s fail- ure, until 1921, to keep accurate national statistics beyond the census. Enormous infusions of new immi- grants before 1914 also helped prevent the new demo- graphic trends from becoming easily apparent, but they existed. By the 1941 census more Canadians lived in urban rather than rural places, a result of a substantial increase in urban residents, especially during the 1920s. Moreover, the 1941 census would be the last in which rural numbers and farm dwellers grew absolutely in number. Even before 1941, the impact of urbanization and industrialization was apparent.

First, mortality rates declined. In the critical area of infant mortality, the death rate had been steadily declin- ing since the nineteenth century. Infant mortality took another major drop in the 1930s, while the overall death rate drifted perceptibly downward. By 1946 the median age at death was 63.1 for males and 65.3 for females. For the first time, Canadian society had begun to produce substantial numbers of people who would live beyond the age of productive labour; a rise in agitation for old-age pensions in this period was hardly accidental. The main exception to the national trend was in the Aboriginal population. Their death rates ran to four times the national average; infant mortality was at least twice that

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354 A History of the Canadian Peoples

of Canadian society as a whole. Large numbers of Native mothers died in childbirth. Moreover, Aboriginal people suffered up to three times more accidental deaths than Canada’s population overall. They had a high suicide rate. Before 1940 most Aboriginal people died of com- municable rather than chronic disease, with tuberculosis as the big killer. The decreasing death rate for Canadians in general resulted from an improved standard of liv- ing, including especially improvements in nutrition and hygiene as well as better medical treatment. In the years 1921–6, 270 out of every 1,000 Canadian deaths came from pulmonary and communicable disease. By 1946 such fatalities dropped to just over 60 out of every 1,000 Canadian deaths. Cardiovascular problems, renal disease, and cancer—all afflictions of an aging popula- tion—became more important killers.

Then fertility rates declined. The extent to which the fall in the birth rate resulted from conscious deci- sions on the part of women is not entirely clear, but the two were plainly related. Increased urbanization made large families less desirable. As industrialization took more women out of the home and into the workforce, child care became a serious problem. More women, especially those over 30 years old, began to limit the number of children they bore, practising some form of contraception. Birth rates had begun to fall in Canada before 1919 and continued to fall in the 1920s and 1930s. They recovered from an extremely low point in the mid- dle of the Depression after 1941, increasing sharply after 1945. There were some significant internal differentials. One was between Quebec and the remainder of Canada. The birth rate in French Canada remained substan- tially higher than in the rest of the country, although it shared in the general decline. There was also a dif- ference between urban and rural areas, with substan- tially higher birth rates in the latter. A third differential occurred between Catholics and Protestants, although certain Protestant subgroups, such as Mennonites and Mormons, had higher rates than the overall Catholic one. Finally, Aboriginal birth rates were at least twice the national average.

Another important new factor was divorce. The year 1918 saw 114 divorces in all of Canada, a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 people. By 1929 the divorce rate had reached 8.2 per 100,000, rising to 18.4 per 100,000

in 1939 and to 65.3 per 100,000 by 1947. Higher rates occurred partly because more Canadians gained access to divorce courts; Ontario courts obtained divorce juris- diction in 1930. The increase also reflected changing attitudes, particularly among women, who instituted most divorce actions. Divorce statistics did not begin to measure the extent of marital dissolutions, however. Most dissolutions never reached a court. Especially during the Depression, husbands simply deserted their wives. Many contemporaries saw the increase in divorce as evidence of the disintegration of the Canadian family.

Technological Change

Despite the nation’s uneven economic record between 1919 and 1945, Canadians in these years experienced an increase in the rate and nature of technological change. The new technologies had enormous impact on all aspects of Canadian life. On one level they forced gov- ernments to adopt a myriad of new policies. On another level they had tremendous psychological impact, par- ticularly by militating against communalism in favour of the individual, family, or household.

One evident area of change was in the mass accept- ance of the internal combustion engine in the form of the automobile and the tractor. Before 1920 automobile ownership had been almost entirely an urban phenom- enon, but by 1920 it had become more general. In 1904 there were fewer than 5,000 motor vehicles in Canada. By 1920 there were 251,000, most of them built during the war. From 1918 to 1923 Canadian manufacturers, allied to US companies, were the second-largest car producers in the world. Canada was a major exporter, especially to the British Empire. By 1930 only the United States had more automobiles per capita than did Canada. In that year Canada had 1,061,000 automobiles registered. Also significant was the increase in the num- ber of tractors employed on the nation’s farms after 1918.

The automobile was individually owned and oper- ated as an extension of a household. It represented pri- vate rather than public transportation. No other single product operated so insidiously against communalism as the automobile. It also had tremendous spinoff con- sequences. Automobiles required roads, which were a provincial and municipal responsibility. More than

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3558 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

From Adolf Hitler’s assumption of office as German

chancellor, it was clear that the Jews would be a tar-

get for persecution. Those Jews who could escape

Germany did so, although they were unable to flee

swiftly enough to escape the German annexations

of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Most

countries sheltering refugees made clear that they

were providing only temporary shelter, and Canada

felt it could not open its doors to a flood of people

from Europe. Canadian policy was put in the hands

of Frederick Charles Blair, a lifetime bureaucrat and

well-known anti-Semite, who saw Jewish people as

unassimilable. Blair kept the Jews out with the full

approval of the Canadian cabinet. In 1938 he decided

that the few Jews admitted to Canada as farmers were

not really agriculturalists. That same year Canada

reluctantly attended a conference at Evian, France,

sponsored partly by the United States, to discuss the

refugee problems of Europe. Canada was a nation

with large amounts of vacant land, and many of its

politicians and population feared—quite accurately—

that the world community would be quite satisfied

to resolve its problems with displaced persons by

sending them to Canada. From Canada’s perspec-

tive, there was no reason to become involved in a

European mess not of its own making. Unfortunately,

isolationism did not suit the times.

A handful of Jewish members of Parliament

(there were only three after 1935), with the support of

J.S. Woodsworth of the Co-operative Commonwealth

Federation, proposed to the Canadian cabinet that

Canada offer at this conference to admit 5,000

Jewish refugees over four years, with all costs to

be assumed by the Jewish community in Canada,

including guarantees that the newcomers would not

become charity cases. The cabinet rejected this offer,

chiefly on the grounds that such action could serve

as the thin edge of the wedge. By 1938, of course,

there were at least a million refugees to be dealt with.

Canadian Undersecretary of State for External Affairs

O.D. Skelton told the Americans that “governments

with unwanted minorities must . . . not be encour-

aged to think that harsh treatment at home is the

key that will open the doors to immigration abroad”

(quoted in Abella and Troper, 1991: 27). The Evian

conference accomplished nothing except to dem-

onstrate to the  Nazis the lack of international sup-

port available to the Jews, thereby probably spurring

further persecution, including the “Kristallnacht”

pogrom of late November 1938. On 23 November

1938 a delegation of Jews met with Prime Minister

William Lyon Mackenzie King and T.A. Crerar, the

Minister of Immigration, to plead for the admission

of 10,000 refugees totally financed by the Jewish

community. They were rebuffed, and the cabinet on

13 December 1938 agreed to maintain existing immi-

gration regulations, which admitted only farmers with

capital. Highly skilled professionals and intellectuals

(including doctors, scientists, and musicians) were

thus rejected as “inadmissible.”

In May of 1939, nearly 1,000 German Jews left

Hamburg on a luxury liner, the St Louis, some with

entrance visas for Cuba. The Cubans rejected most

of the passengers, and while Canada sat on the side-

lines, the ship was forced to return to Europe. The

most that could be said for the Canadian exclusion

of Jews was that it was consistent with past national

policy, which had never been strongly influenced by

humanitarian considerations. But for a nation as lim-

ited in world-renowned scientific, intellectual, and

cultural talent as Canada, the result was a cruel—if

totally deserved—shortfall. Even in the crassest of

practical terms, Canadian policy was a disaster. But it

was also inexcusable, in a moral sense, on the part of

a nation that constantly lectured the rest of the world

about its shortcomings.

BACKGROUNDER Canada and the Refugees from Nazi Germany, 1933–1939

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356 A History of the Canadian Peoples

one-quarter of the $650 million increase in provincial and municipal debt between 1913 and 1921 resulted from capital expenditures on highways, streets, and bridges. Road mileage in Canada expanded from 385,000 miles (619,580 km) in 1922 to 565,000 miles (909,254 km) in 1942. Motorists wanted not only roads but properly paved ones. Although in 1945 nearly two- thirds of Canadian roads were still of earth construc- tion, the other third had been paved or gravelled at considerable expense. Automobiles ran on petroleum products. Not only did they encourage petroleum pro- duction, chiefly in Alberta, but they also created the gasoline station, the repair garage, the roadside restau-

rant, and the motel—new service industries to provide for a newly mobile population. Door-to-door rather than station-to-station mobility was one of the principal effects of the automobile revolution. Both the automobile and the truck competed with the railways, which began their decline in the 1920s. Although the automobile pro- vided an important source of tax revenue for both fed- eral and provincial governments, neither Ottawa nor the provinces made any serious effort to control the use or construction of motor vehicles, aside from some fairly minimal rules of the road and the issuance of drivers’ licences to almost all comers. Despite its importance, the automobile and its 20,000 parts were produced entirely

After being denied entry into Cuba, the SS St Louis was then sent away from the United States and Canada before returning to Europe, where many of its Jewish passengers were killed in the concentration camps. AP Photo, CP Images.

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according to manufacturers’ standards and consumers’ desires, without government regulation. The car quickly became the symbol of North American independence and individuality. It also served as a combined status and sex symbol, and according to some critics, as a “port- able den of iniquity.”

Unlike the automobile, radio was treated by the federal government as a public matter deserving of regulation. The programs broadcast, rather than the radio receiver itself, became the target of government control. The transmission and reception of sound via radio waves had initially been developed before the Great War as an aid to ships at sea. The 1920s saw the mass marketing of the radio receiver in North America. In order to sell radios, it was necessary to provide something to listen to. By 1929, 85 broadcast- ing stations were operating in Canada under various ownerships. Private radio broadcasting in Canada was not all bad, but it was uneven. A Royal Commission

on Broadcasting—the Aird Commission, appointed in 1928 and reporting in 1929—recommended the nation- alization of radio. Its advice was not immediately taken. The Bennett government eventually introduced the Broadcasting Act of 1932, however, which led to the formation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission to establish a national network and to supervise private stations. In 1936 this Commission became the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with extensive English and French networks, and oper- ated with federal financial support as an independent agency. No other Canadian cultural institution of its day was so closely associated with Canadian national- ism and Canadian culture than was the CBC. The CBC was not only pre-eminent but frequently unique in fos- tering Canadian culture. Often the battle seemed to be uphill, since Canadians usually preferred listening to the slick entertainment programming produced in the United States.

A Toronto traffic jam, 1924: motorists out for a Sunday drive on the newly built Lakeshore Boulevard. City of Toronto Archives, James Collection, Fonds 1244, 2530.

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358 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Prohibition and Church Union The impetus for social reform died after 1918. To some extent, the movement was a victim of its own successes. For many Canadians, the achievement of prohibition and women’s suffrage—the two principal reform goals of the pre-war period—meant that the struggle had been won. To some extent, reform was a victim of the Great War. Reformers had exhausted themselves in a war effort that had produced devastation but no final victory. The war had been a disillusioning experience for many.

The failure of the prohibition experiment sym- bolized the decline of reform. Despite considerable evidence that the elimination of alcoholic beverages had made a social difference—the jails were emp- tied in most places, since they were usually filled with prisoners who had committed alcohol-related offences—the supporters of prohibition were unable to stem the tide. The Ontario Alliance for the Total Suppression of the Liquor Trade claimed in 1922 that the number of convictions for offences associated with drink had declined from 17,143 in 1914 to 5,413 in 1921, and drunkenness cases decreased in the prov- ince’s major cities from 16,590 in 1915 to 6,766 in 1921.

Nevertheless, various provinces went “wet” between 1920 and 1924, and the Liquor Control Act replaced the Ontario Temperance Act in 1927. Opposition to prohibition after the war found a new argument to add to the old one that private conduct was being publicly regulated: attempts to enforce prohibition encouraged people to flout the law and even created organized crime and vice. Too many people were pre- pared to ignore the law, said prohibition’s opponents, who found more acceptable slogans of their own in “Moderation” and “Government Regulation.” In many provinces, the possibility of obtaining provincial rev- enue for tax-starved coffers led to the introduction of government control over the sale of alcohol. Taxing bad habits rather than forbidding them became part of the Canadian tradition.

While prohibition was dying, in 1925 the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches (the first two were among Canada’s largest denomina- tions) merged as the United Church of Canada. As three of the most “liberal” denominations in Canada, home of much of the social gospel commitment to Christian reform of secular society, they hoped to rejuvenate reform fervour through unification. Not all members of the three denominations were equally enthusiastic. Opposition to union was particularly strong among the

Household Equipment Ownership in Montreal, 1941

Document

Heating By stove 51.5% Wood and coal 92.3

Cooking Fuel Wood and coal 17.7 Gas & electric 80.6

Refrigeration Mechanical 25.1

Icebox 65.0 None 5.1

Radio 85.5 Bathtub 83.9 Telephone 44.9 Vacuum cleaner 28.2 Automobile 15.7

Source: Denyse Baillargeon, Making Do: Women, Family, and Home in Montreal during the Great Depression (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2000), 187. Reprinted with permission.

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3598 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Presbyterians. In the end, congregations could vote to stay out of the union. Thus 784 Presbyterian and eight Congregational congregations so declared, while 4,797 Methodist, 3,728 Presbyterian, and 166 Congregational congregations joined in the United Church of Canada. The new denomination became the most substantial Protestant communion of Canada, generally commit- ted to liberal thinking and reform.

Racism

Canadian society between the wars continued to be pro- foundly racist. That point was demonstrable in a variety of ways, although it must be emphasized that very few Canadians saw their exclusionary attitudes as either socially undesirable or dysfunctional.

Imported from the United States, the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Canada during the 1920s. In the United States the revived Klan spread anti-black and anti-Catholic hate propaganda under the guise of a fra- ternal organization. In its secret rituals, fundamentalist Protestantism, and social operations, the Klan appeared to some Canadians to be little different from a host of other secret societies. The Klan assumed a Canadian face, posing as the defender of Britishness against the alien hordes and calling itself the “Ku Klux Klan of the British Empire.” Although the Klan had some suc- cess everywhere in Canada, it made particular head- way in the late 1920s in Saskatchewan, where by 1929 there were over 125 chapters. In that province it found support from a number of Protestant ministers, who objected to the increasingly liberal leanings of the main- line Protestant churches. It also gained acceptance as a way of opposing the patronage-style politics of the prov- incial Liberal government. Few of its members associ- ated it with American-style cross burning or midnight lynch mobs.

Canada’s treatment of its Aboriginal population continued to reflect both belief in the superiority of non-Native culture and antagonism towards the Native peoples. The Department of Indian Affairs assumed that assimilation was the only possible policy. Deputy Minister Duncan Campbell Scott stated in 1920 that “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the

body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” Indian Affairs employed a variety of policies. It forced Aboriginal children into schools, usually residential ones far removed from their fam- ilies. It forbade and actively suppressed the practice of traditional Native rituals like the potlatch. It carried out the Canadian government’s legislative provisions to enfranchise the Aboriginal people, thus in theory mak- ing them full citizens and no longer wards of the state. Most of the resistance to these measures was passive, although there was the beginning of organization. The first congress of the League of Indians convened at Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, in September 1919. The League’s objectives were “to claim and protect the rights of all Indians in Canada by legitimate and just means” and to assert “absolute control in retaining possession or dis- position of our lands” (quoted in Cuthand, 1978: 31–2). The League and its successors met regularly thereafter.

In British Columbia, an anti-Oriental movement flourished during the interwar years. Much of the criti- cism of the “menace” from Asia came from economic fears, although there was also a general concern for the racial integrity of the province as a white society. The general argument was that the newcomers would not assimilate, although there was considerable evidence that the Japanese, at least, were acculturating rapidly. Moving onto small holdings in the Fraser Valley and into salmon fishing along the coasts, the Japanese appeared to pose a potential military threat should their home- land—which was militarily aggressive in the Pacific from the beginning of the century—attempt to expand into Canada. If people from Asia were highly visible in some areas and in some industries, that fact was partly explained by their exclusion—in law and in practice— from so much of the life of the province.

Women

Canadian women emerged from the Great War with the vote in hand. A few feminist critics had argued that the vote was no panacea for women’s second-class position in Canadian society. It did not even assure a high level of political involvement. Between the wars women did not very often run for public office or constitute a recogniz- able voting bloc. The flapper, with her bobbed hair, short

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360 A History of the Canadian Peoples

skirts, and spirit of independence, was the symbolic “new woman” of the 1920s, but she was hardly typical. Most Canadian women did not smoke or sip cocktails or dance the “black bottom.” About all they had in common with the flapper was that, like her, they worked outside the home. Quebec women began moving into the workforce after 1918. More women worked in Canada in 1931 than in 1921, mostly in dead-end jobs. The Depression was particularly difficult for women. Public opinion turned against married women holding jobs that could be done by men. Most relief programs were geared to men, partly because it was not thought that women would threaten the social order by rioting and demonstrating.

In the gradual elaboration of unemployment insur- ance, many radicals opposed gender discrimination but at the same time accepted the principle that mar- ried women should be supported by their husbands. Women’s access to benefits was often limited without mention of gender. For example, traditionally female areas of employment—school teaching, nursing, domes- tic service performed in private homes—were excluded from UI coverage. Many husbands deserted their wives during the Depression, and even where the family remained together the wife did most of the work to keep it functioning. In the House of Commons in 1935, J.S. Woodsworth cited the case of a child murder and suicide in Winnipeg. The husband was unemployed and came home to find his children and wife dead. His wife had left a suicide note that read, “I owe the drug store 44 cents farewell” (quoted in Pierson, 1990).

Canadian Culture between the Wars A resurgence of Canadian nationalism characterized the 1920s. The larger stories of the interwar period, how- ever, were the blossoming of Canada’s love affair with American popular culture and the simultaneous emer- gence of a number of significant homegrown writers and artists. By the 1930s Canadians no longer had to be apologetic about their cultural achievements, although the number of individuals who could actually make a living from their creative work remained fairly small.

The Great War may have been fought for the British Empire, but both its course and its outcome made Canadians more conscious of their nation’s distinctive- ness. In the 1920s Canadian nationalism wore a dual face. On the one hand, it had to reflect Canada’s new international status. On the other, it felt it had to protect the country from being overwhelmed by foreign culture. The painter Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) wrote, “After 1919, most creative people, whether in painting, writing or music, began to have a guilty feeling that Canada was as yet unwritten, unpainted, unsung. . . . In 1920 there was a job to be done” (quoted in Thompson and Seager, 1985: 158). That job was not simply to write books, paint pictures, and compose music that captured the true Canadian spirit. The task was also to organize national cultural organizations and institutions that would mobilize a new sense of national consciousness. A number of Canadian magazines and journals emerged to serve as vehicles for Canadian ideas. The Canadian Bookman appeared in 1919, and Canadian Forum, Canadian Historical Review, and Dalhousie Review in 1920. The Canadian Authors’ Association, founded in 1921, backed campaigns promot- ing Canadian writers. In 1937 it succeeded in persuading the Governor General—the famous Scottish novelist John Buchan (1875–1940), Lord Tweedsmuir—to establish the prestigious Governor General’s awards. In art, the Group of Seven consciously sought to create a Canadian mythol- ogy. According to their first exhibition catalogue, in 1920, their vision was simple: “An Art must grow and flower in the land before the country will be a real home for its people” (quoted in Thompson and Seager, 1985: 162).

Between 1920 and 1940 over 750 Canadian novels were published. While most of these works were escap- ist fiction, a number of Canadian novelists achieved national and even modest international reputations for their skill at their craft. Perhaps even more import- ant, a small number of strong, confident, realistic novels appeared that formed the foundation of modern Canadian fiction. Not only was the move towards real- ism in line with international trends, but it responded to the nationalist demand for distinctively Canadian content. As for the visual arts, particularly during the Depression when most artists had to live at sub- sistence level, much work we now value highly was produced. Few visual artists in Canada could make a

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3618 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

living from their work alone, but art schools were now sufficiently common in the larger Canadian cities to provide employment for painters and sculptors. British Columbia’s Emily Carr (1871–1945) united art and lit- erature in a highly original way. Combining French Post-Impressionism with Aboriginal form and colour, Carr gradually created a powerful and distinctive vis- ual landscape. She also won a Governor General’s award for Klee Wyck (1941), a collection of stories based on her visits to Native villages. By the time of her death, Carr’s paintings were probably the visual icons the average Canadian could most easily associate with an individual artist. She had triumphed not only over the

disadvantages of Canadian geography but over the lim- itations faced by any woman who aspired to more than a genteel “dabbling” in art.

During the interwar period, radio, motion pictures, and the great expansion of professional sports all repre- sented major American influences on the Canadian consciousness. In popular culture Canada made little effort at national distinctiveness. The loudest critics of insidious Americanization usually had no alternatives to offer other than a somewhat outworn Britishness. At the same time, Canada and Canadians were hardly innocent victims of American cultural imperialism. As a nation Canada had choices it failed or refused to

Biography

Charlotte Whitton (1896–1975) was born in Renfrew, Ontario, and was educated at Queen’s University, where she had a spectacular academic record. In 1918 she was ap- pointed assistant secretary to the Social Services Council of Canada. She was soon actively involved in social work and social work reform, and became the first director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare, which would become the Canadian Welfare Council, serving from 1926 to 1941. In this position she edited the journal Social Welfare and represented Canada on social issues at the League of Nations. She also campaigned courageously for improved standards in the care of children and juven- iles, and insisted on the need for a more professional ap- proach to social work. During her tenure as director of the Canadian Welfare Council she toured the nation, making frequent speeches and giving many lectures. Her major message during the 1930s was that while the Depression had made it impossible for private philanthropy to carry the social welfare load by itself, neither spending large sums of money on unemployment nor an active federal government was the answer to the problem. As an advis- er to the Bennett government on federal unemployment relief, she offered the same opinions.

After her departure from the Welfare Council in 1941, Whitton became a private consultant on welfare matters. In 1943, in response to an invitation from new Progressive Conservative leader John Bracken, she pub- lished The Dawn of an Ampler Life, obviously intended to serve as a background document for the new party’s social policy. (Bracken, a Progressive who had been Premier of Manitoba, had accepted the leadership of the Tories on the condition that “Progressive” would be added to the name of the Conservative Party.) The reader would be hard-pressed to decide exactly what Whitton was recommending, but it clearly was considerably less state interventionist than most of the competing visions of the time, and it had little impact on the welfare debate. Whitton subsequently became notorious for her oppos- ition to liberal divorce laws and to married women who held jobs. In 1950 she was elected controller of the city of Ottawa, succeeding to the mayor’s post on the death of the incumbent, thus becoming the first female mayor of a major Canadian city. She was re-elected in 1952 and 1954, then again in 1960 and 1962. When not mayor, Whitton served the city as an alderman. She was famous for her outspoken opinions and keen wit.

Charlotte Whitton

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362 A History of the Canadian Peoples

exercise. As a people Canadians were willing—indeed, active—collaborators in cultural production, both at home and in the United States itself. A closer examin- ation of motion pictures and hockey in this period is instructive.

In the world of film, Hollywood’s success was also Canada’s, since there was no shortage of Canadian talent involved in the formative years of Tinseltown. Mack Sennett, Sidney Olcott, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Walter Huston, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, and Marie Dressler—some of Hollywood’s biggest and most influential names at the time—were Canadian- born. Pickford, Warner, and Mayer founded three of the major Hollywood studios between 1919 and 1924. Canada itself had only the beginnings of a film indus- try, consisting mainly of the seven films produced by Ernest Shipman, of which Back to God’s Country (1919) is a Canadian silent film classic. Otherwise filmmaking in Canada was confined chiefly to newsreels and docu- mentaries, which were often appended to American features. By 1922 American studios were including Canadian receipts as part of domestic revenue, and in 1923 Famous Players’ Canadian Corporation, a subsidiary of Pickford’s studio, took over the leading Canadian cinema chain, Allen Theatres. At the height

of the silent film era, Hollywood succeeded in monop- olizing the distribution of film in Canada; Canadian exhibitors and cinema owners were not much con- cerned about where the product had originated so long as it was profitable.

Other nations around the world took some sort of defensive action against the Hollywood juggernaut, either placing quotas on imported films or providing tax incen- tives for local productions. Canada did neither, partly because a few of its citizens were so closely connected with the American film industry, partly because Canadians so clearly preferred Hollywood films to the alternatives. During the Great Depression, when the Dream Factory provided blessed release from the cares and woes of everyday life for millions of Canadians, that dream was plainly American. Canadians continued to love American movies despite the inaccuracy with which Hollywood persistently treated Canadian geography, society, and history. Symbolically, the successive and successful film portrayals of that quintessential American, Abraham Lincoln, by two Canadian actors, Walter Huston (1884– 1950) and Raymond Massey (1896–1983), only solidified the close identification of Canadians and Americans in the popular mind on both sides of the border.

The situation with professional hockey was equally interesting. The National Hockey Association (NHA) was organized in 1909 in eastern Canada. On the west coast, Frank and Lester Patrick, in 1911–12, formed the Pacific Coast Hockey Association (PCHA), whose Vancouver Millionaires defeated the Ottawa Senators of the NHA for the Stanley Cup in 1915. The next year, the Montreal Canadiens of the NHA outlasted the PCHA’s Portland Rosebuds—the first US-based team in the Stanley Cup final. Then, in 1917, the National Hockey League (NHL) formed out of the NHA. The PCHA folded in 1924. That same year, the NHL granted a franchise lease to the Boston Bruins and became the top professional hockey league in North America. The New York Rangers and the Pittsburgh Pirates soon followed, and Chicago and Detroit received NHL franchises in 1927. Most of the American clubs were owned or managed by Canadians, and the players were almost entirely Canadian. Indeed, the Patrick brothers had brought players from their PCHA teams to the American-based NHL teams they acquired in the 1920s. The Toronto Maple Leafs acquired a physical

Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa (second from left), at the unveiling of a commemorative bust of Agnes Macphail, the first woman elected to the House of Commons, outside the House, Ottawa, 1955. Also pictured (from left) are MP Margaret Aitken, Senator Cairine Wilson, and MP Ellen Fairclough. Duncan Cameron, LAC, PA-121765.

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As for Me and My House Document

Sunday Evening, April 30.

The wind keeps on. It’s less than a week since the snowstorm, and the land is already dry again. The dust goes reeling up the street in stinging little scuds. Over the fields this morning on our way to Partridge Hill there were dark, foreboding clouds of it.

Service was difficult this morning. They were lis- tening to the wind, not Philip, the whimpering and strumming through the eaves, and the dry hard crackle of sand against the windows. From the organ I could see their faces pinched and stiffened with anxiety. They sat in tense, bolt upright rows, most of the time their eyes on the ceiling, as if it were the sky and they were trying to read the weather. . . .

Philip and Paul and I stood on the school steps till the congregation were all gone. The horses pawed and stamped as if they, too, felt something ominous in the day. One after another the democrats and buggies rolled away with a whir of wheels like pebbly thunder. From the top of Partridge Hill where the schoolhouse stands we could see the prairie smoking with dust as if it had just been swept by fire. A frightening, wavering hum fled blind within the telephone wires. The wind struck in hard, clenched little blows; and even as we watched each other the dust formed in veins and wrinkles round our eyes. According to the signs, says Paul, it’s

going to be a dry and windy year all through. With the countryman’s instincts for such things he was strangely depressed this morning. . . .

I found it hard myself to believe in the town outside, houses, streets, and solid earth. Mile after mile the wind poured by, and we were immersed and lost in it. I sat breathing from my throat, my muscles tense. To relax, I felt, would be to let the walls round me crumple in. . . .

It’s the most nerve-wracking wind I’ve ever lis- tened to. Sometimes it sinks a little, as if spent and out of breath, then comes high, shrill and importunate again. Sometimes it’s blustering and rough, sometimes silent and sustained. Sometimes it’s wind, sometimes frightened hands that shake the doors and windows. Sometimes it makes the little room and its smug, fam- iliar furniture a dramatic inconsistency, sometimes a relief. I sit thinking about the dust, the farmers and the crops, wondering what another dried-out year will mean for us.

We’re pinched already. They gave us fifteen dollars this week, but ten had to go for a payment on the car. I’m running bills already at the butcher shop and Dawson’s store. Philip needs shoes and a hat. His Sunday suit is going at the cuffs again, and it’s shiny at the seat and knees. I sent for a new spring hat for myself the other day, but it was just a dollar forty-five, and won’t be much.

In 1941 (James) Sinclair Ross (1908–96) published a novel in New York entitled As for Me and My House. Set in Horizon, Saskatchewan, in the 1930s, the story is told from the vantage point of Mrs Bentley, the wife of a local clergyman.

Source: Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970 [1941]), 37–9.

presence when Maple Leaf Gardens was built as their home. At the opening on 12 November 1931, Foster Hewitt (1902–85) broadcast his first Hockey Night in Canada, describing the game from a gondola overlooking

the rink. For three decades thereafter, his high-pitched voice—and his excited refrain, “He shoots! He scores!”— was hockey for most Canadians. Hockey Night in Canada was the one and only Canadian-produced radio program

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364 A History of the Canadian Peoples

on CBC that consistently outdrew American offerings with the Canadian listeners. Although the Depression benefited professional sports by creating a desperate need for escape, not all Canadians could afford to pay for admission. In Toronto, for example, ticket prices of 50¢ and $1.25 resulted in many empty seats. By 1939 the NHL had suffered the loss of all but two of its Canadian teams, the Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens. The cen- tre of professional hockey power shifted to the United States, although Canadians knew that virtually all the players still came from Canada, where hockey was a way of life on the frozen rivers and lakes of the nation in the winter months.

While Canada’s film and hockey successes were mainly in Hollywood and in American arenas, a vital grassroots theatrical movement existed at home between the wars, almost entirely on the amateur level. It consisted of Little Theatre groups in most major cit-

ies and towns, hundreds of high school drama groups, dozens of university drama groups, and innumerable other drama and musical drama organizations spon- sored by fraternal organizations, church groups, and labour unions. In most Canadian cities and towns, one group or another was rehearsing a play or a musical at any given time during the winter months. During the darkest days of the Depression, Canadian theatre blossomed, providing relief for many from the grim conditions of their lives. Protracted hard times, while discouraging some artists, also energized others, par- ticularly those who sought cultural directions that would encourage a new spirit of social involvement and commitment.

During the Depression, a theatre of the left emerged in the major cities of Canada, particularly Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Montreal, which spread to other places (like Timmins, Ontario) where “progressive” people were to be found. In all of these places, there was a twin emphasis: first, on supplying theatre that spoke directly to its audiences about what was going on in Canada and the world; and second, on exemplifying the ideals of collective experience in theatrical production. The theatre of the left tended to exalt amateur values and participation. It also had far more Canadian content in its plays. The first tour of the Workers’ Theatre, for example, included seven short plays, including Eviction (written by members of the Montreal Progressive Arts Club), Farmers’ Fight (also written by the Montreal PAC), Joe Derry (written by Dorothy Livesay), and War in the East (written by Stanley Ryerson). Interestingly, progressive theatre groups did not shun the establishment-oriented Dominion Drama Festival (DDF) but instead competed frequently, seek- ing thereby to test their theatrical quality, apart from the political value of their work. The DDF adjudicators, in their turn, were sympathetic to the productions but often unenthusiastic about the doom and gloom of their themes, preferring lighter fare. In 1937, a four-person play entitled Relief, written by Minnie Evans Bicknell of Marshall, Saskatchewan, and performed by the Marshall Dramatic Club, was one of the finalists at the DDF. The play was a domestic tragedy performed in a naturalistic style in which the performers dealt with matters that were all too familiar in their daily lives, as

Emily Carr in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, 1904.

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Radio Programming, 1939

Document

Network Highlights CBC

7:00 Songs of the World 7:30 Percy Faith’s Music 8:00 Sunset Symphony 8:30 Nature Talk 9:15 Sunset Symphony 10:00 Everyman Theatre

NBC—BLUE 7:30 Idea Mart 8:00 Kay Kyser’s Quiz 8:30 Fred Waring Orch. 10:30 Lights Out

CBS

9:00 Amos ’n’ Andy 9:30 Paul Whiteman orch.

Station Programs 5:00 The Lone Ranger, sketch—CKY 5:00 Dinner Concert—CBC-CJRC, CBK 5:00 Fred Waring Orch.—KFYR 5:30 Crackerjacks, songs—CBC-CJRC, CBK 5:30 Jimmy Allen, sketch—CKY 5:45 Howie Wing, sketch—CJRC 5:45 Waltz Time—CKY 5:45 Canadian Outdoor Days, Ozark Ripley—

CBC-CBK . . . 7:00 Songs of the World, mixed choir, Montreal—

CBC-CKY

7:00 Reports—CJRC

7:00 Horse and Buggy Days, songs of the 90s— KFYR

7:00 Percy Faith’s Music; George Murray, Dorothy Alt, soloists, Toronto—CBC-CKY, CBK

7:30 Modern Music Maestros—CJRC 7:30 Idea Mart—KFYR 8:00 Interview from London, from BBC—CBC-

CKY, CBK 8:00 Reports, Blaine Edwards, organ—CJRC 8:00 Kay Kyser’s College, musical quiz—NBC—

KFY until 9. 8:15 Teller of Curious Tales—CJRC 8:30 Dan McMurray’s Nature Talk, Bank CBC-

CKY, CBK 8:30 Five Esquires—CJRC 8:45 Lieder Recital—CBC-CKY, CBK 9:00 Canadian Press News—CBC-CKY, CBK 9:00 Reports; Piano Moods—CJRC 9:00 Amos ’n’ Andy, sketch—CBS-WJR, WCCO,

KMOx, KBL 9:00 Fred Waring Orch.—NBC-KFTR, WHO, WLW 9:15 Summer Symphony, G. Waddington con-

ducting from Walker Theatre, Winnipeg— CBC-CKY, CBK, CJRC, until 10.

9:30 Milt North Trio, WKNR 9:30 Tommy Dorsey Orch.—NBC-KOR 9:30 Horace Heidt Orch.—NBC-KFYR 9:30 Paul Whiteman Orch., guests—CBS-WCCO,

KMOx, KSL 9:45 Reports—CJRC

Wednesday 2 August

Source: Winnipeg Tribune, 2 August 1939, 2.

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366 A History of the Canadian Peoples

A Cabaret Song

Document

One of the major songwriters for the cabarets of the left-wing Theatre of Action was Frank Gregory. These cabarets began in 1939 and continued through the early 1940s. The songs were heavily influenced by Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.

the critics noted in their reviews. Toronto’s Theatre of Action was particularly active in seeking out Canadian themes and Canadian playwrights. The thematic con- tent of the drama preferred by the theatre of the left was undoubtedly one of the factors that limited its popular acceptance. Towards the end of the 1930s, however, influenced by the cabaret theatre of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht as developed by left-wing American the- atre groups, progressive theatre in Canada became more interested in musical theatre. Some of the cabaret pro- ductions actually featured songs that commented satir- ically on Canadian politics. This topical humour offered a lighter alternative to the fare presented by the more earnest theatre companies.

World War II Canada went back to war on 10 September 1939. This time the government waited a week after the British declaration of war against Germany to join the conflict, thus emphasizing Canada’s “independent” status. The nation’s entry into the war helped complete the process of economic recovery. Unprepared militarily, as in the Great War, Canada proved capable of mobilizing resour- ces remarkably swiftly when required. Canada quickly accepted the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan as its major war commitment. The details of the scheme were agreed upon by Britain and Canada on 17 December 1939. Within months the program’s first

We never travel in Café society, And Winchell never gives us notoriety— I guess we must be Socially insignificant But we get along.

You’ll never find us at the El Morocco, We can’t afford the latest Broadway socko— It seems we are just Socially insignificant. But we get along.

Don’t think we’re satisfied To sit and bide Our time as we are: We’re not the patient kind. For in addition We’ve got ambition, But that can’t get us far, With money and security so hard to find.

So that is why you’ll never see our faces In photographs of all the swellest places: You’d think we were born Socially insignificant, But we get along.

Source: Quoted in Toby Gordon Ryan, Stage Left Canadian Theatre in the Thirties: A Memoir (Toronto: CTR Publications,

1981), 189. Courtesy CTR Publications.

We Get Along

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graduates emerged from Camp Borden, Ontario. It even- tually graduated 131,552 Commonwealth airmen from Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand (Table 8.1), over half of whom were Canadian, at a cost of $1.6 billion. A nation of less than 12 million people would eventually put over 1 million of them into uni- form. Using the War Measures Act, Canada succeeded in mobilizing economic resources in a way that had seemed impossible during the Depression. Tax arrangements between the Dominion and the provinces were restruc- tured during the emergency, with the federal govern- ment collecting most of the revenue and making grants to the provinces to recover their operating expenses.

The economy was totally managed and regulated, a process associated with Ottawa’s wartime economic czar, Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960). By 1943 unemploy- ment was well under 2 per cent, a figure regarded in most quarters as full employment. Federal spending rose from 3.4 per cent of the gross national product (GNP) in 1939 to 37.6 per cent of GNP by 1944, totalling a full $4.4 billion in the latter year. Industrial growth was bet- ter distributed across the regions than in 1914–18, infla- tion was controlled, and consumption was regulated by shortages and rationing. Canada’s total GNP rose from $5.6 billion in 1939 to $11.9 billion in 1945. The nation became one of the world’s industrial giants, producing 850,000 motorized vehicles and over 16,000 military air- craft during the war. The government borrowed heavily from its own citizens, partly in the form of war bonds. While the achievement was impressive, it suggested that Leacock’s “riddle of social justice” remained unsolved. Canada appeared far more capable of efficient use of its productive capacity to fight destructive wars abroad than to battle domestically with poverty and unemployment.

As in the Great War, Canadians fought well when- ever called upon. As in the previous conflict, they were often employed as shock troops. In the disastrous land- ing of the 2nd Canadian Division at Dieppe in August 1942, nearly 2,700 of the 5,000 Canadians who embarked were either killed or captured. Canadians landed on Juno Beach on D-Day, 6 June 1944, and took heavy casualties. The First Canadian Army, formed in 1942 under the command of General A.G.L. McNaughton (1887–1966), was composed of five divisions that were eventually split between Italy and Northwest Europe.

This army was independently commanded, although the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy were mainly integrated with their British counter- parts. Canadian flyers became noted for their work in bombers rather than in fighters, as in World War I. Many thousands of Canadians spent most or all of the war years in Britain, and a number brought their British wives back to Canada after the war.

The RCN grew to 365 ships, spending the war mainly protecting convoys on the North Atlantic route and achieving such expertise in this duty that in May 1943 a Canadian, Admiral L.W. Murray (1896–1971), was given command of the Canadian Northwest Atlantic theatre. Many other Canadians and Newfoundlanders served in the Canadian merchant marine, a thankless task that kept them out of the loop for veterans’ benefits for many years. Canada ultimately had the third lar- gest navy among the Allied powers, the fourth largest air force, and the fourth largest army. Such a contribu- tion ought to have made it something of a power in the world, although the major powers—Britain, the United States, and the USSR—routinely treated Canada as little different from Allied nations such as Chile and Brazil, which had only token forces in the war. The super- powers admitted France to their council tables almost as soon as the nation was liberated, while ignoring Canada completely.

Canada fought chiefly in the European and North Atlantic theatres. Canadian assistance to American and British efforts in the Pacific and Southeast Asia was fairly minimal. In December 1941, however, two Canadian battalions were involved in the surrender of Hong Kong. The 1,421 men who returned home after years in Japanese prison camps had to fight for 23 years to win proper veterans’ benefits from the Canadian gov- ernment. As in the Great War, casualties in this conflict were heavy, with 42,642 Canadians giving up their lives. On the other hand, this was not a war of stalemate in the trenches. Instead, the establishment of beachheads was followed by a constant advance that involved lib- erating places held by the enemy. One innovation in this war was the active military service of women. As in 1914–18 large numbers of women were employed in the war industry, but by 1945 over 43,000 women were actually in uniform. A Gallup poll taken in 1944

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368 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Table 8.1 Final Output of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan

Trade RCAF RAF RAAF RNZAF Total

Pilot 25,646 17,796 4,045 2,220 49,707

Navigator 7,280 6,922 944 724 15,870

Navigator (B2) 5,154 3,113 699 829 9,795

Navigator (W) 421 3,847 30   4,298

Air Bomber 6,659 7,581 799 634 15,673

Wireless Operator/Air

Gunner

12,744 755 2,975 2,122 18,596

Air Gunner 12,917 2,096 244 443 15,700 

Flight Engineers 1,913       1,913

Total 72,734 42,110 9,706 7,002 131,552

Source: http://www.canadianwings.com/BCATP.

Canadian soldiers, known for their bravery, were instrumental in liberating northwestern Europe from the Germans. Canadian Major David Currie (left, holding pistol) won the Victoria Cross for his role in helping to close the Falaise Gap in August 1944. CWM 20020045-2276, George Metcalf Archival Collection, Canadian War Museum.

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indicated, however, that most Canadians, including 68 per cent of the women polled, believed that men should be given preference for employment in the post-war reconstruction. As a result, the machinery for women’s participation in the workforce, including daycare cen- tres, was dismantled with unseemly haste at the war’s end.

Dissent was met with persecution, as had been the case during the Great War. The Canadian govern- ment proved almost totally insensitive to pacifists’ beliefs. It interned thousands of Canadians without trial, often for mere criticism of government policy. The most publicized abuse of the state’s power was the treatment of the Japanese Canadians. Although the King government did not for a minute believe that Japanese Canadians represented any real military dan- ger, it yielded to pressure from British Columbia and forcibly evacuated most Japanese Canadians from the west coast. Many were sent to internment camps in the

BC Interior, and others were scattered across the coun- try, their land seized and their property sold at auction. “National emergency” was also used to justify the dis- semination of propaganda, now called “management of information.” Citizens needed to be educated in order to maintain faith and hope and to eliminate “potential elements of disunity,” a euphemism for criticism of the government. One major institution of information management was the National Film Board of Canada, under Scottish-born John Grierson (1898–1972), who believed in the integration of “the loyalties and forces of the community in the name of positive and highly con- structive ideas.” Grierson saw “information services— propaganda if you like” as an inevitable consequence of the government’s involvement in the crisis (quoted in Young, 1978: 217–40).

Internally, wartime policies revolved around two major questions: conscription and post-war recon- struction. In a national plebiscite held on the question

Many gave their lives on D-Day. Sixty-three in The

Queen’s Own paid the price. In our section of ten

men, seven fell: David Boynton, Fred Eaman, Edward

Westerby, Albert Kennedy, John Kirkland, Douglas

Reed—all Riflemen—and Corporal John Gibson.

Three of our ten survived: Rifleman Robert Nicol,

Corporal Rolph Jackson, and myself.

Although I spent more than twelve hundred

days in active service only three were spent on the

beachhead. Less than three hours were spent on my

feet. The rest was on a stretcher. That first night was

in a small building on what is now called rue de la

Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada. The second night was

in the now very well-known orchard where we were

taken care of by those wonderful nuns. Then it was a

rocky and dangerous ride getting out to an American

LST [landing ship, tank] and back to England.

It was August 1944 before my wound healed and

I could get back to the invasion beach and take a look

at Bernières-sur-Mer. I found the temporary graves of

some of our fallen by the railroad tracks. One of the

cleanup pioneers told me bodies were still washing

ashore from time to time. I stood facing the beach,

heart heavy and mind racing.

A British sergeant began to explain things to me

describing what took place on D-Day. It was clearly

beyond his imagination. It hurt to listen.

“Were you there?” I asked him. “No.” “Well, if you

had been there you wouldn’t need to say a word. If you

weren’t, then it’s impossible for you to understand.

“You see that beach? My friends and I own a

piece of it. And I don’t want to hear another word.”

Owning a Piece of Juno

Source: Doug Hester (Toronto, Ontario, Queen’s Own Rifles, Canadian Third Division), “A War Memoir,” http://www.

warchronicle.com/canadian_third_div/soldierstories_wwii/hester.htm.

Contemporary Views

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370 A History of the Canadian Peoples

of conscription in the spring of 1942, the nation voted 2,945,514 to 1,643,006 to release the government from an earlier pledge not to conscript for overseas service. Quebec voted strongly in the negative. The conscrip- tion issue emerged again in 1944, when the military insisted (as in 1917) that it was necessary to ship conscripts overseas, although they had been drafted with the promise that they would not be required to serve abroad. In the end, while conscripts were sent to Europe, few served as combatants before the war ended in May 1945. For the King government, the increasing threat from the CCF became a problem as nagging as

that of Quebec. As early as 1941 many Canadians had apparently come to realize that the failure to make a concerted assault on social injustice had been a result mainly of governments’ refusal to act. Canada was now, in wartime, demonstrating how thoroughly the coun- try could be mobilized if the will to do so was present. Public opinion in Anglo-Canada began turning to the social promises of the CCF. Indeed, in the September 1943 federal election, the CCF received the support of 29 per cent of the electorate at the polls, and in 1944 the Saskatchewan CCF wiped out a long-standing Liberal government in an election fought over social services.

Ruby was a lonely English girl from London, England.

She was a widow with a three-year-old daughter.

Ruby didn’t make friends easily because she was hard

of hearing and tended to keep to herself. At the time,

she worked in a Legion waiting on tables and helping

with the cleaning for the more than 400 soldiers of

every nationality who called the Legion home. They

could not go to their real homes on leave, so most of

them stayed at the Legion.

Every New Year’s Eve, the soldiers donned kitch-

en aprons and waited on the help. Everyone made

jokes and enjoyed the antics and the soldier who

waited on them.

The Canadian soldier who waited on Ruby spoke

to her several times and even put a present on her

plate, but she didn’t answer him, she just tried to smile.

Not many people knew she was hard of hearing.

After all the tables were cleared, the band began

to play and couples started dancing. Ruby stood

alone, just watching.

Suddenly Ruby’s soldier approached her and gave

her a note to read: “I know you have trouble hearing.

Are you as lonely as you look: I feel the same way; I

miss my folks home in Canada. Would you keep me

company and dance with me?” She surprised her-

self and danced with him several times. He saw her

home, and after this he continued to see her at work

and on the occasional date.

After seeing him for a little over six months, she

took him home to meet her parents and her little girl.

When the little girl saw him she ran to him and said:

“Daddy, you came home!”

She had seen her dad in uniform in a photo on

her shelf, and seeing the soldier in uniform, she nat-

urally assumed it was her father.

After the young girl was put to bed and Ruby and

the soldier was [sic] alone, he asked, “Well, how about it?”

“How about what?” Ruby asked.

“Being her daddy,” he replied.

This was in 1944. We were married in 1945 and

came to Canada the next year. We have now been

married for 46 years and we have five children—and

are still as happy as the day we first met.

The Story of War Bride Ruby McCreight This narrative of a Canadian war bride begins in the third person but concludes in the first person.

Source: David Helwig, ed., Back Then: Voices of Memory 1915–1945 (n.p: Oberon Press, 1993), 102–3.

Contemporary Views

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King’s Liberals had long dragged their heels over serious social welfare reform. Federal unemployment insurance had been introduced in 1940, but other pro- gressive legislation remained on hold. Now, in 1944, King declared in the House of Commons “a wholly new conception of industry as being in the nature of social service for the benefit of all, not as something existing only for the benefit of a favoured few.” The introduction of social reform was necessary not only to deal with the threat from the CCF but also to prevent possible public disorder at the conclusion of the war and to assert the authority of the federal government over the provinces. Once the political decision was made to implement social reform, there were plenty of schemes available, including a package in the Report on Social Security for Canada tabled in the House of Commons Special

Committee on Social Security by economist Leonard Marsh (1906–82) in 1943. In the end, a full program of progressive legislation was never actually enacted before the end of the war. The Liberal government did introduce the Family Allowances Act of 1944, Canada’s first social insurance program with universal coverage. It provided benefits to mothers of children under age 16. In 1944 the Liberals also passed the National Housing Act, described as “An Act to Promote the Construction of New Houses, the Repair and Modernization of Existing Houses, the Improvement of Housing and Living Conditions and the Expansion of Employment in the Postwar Period.” The King government turned to the post-war period, how- ever, with intentions of attacking the problem of social justice and the constitutional limitations of the British North America Act simultaneously.

Japanese Canadians being relocated to camps in the Interior of British Columbia, 1942. LAC, C-046355.

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372 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Conclusion Despite war fatalities, injustices, and some depriva- tion, World War II was, on balance, a more unifying and positive experience for most Canadians than the Great War had been. Full employment helped a good deal. Rationing provided a better-balanced diet. Limited leisure time and the absence of big-ticket consumer items, such as automobiles and household

appliances, forced many Canadians to save, often by purchasing war bonds and savings stamps. By war’s end, a 15-year deferral of expectations had built up a powerful urge among Canadians to enjoy material comforts, free from concern over life’s vagaries and hazards. This population was fully conscious of the dangers of assuming that social protection could be left to the private individual. It was equally aware that the state could intervene in the process, if it so desired.

Evacuation from Woodfibre, British Columbia, 1942

Document

Pearl Harbor, the opening strike of the Japan–U.S. con- flict, shocked Woodfibre’s inhabitants. The quiet town was completely transformed as rumours propagated rumours, fed by often conflicting reports. The Japanese community especially was in an uproar.

We Japanese, largely working-class immigrants, were, generally speaking, not given to sophisticated pol- itical thinking. Rather we had in common a blind faith in Japan’s eventual victory. The extent of our reasoning, decidedly specious in retrospect, went something like this: The burst of energy at Pearl Harbor was exemplary. If the war were short, say of less than two years’ duration, Japan stood to win. If it were prolonged, Japan, weakened by over a decade of aggression in Manchuria and China, admittedly might lose. Meanwhile, we kept receiving reports of Japanese victories in the Far East. We there- fore resolved to bear the present uneasiness patiently.

In the weeks that followed, life in Woodfibre was indeed changed. I remember especially the compul- sory nightly blackout, meant to thwart the activity of Japanese bombers that might fly over British Columbia.

With Canadians thus anxious, some drastic move was inevitable. By mid-January of 1942, some of us faced the prospect of evacuation. At that time it was said that if the Issei [Japanese-born] men aged eighteen to forty- five went to the road camps, then the Issei men over forty-five, the Issei women and children, and all Nisei [Canadian-born of Japanese descent] would be allowed to remain where they were. We Issei men accordingly received an order to depart on March 16.

As the day of departure drew nearer, tension mounted in the Japanese community. The lot of us Issei men was held to be a sorry one indeed. The Rockies were terribly cold in March; some of us would likely freeze to death in the twenty-below temperature. Again, the steep moun- tains were subject to avalanches; road work in them would be very dangerous. And again, deep in the mountains, men could easily become isolated by the snow and starve when provisions failed to get through to them. With such conjectures, the families of Issei men spent anxious days and sleepless nights. But the order to depart was a govern- ment order. To accept it as fate was our sorry resolve. . . .

Takao Ujo Nakano published this account of his wartime experience in 1980.

Source: T.U. Nakano, “Evacuation from Woodfibre, British Columbia, 1942,” from T.U. Nakano, Within the Barbed Wire Fence: A Japanese Man’s Account of His Internment in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 8–10. © University of Toronto Press, 1980.

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Studying Canada’s Military Effort in World War I

Roger Sarty, Wilfrid Laurier University

Personal favourites, among many short, introductory accounts, are D.J. Goodspeed, The Road Past Vimy: The Canadian Corps 1914–1918 (Toronto, 1969) and Terry Copp, Matt Symes, and Nick Lachance, Canadian Battlefields 1915–1918 (Waterloo, Ont., 2011).

Books about Canada’s role began to appear dur- ing the conflict1 and continued to pour forth in the following decades. These included memoirs, popular works, and regimental histories. Many are still very useful. The regimental histories, for example, present detailed accounts of operations and sketches of person- alities available nowhere else.2 Among the most distin- guished memoirs are those of the wartime leader, Prime Minister Robert Borden, assembled by his nephew, who drew heavily on Borden’s papers.3

The project initiated by the Department of National Defence for an eight-volume official history, however, produced only the first volume and a supporting vol- ume of documents. These appeared in 1938 and cover the initial year of the war. Immensely detailed, they are still an essential resource.4 A full official account of Canadian participation in land warfare—nearly 500,000 Canadian troops served overseas—appeared in a single volume in 1962.5 Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson, a senior member of the professional Army Historical Section, and the noted academic C.P. Stacey led the team that was organized during and after World War II to work on this history. They drew on the vast archives organized by the original historical section and the book is still the best starting place.

Nicholson produced two other thoroughly refer- enced, foundational volumes. The Fighting Newfound- lander: A History of The Royal Newfoundland Regiment (St John’s: Government of Newfoundland, 1964) is the first comprehensive account of the extraordinary sac- rifice by this British Dominion, separate from Canada, that did not join Confederation until 1949. Nicholson’s

The Gunners of Canada: The History of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, vol.1, 1534–1919 (Toronto and Montreal, 1967) details the organization and oper- ations of the immensely powerful artillery arm of the Canadian Corps, which was a key element in its formid- able striking power.

Canada’s large contribution to the air war—the provision of some 20,000 personnel to the British fly- ing services—was the least well recorded part of the military effort. This was belatedly corrected when the Army Historical Section became the tri-service Directorate of History in 1965 and focused on aviation history. S.F. Wise, Canadian Airmen in the First World War, The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, vol. 1 ([Toronto], 1980)is still a foremost author- ity on not just the Canadian role, but on aviation more generally during World War I.

At the leading edge of scholarly work that started in the 1960s with the opening of government archives was Robert Craig Brown’s biography, Robert Laird Borden: A Biography, 2 vols (Toronto, 1975–80). Another bench- mark in superbly researched biography is Michael Bliss’s volume on Sir Joseph Flavelle,6 who headed munitions production in Canada from 1916 to 1918. This is the fullest published account of Canada’s indus- trial effort. Strong in its research on both the home front and the overseas effort is Ronald G. Haycock’s life of Sir Sam Hughes, Minister of Militia and Defence from 1911 until 1916, when Prime Minister Borden finally lost patience with Hughes’s erratic, scandal-prone administration.7 General Sir Arthur Currie, the militia officer who succeeded brilliantly on the battlefield and commanded the Canadian Corps in 1917–18, has had three major biographies written about him, all well worth consulting.8

Robert Craig Brown joined Ramsay Cook to pro- duce a survey of signal importance, Canada 1896–1921:

Historiography

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374 A History of the Canadian Peoples

A Nation Transformed (Toronto and Montreal, 1974). Its chapters on the war draw on the large number of gradu- ate theses recently completed or in progress prior to the book’s publication; the book really marks the beginning of sustained scholarship, particularly on the homefront. For further work in the following three decades, see the outstanding collection of papers in David Mackenzie, ed., Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown (Toronto, 2005), which captures sub- sequent work on combat and the home front by many of the now senior scholars whose early research informed the 1974 volume by Brown and Cook.

Publication of new scholarly work in the 1970s and 1980s included little on the navy. It raised a total of 9,600 personnel during the war, about 1,700 for service with the British fleet overseas and the rest for the protec- tion of shipping in Canadian waters. Gilbert N. Tucker’s detailed The Naval Service of Canada: Its Official History, vol. 1, Origins and Early Years (Ottawa, 1952) is still a valuable source on many subjects. The volume, however, is circumspect about personalities and silent on import- ant aspects of operations. Michael L. Hadley and Roger Sarty sought to fill these gaps in Tin-Pots and Pirate Ships: Canadian Naval Forces and German Sea Raiders 1880–1918 (Montreal and Kingston, 1991). The navy had long carried much blame for the Halifax Explosion, the devastation of the city by the explosion of a muni- tions ship in the Halifax harbour on 6 December 1917. John Armstrong’s The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue (Vancouver, 2002) explores the navy’s role, and challenges its responsibil- ity for the critical lapses with newly discovered archival sources. Mark Hunter’s To Employ and Uplift Them: The Newfoundland Naval Reserve, 1899-1926 (St John’s, 2009) covers the service Newfoundland’s experienced seamen gave to both the British and Canadian fleets during the war. These works helped lay the foundation for William Johnston, William G.P. Rawling, Richard H. Gimblett, and John MacFarlane, The Seabound Coast: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Navy, 1867–1939, vol. 1 (Toronto, 2010), which the Directorate of History (now

the Directorate of History and Heritage) undertook because of renewed interest in World War I.

The enormous achievements of the Canadian Corps that fought in France and Belgium, and the heavy losses it bore, have been the subject of the bulk of schol- arly research that started in the 1960s and 1970s, gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, and continues with the interest aroused by the centenary of the war. Still important are the well-researched books produced by Daniel G. Dancocks in the 1980s, including Spearhead to Victory: Canada and the Great War (Edmonton, 1987). One of the first and still leading academic authors is Desmond Morton. Among his numerous, wide-ranging studies, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto, 1993) perhaps best encapsulates his research on combat. It can profitably be read in conjunction with Bill Rawling’s Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918 (Toronto, 1992). A comprehensive and insightful treat- ment of French Canada’s part in combat is Jean-Pierre Gagnon, Le 22e bataillon (canadien–français) 1914- 1919: Étude socio-militaire ([Quebec City], 1986), which was produced by the Directorate of History. The full- est treatment of the divisive conscription issue is still J.L. Granatstein and J.M. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto, 1977). The journal Canadian Military History, published since 1992 by the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic, and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University has featured a great deal of the new work on World War I combat. Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, and Mike Bechthold’s Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment (Waterloo, Ont., 2007) comprises wide-ranging essays by many of the leading younger scholars on the Canadian Corps’ iconic battle. J.L. Granatstein drew on much of the more recent scholarship in The Greatest Victory: Canada’s One Hundred Days, 1918 (Toronto, 2014). One of the foremost younger authors is Tim Cook, who in two substantial volumes presents the whole combat history of the Canadian Corps with the rich personal accounts that have become available since the 1960s.9

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3758 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Notes 1. Max Aitken, Canada in Flanders. The Official Story

of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, vol. 1 (London, 1916), for example, was a best-seller.

2. For a full listing, see O.A. Cooke, The Canadian Military Experience 1867–1995: A Bibliography, 3rd edn (Ottawa, 1997). See also Brian Douglas Tennyson, The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs (Plymouth, UK, 2013).

3. Henry Borden, ed., Robert Laird Borden: His Memoirs, 2 vols (Toronto, 1938).

4. Archer Fortescue Duguid, Official History of the Canadian Forces in the Great War, 1914–1919, vol. 1 (Ottawa, 1938).

5. G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919 (Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War) (Ottawa, 1962).

6. Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire: The Life and Business Times of Sir Joseph Flavelle, Bart., 1858–1939 (Toronto, 1978).

7. Ronald G. Haycock, Sam Hughes: The Public Career of a Controversial Canadian, 1885–1916 (Waterloo, Ont., 1986).

8. H.M. Urquhart, Arthur Currie: The Biography of a Great Canadian (Toronto, 1950); A.M.J. Hyatt, General Sir Arthur Currie: A Military Biography (Toronto, 1982); D.G. Dancocks, Sir Arthur Currie: A Biography (Toronto, 1985).

9. Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–16, vol. 1 (Toronto, 2007) and Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918, vol. 2 (Toronto, 2008).

Short Bibliography

Abella, Ir ving, and Harold Troper. None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948. Toronto, 1982. The standard work on the subject, judicious, fair, and scathing in its critique of Canadian policy.

Baillargeon, Denyse. Making Do: Women, Family, and Home in Montreal during the Great Depression. Waterloo, Ont., 2000. An exploration of women’s role during the Depression.

Baum, Gregory. Catholics and Canadian Socialism: Political Thought in the Thirties and Forties. Toronto, 1980. A stimulating book emphasizing that not all Catholics were unsympathetic to social reform and socialism.

Berton, Pierre. Hollywood’s Canada: The Americanization of Our National Image. Toronto, 1975. Perhaps Berton’s best work, this explores the ways in which

Hollywood has dealt with Canada and Canadian subjects.

Bumsted, J.M. The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919: An Illustrated History. Winnipeg, 1994. Makes the hist- ory of the strike accessible to the general audience.

Fedorowich, Kent. Unfit for Heroes: Reconstitution and Soldier Settlement in the Empire between the Wars. Manchester, 1995. Examination of the failed attempts to relocate British ex-soldiers as immigrants to rural areas in Canada and other Anglo countries.

Finkel, Alvin. Business and Social Reform in the Thirties. Toronto, 1979. A useful analysis of the relation- ship between business and social reform in the Depression, emphasizing that many businessmen saw reform as the only alternative to the destruction of capitalism.

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376 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Forbes, Ernest R. The Maritime Rights Movement 1919– 1927: A Study in Canadian Regionalism. Montreal, 1979. A fascinating study of one movement of regional protest that failed.

Kaprelian-Churchill, Isabel. “Armenian Refugees and Their Entry into Canada, 1919–1930.” Canadian Historical Review 71, 1 (1990): 80–108.

Lévesque, Andrée. Making and Breaking the Rules: Women in Quebec, 1919–1939. Toronto, 1994. An important study of women in Quebec between the wars.

MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. New York, 2002. A Canadian- based historian’s massive narrative of the Paris Peace Conference, including Canada’s role put in context.

Morton, W.L. The Progressive Party of Canada.Toronto, 1950. The classic account, still generally valid.

Owram, Doug. The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State 1900–1945. Toronto, 1986. A synthesis of secondary literature on the subject to the mid-1980s.

Peers, Frank. The Politics of Canadian Broadcasting 1920–1951. Toronto, 1969. A first-hand history of the development of Canadian broadcasting before television.

Safarian, A.E. The Canadian Economy in the Great Depression. Toronto, 1959. The standard account of

the performance of the Canadian economy in the 1930s.

Stacey, C.P. Arms, Men and Governments: The War Policies of Canada 1939–1945. Ottawa, 1970. A useful survey of Canada’s military policy during World War II.

Strong-Boag, Veronica. The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada 1919–1939. Toronto, 1988. A survey of the changing (or unchanging) role of women in English Canada between the wars.

Sunahara, Ann. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Toronto, 1981. A sober and unsentimental account that does not hesitate to call this part of Canadian war policy racist.

Thompson, John Herd, and Allan Seager. Canada 1922– 1939: Decades of Discord. Toronto, 1985. The best syn- thesis of the interwar years, rich in detail.

Tippett, Maria. Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission. Toronto, 1990. Perhaps the only over- view of the cultural infrastructure of any part of Canada before 1951.

Trofimenkoff, Susan Mann. Action Française: French- Canadian Nationalism in the Twenties. Toronto, 1975. An analysis of nationalism, mainly in Quebec, in the 1920s, focusing on Abbé Groulx and his circle.

Study Questions 1. What was Stephen Leacock’s “unsolved riddle of social justice”? How did Canadians address this riddle in the

interwar period?

2. Identify three causes of labour unrest in Canada after the Great War.

3. Explain why the Depression was a devastating experience for many Canadians.

4. What social and economic impacts did the automobile have on the Canadian public during this period?

5. Did gaining the vote substantially increase the political power of Canadian women? Explain.

6. In what ways could Canada’s exclusionist immigration policy be defended?

7. What does the document “Radio Programming, 1939” tell us about what Canadians listened to in 1939?

8. Why was the theatre of the left more active than the mainstream theatre in presenting Canadian themes

during the 1930s?

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3778 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

9. For Canadians, in what ways was World War II a replay of World War I? In what ways was it different? Are the

similarities more important than the differences?

10. Are there incidents in this period about which the Canadian government needs to be ashamed? What are

they?

Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.

www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e

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