Canada and World War I

 Robert Borden  was a marked contrast to Laurier. He was a successful Halifax lawyer, formal, even stuffy. However, he was an accomplished politician - able to maintain his position as leader of the Conservatives while they were consigned to the Opposition benches from 1896 to 1911. His flexibility as a politician, however, soon became apparent. His campaign slogan of “No truck nor trade with the Yankees” came to nothing as American investment in Canada increased between 1911 and 1913, and the U.S. realized that many of their factories depended upon cheap Canadian resources, and invested here to get them

Borden was also elected on a wage of reformism, and he won many prairie ridings based on this. His government provided federal subsidies to build provincial highways, free rural mail delivery, agricultural education, and more government involvement in the western economy through public ownership of grain elevators

His greatest weakness was Quebec - his knowledge of French was basic, and he had difficulty understanding the different views of French Canadians. This was not aided by the weak Quebec MPs who were Conservatives.

It didn't help that Borden was a firm believer that Canada was part of the larger British Empire. His government passed the 1913 Naval Aid Bill – reached after consultation with the British admiralty. Canada provided $35 million for the building of 3 dreadnoughts.

Canada and World War I

When war did break out in 1914, Canada as part of the British Empire entered automatically. Even Laurier said that when the call goes out, our answer goes at once, and, it goes in the classical language of the British answer to the call of duty:  Ready, Aye, Ready. Borden pledged every efforts and...every sacrifice...that the manhood of Canada stands ready to fight beyond the seas. even Henri Bourassa said Canada should join the war effort, but that there should be limits to Canada’s contribution

Everyone also thought that it would be a short war that would require only 6 months to fight and win.

Everywhere people greeted the war with enthusiasm. Sir Sam Hughes, the Minister of the Militia, was deluged with people who wanted to volunteer. More than 34, 500 volunteers were assembled at Valcartier, Quebec, in a makeshift training camp and then sent off to England for further training.

The ethnic makeup of these volunteers, however, reveals where the enthusiasm for the war lay in Canada - 65% of these were British born.

Seventeen poorly equipped and trained battalions of Canadians were sent to the battlefields of France. They were not under Canadian command, but placed under Lieutenant-General E.A.H. Alderson, a British officer.

Their first battle would be at Ypres, on April 22, 1915. This was the first battle in which chemical gas was used in war, and the Germans sent yellow clouds of chlorine gas. French troops abandoned their position, and Canadian troops had to stretch their lines thing to fill in this gap and hold off the German offensive. It was a battle that over four days resulted in 6,037 Canadian casualties. The high casualty rate became a common characteristic of WW I.  

By December, 1915, there were 3 Canadian divisions in France. By the beginning of 1916, Canada had sent 500,000 men (all volunteers) to France.

These soldiers, as noted earlier, were not well equipped. Same Hughes was an old Conservative who had fought in the Boer War. He had a love of ingenuity, but unfortunately this did not allow him to make intelligent choices when it came to choosing the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s (CEF) equipment.

One example is a shovel - the MacAdam shovel - a Swiss invention. It was a shovel with a four inch handle, and a hole in the centre - it could be used to dig, and sight your rifle through while the shovel protected the soldier’s head from bullets. However, the metal was not strong enough and offered no protection from bullets. The hole in the centre made it useless for digging.

Hughes other, more famous, poor choice was the Ross rifle. A superb hunting rifle, excellent for marksmanship, but it proved unreliable in the trenches as it jammed easily if any dirt got into the firing mechanism. In his book, Farewell to All That, the British author Robert Graves, who fought in W.W. I, recounted how Canadian soldiers would take Lee-Enfield rifles from dead British soldiers and discard their Ross Rifle (the ammunition was interchangeable). By 1916 the Canadian soldiers were eventually issued Lee-Enfields but the war continued to drag on.

The tactic in an attack was to use artillery to pound the other side. The men would be lined up in the trenches, at scaling ladders, and at the command wave after wave of them would climb out and rush the opposing army. There were two problems with this – often the artillery did not have the desired affect as the Germans would retreat to enforced bunker, and when the men rushed out to attack, the German army was well equipped with machine guns and would mow down the attackers.

This resulted in the high casualty rates.  The Battle of the Somme (July, 1916): Allies suffered 623,907 casualties at the Somme (24, 029 Cdn), while the German army lost between 660,000 and 680,000 men. The name for this was type of war is a "war of attrition" - weakening the opposing army through casualties until it simply falls apart.

It would not be until Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, that the Allied forces had their first success. On that day the entire Canadian Corps, four divisions, stormed forward in the early dawn against the heights of Vimy Ridge. With driving sleet and snow at their backs, they crashed through three successive lines of German defences, and reached the crest of the ridge by mid-morning. The Canadians, who completely planned and commanded this attack, used a new strategy of progressive shelling, with the troops following behind the shells.  

This battle has been portrayed as a turning point in Canada's 'coming of age' in the world -- a small country achieving a victory that the French and British troops could not achieve. It did lead to Canadian troops finally being put under the command of a Canadian general – Sir Arthur Currie. Currie  would lead Canadian troops again at Passchendaele – they would capture Hill 70 at Arras (ten days of fighting saw 9,198 Canadian casualties). Total Canadian casualties reached 15, 654 by the time this battle was finished.

These high causality rates led the Allied forces to consider the possibility of conscription. Britain started this in 1916, and Canada faced the same choice by 1917. It was estimated by the government of Canada that there were approximately 475,000 men of enlistment age in Canada. Many were French Canadian who felt no real duty or tie to the British Empire, and the CEF was not particularly welcoming. All training, in Canada and Britain, was in English, and the vast majority of commissioned officers were also unilingual English.

The necessity of more men became more pressing when Russia withdrew from the war in 1917. Germany could now concentrate all its forces on the western front (i.e.: France). In the summer of 1917 Borden led to an effort by Liberals and Conservatives to form a coalition to put together a united front for Canadians that this was the right policy. Borden approached Laurier, but Laurier declined as he realized that it would cost the Liberals all political support in Quebec. Borden then turned to English Liberals and met with more success – led to his announcement of a new Union party, and with this party he called a federal election to be fought primarily  on the issue of conscription .

French Canadians, and a few English Canadians, remained in the old Liberal Party which still existed under Laurier and his able MP William Lyon Mackenzie King.

The election of 1917 also saw the franchise extended in a cleverly modified way with the Wartime Elections Act. It enfranchised all the female relatives and wives of men who had served or were serving overseas: essentially a group of women who would be almost guaranteed to support conscription. It also disenfranchised people who were of enemy alien birth, or habitually spoke an enemy alien tongue, and who had not become British subjects until after 1902: essentially, new immigrants who were more likely to vote Liberal. At the end of the election the Liberals won only 82 seats – only 20 outside Quebec

In essence the conscription issue split Canada along French-English  lines – a rift that would continue to exist, and remain in the minds of politicians for some time to come. In Quebec City there was rioting against Conscription

-although the measure was wildly popular elsewhere

When the war did end, it caught the Allies by surprise. The entry of the Americans in 1917 helped turn the tide of the war. The invention of tanks also made trench warfare less of an obstacle. However, it appears that the anger of the Germany people at the high cost of the war was what led the government to sign an armistice in 1918, and ultimately the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. 

The Inter-War Years,

1919-1939

Canada underwent a number of changes during the interwar years. This was due to the growing influence of some elements of society, such as labour unions, and the waning influence of others such as farmers. The two events that best encapsulate these changes are the Winnipeg General Strike and the formation of the Progressive Party.

The Winnipeg General Strike, although ultimately a failure, revealed the increasingly 'radical' (for that time) nature of unionization that was sweeping not only Canada but the United States, Britain and Europe. The industrialization of Canada, which started in the last twenty years roughly of the nineteenth century, resulted in the emergence of a large, unskilled labour force. These workers were in some ways the disenfranchised of the labour force. Without job skills they had very low pay, no benefits, and could be fired for any reason (because they were easily replaceable). The Winnipeg Strike reflected this changing nature of Canadian unions.

The Progressive Party, on the other hand, reflected the waning influence of farmers. While farmers today obviously still have a lot of political power it pales in comparison to manufacturers, banking, and the industrial sector of the economy. The Progressives and other farmer political parties and organizations were an attempt to protect this power. They also reflected the growing sense of anger that some, particularly in western Canada, were feeling about the changing nature of Confederation. Westerners began to feel that Ontario and Quebec pulled all the strings in Canada, and that farmers (who were a majority out west) needed to band together to counter this influence.

Part 1:  Labour and the Winnipeg General Strike

Probably the most important challenge to the Dominion government’s prairie mission, that of settling and creating an economically prosperous region of Canada, came from the labour movement.

Prior to World War I, one in ten workers in Western Canada were unionized. These unions were strongest in Winnipeg, and the coal mining towns of Alberta. What set these unions apart from those of Ontario was that they were organized by industry , not be craft and largely represented unskilled workers. Ontario and Quebec unions were largely craft and skilled worker unions.

The western unions, as a result, were more radical. They did not have a job skill to help them obtain higher wages; this lack of skill also made them more expendable. Combined with this was the importation of more 'radical' political beliefs brought to western Canada by recent European immigrants. Steeped in the socialist and labour politics of Europe, these people became involved in this unions and became active in trying to get workers to adopt more radical solutions -- such as going on strike.

In this effort the skilled unions of central Canada were not interested. All of these unions belonged to the Trades and Labour Congress which represented many of Canada's existing unions. The TLC  was dominated by the numerous craft unions of central Canada and had close ties to the American Federation of Labour (under Samuel Gompers) in the United States. Gompers was more accepting of modern capitalism. This approach did not always fit in with the western unions, which felt restrained by the perceived conservatism of the American Federation of Labour.

Economic disruption following the war (i.e.: inflation), and the high unemployment rate caused by demobilization (i.e.: soldiers leaving the army) resulted in labour radicalism becoming more popular not just in western Canada but in many parts of Canada. Rumours of war profiteering also did not help calm down labour unions. The west has received most attention, however, because it was here that the first general strike occurred in Winnipeg.

During the winter of 1918-1919 conditions worsened in the west. There was high  unemployment, and the influenza epidemic made matters even more tense. Western labour unions held large conferences, and it was here that even more radical political groups became involved and began to advocate a real revolution along the lines of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

When the General Strike finally occurred in Winnipeg the radicalism of union statements, combined with the conservatism of political leaders (and their fear of a communist revolution starting in Canada) resulted in a violent clash between strikers, the police and government.

Winnipeg was a city that had (and still has) clear class divisions. The North End (Elmwood, Transcona, St. Boniface) were the working class districts. In the south end of the city the wealthier classes lived.

What became known as the Winnipeg General Strike grew out of two relatively minor labour disputes. The construction and metals trades were engaged in bargaining with their employers. It was a strike that spread quickly, but soon engulfed the entire city. The Strike Committee essentially set up another level of government - deciding when services would be provided (such as milk delivery). Even the police went out on strike for higher pay. By May 15, 1919, 25,000 workers stopped work. What started as a strike quickly became a political confrontation between the strikers and the three levels of government.

 The municipal government fired the 200 police who went on strike, and hired 2,000 special police at wage of $6/day (double the pay of the striking policemen).

What brought matters to a head was the Winnipeg City Council bringing in replacement workers to run the streetcar service. It was a symbolic act that the strikers did not want to occur. When the first car was sent out the 2000 special police, and the RNWMP were present. They were issued revolvers and wagon spokes to deal with the crowed that was assembling. As the first streetcar was sent out, the police rode out to clear Portage Avenue and Main Street of demonstrators. They charged through, and were met with thrown stick and stones by the demonstrators to which they responded by firing into the crowd. Within minutes the streets were cleared, and the special police and militia cruised the streets in machine gun trucks. 

THE 1920s

During World War One Borden’s Conservative government had formed a coalition with the Liberal Party. Part of the basis of their win in 1917 was the prairie vote. Borden had promised farmers that their sons would not be conscripted so that the labour crisis on farms (already becoming acute) would not grow worse. Once he had won, however, Borden broke that promise.

In the long term it had no impact - of the men who were conscripted, very few went overseas as the war ended one year after conscription was implemented ; however, it left bitter feelings amongst farmers . This betrayal was only part of the problem that farmers were facing in the 1920s. Shortly after the war price and economic stability led to a depression that saw a number of farmers lose their farms. Having invested heavily in the new mechanized farm equipment they could not meet their loan payments when the price of wheat began to fall. The Union government also did little to control railway freight rates for farmers who needed to get their wheat from Saskatchewan to Ontario.

Added to this problem was a drought in southern Alberta that saw crop yields drop by almost 80% per acre.

The end result was the emergence of farmer political groups not just in the prairies but also in Ontario. Provincially a number of parties, known as the United Farmers appeared. In Ontario the United Farmers of Ontario actually won the 1919 election and held power until 1923. The United Farmers of Alberta also formed a government in Alberta. All of this was part of an effort by farmers to counter the appearance of their interests not receiving proper attention by politicians. 

Part of this problem was also because of the shifting demographics of Canada. By 1921, for example, Ontario's population finally became predominantly urban. Farmers and rural areas no longer held the balance of power in politics. Farm political organization was seen as a counter to what was seen to be corporate, industrial and urban domination of Canadian politics.

Even within the federal government this began to happen. Minister of Agriculture, Thomas A. Crerar, resigned his position in Borden's government in 1919 because the government was not doing enough to lower tariffs in Canada (tariffs were important to farmers who were interested in the bottom line of their farms, and obtaining the goods they needed as cheaply as possible). 

Under Crerar's leadership he pulled together a number of the smaller farmer organizations to form what became known as the Progressive Party in 1920. When an election was called in 1921 the Progressives tapped into rural discontent, and they won 65 seats in Western Canada (Agnus McPhail - first female MP was a Progressive from Grey County in Ontario)

When they were asked to form the Official Opposition, however, they refused. The Progressives were a populist party who believed that traditional political structures in Ottawa distanced MPs from their constituents. Lobby groups, manufacturers and big urban interests had seized control of Ottawa, they believed, and only by remaining apart from this could an MP be truly effective and represent their riding.

As a result the Progressives sat as a third party, and voted as individuals instead of as a party. Caucus discipline, in their minds, was merely a means of enforcing special interests on to the party system. The end result, however, was utter ineffectiveness in the House of Commons. Crerar, who was a traditional politician, finally resigned as leader in 1922 as the Progressives could not accomplish anything.

Their ineffectiveness is reflected by their later electoral results:

Ultimately the remaining Progressives joined with Mackenzie King's Liberal party.

Conclusion