Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  By November 1917, there were twenty-seven recruiting depots across the United States, as well as mobile units. Canadians prominently involved in the Mission’s work included Lieutenant Colonel J. S. Dennis, a militia officer from Calgary who was responsible for the western states, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Guthrie of the 236th (MacLean Highlanders) Battalion of New Brunswick who recruited men in New England, and Major Jules-Olivier Daly-Gingras of the 22nd Battalion, who sought recruits among the large French-Canadian immigrant population in New England. He was assisted by the Rev. Constant Doyon, the former Catholic chaplain of the 22nd Battalion.[21]

  Remarkably, the Mission succeeded in recruiting 47,188 men.[22] Not all were necessarily American citizens, however. Thomas Dinesen, for example, was a Danish civil engineer who, having been rejected by the British and French armies, went to New York in 1917, where he was rejected by the U.S. army as well. He finally succeeded when the Canadian recruiting office accepted him. He served overseas in the 42nd (Royal Highlanders) Battalion, earning both the Victoria Cross and the Croix de Guerre for extraordinary bravery at Parvillers in August 1918.[23]

  But about 5% of the new recruits deserted en route to Canada and about 37% were rejected as medically unfit. An indication of the unsatisfactory results of the Recruiting Mission was the fact that in September 1917 Canada began accepting men who were not British subjects if they had been born in Allied or neutral countries and could speak either English or French. Four months later it began accepting Syrians and Armenians who had been born in the Ottoman Empire (a hostile power). It seems that a few men from Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria—also enemy states—were also accepted, although recruits from Poland (then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire) and Russia were rejected. Volunteers of Chinese and Japanese descent were also rejected, although several Japanese Canadians had been accepted, and at least forty-nine men of African descent from the British West Indies were accepted.[24]

  Because neither British subjects living in the United States nor American citizens living in Britain or Canada could be drafted by the countries in which they were resident, Britain and the United States negotiated an agreement which gave these men the choice of returning home, where they could be conscripted, or remaining where they were subject to local conscription legislation. The result was that about 20,000 potential CEF recruits living in the United States chose to serve in the AEF rather than return home, while more than 18,000 Americans living in Canada registered with U.S. consular officials and were therefore exempt from conscription.[25] Clearly, this arrangement did not work to Canada’s advantage.

  By the autumn of 1918, the Mission had become redundant, and it ceased operations in October. Of the 47,188 men recruited, only 33,335 actually joined the Canadian army. Only about 17,000 of them reached France before the Armistice because of the length of time it took to train them, and only 7,100 of them were infantrymen. The Mission’s historian, Richard Holt, concludes that “the meagre results hardly justified the time, effort and expense of running a large and elaborate recruiting structure in a foreign country.”[26] To be fair, however, as was the case with conscription, the number of men raised and dispatched to Europe would have been significantly higher if the war had dragged on into 1919, as the politicians had thought it would.

  Despite all the efforts by the government and patriotic organizations and the media to encourage more men to enlist, it was obvious that not enough men were volunteering to sustain Canada’s commitment. If the war was going to be won—was the alternative even an option?—Canada would have to find more men, so that the Allies could at least hold on until American troops arrived in meaningful numbers.

  The crisis arrived in the spring of 1917, by which time more than 27,000 of the approximately 45,000 infantrymen serving in the Canadian Corps had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, more than half of them since the beginning of the year.[27] In order to maintain the four divisions, the government needed to raise more than 6,000 men each month, but it was getting only about 5,000. The result was that battalions were going into action with as few as 600 or 700 men instead of the normal 1,000, and wounded men were increasingly being sent back to their units before they had fully recuperated. In other words, it was not just a matter of keeping up the Canadian commitment to Britain; it was also a matter of not letting down the men already overseas, who were putting their lives on the line.

  When Borden went to London to participate in the Imperial War Cabinet in the spring of 1917, he also met with Arthur Currie, whose advice reflected the feeling of most of his troops that the sacrifices they were making would be intolerable if the “shirkers” at home were not coerced into doing their duty. And to be honest, when they thought of shirkers they were usually, if not always, thinking of French Canadians, among whom the rate of enlistment was much lower than it was among English Canadians.

  Borden genuinely believed that the war had become a crusade being fought by the British Empire, which represented civilization, and barbarism, which was obviously represented by Germany and its Austrian and Turkish allies. The very fact that people commonly referred to the Germans as Huns was telling because, when the so-called barbarian tribes were attacking the Roman Empire, the Huns were regarded as the least civilized and most barbaric of them all. Never mind that the Huns were an Asian people whom the Germanic tribes or nations were fleeing when they entered the Roman Empire. Most people didn’t know their history, and it didn’t really matter: they got the point.

  Borden returned home convinced that conscription was unavoidable, a decision he announced in the House of Commons on May 18. He did not justify it on the grounds of supporting Britain or the empire; he appealed to Canadian nationalism. “The battle for Canadian liberty and autonomy is being fought today on the plains of France and Belgium,” he said, and conscription was needed not just to maintain the strength of the Canadian Corps but to keep faith with its members. If they returned to Canada “with fierce resentment in their hearts,” feeling that they had been “deserted and betrayed,” he asked, “how shall we meet them when they ask the reason?”[28]

  Borden knew that conscription would be highly controversial and tried to limit the damage by inviting Laurier and his followers to join him in a coalition government. He would carry on as prime minister, but Laurier would be appointed his deputy and the Cabinet would have an equal number of Liberals and Conservatives. He also offered to defer conscription until after the new government was formed. Laurier pondered for two weeks before rejecting both conscription and a coalition. Laurier spoke for many Canadians when he argued that conscription might be acceptable if Canada were under attack or threatened, but it was not acceptable to raise troops for an overseas war. Besides, it would hand Quebec over to the Nationalists, which would be disastrous to national unity.

  He wasn’t thinking only of Quebec, however. Although Canadians tend to think that the conscription crisis was an English-French conflict, Laurier was well aware that many people in English Canada opposed it as well. Farmers, for example, whether English or French, were generally opposed to having their sons conscripted because they were essential labor on the family farm at a time when the government was appealing to farmers to boost their production. The same was true of fishermen. Similarly, trade unions undoubtedly spoke for many of their members when they denounced conscription of the only “capital” a working man had (i.e., his body), while businessmen were making huge profits on government wartime contracts. Aboriginal leaders opposed conscription as well, arguing that their treaties guaranteed that they could never be compelled to take up arms against their will. And of course there were those many thousands of European immigrants who had come to Canada in recent years from what were now enemy nations, who could not be expected to favor conscription in a war against their homelands.

  The government proceeded to ram the Military Service Act through Parliament, using closure on all three readings of the bill. With a view to raising 100,000 men, the Act empowered the government to con
script all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty. It did, however, allow exemptions for those employed in war production, agriculture, and the fishery, and on religious grounds or cases of hardship. It then called an election.

  Laurier believed with good reason that a victory by the Unionist government was by no means a foregone conclusion. He didn’t fully grasp how committed Borden was to the war effort. “Our first duty,” Borden wrote in his diary, “is to win, at any cost, the coming election in order that we may continue to do our part in winning the War and that Canada not be disgraced.”[29] Because defeat was not an option, he now rewrote the country’s electoral laws to ensure victory. In a nod to the women’s suffrage movement, women were allowed to vote for the first time, but only those with a direct connection to a man who was serving or had served in the army. At the same time, he disenfranchised the thousands of enemy aliens except those who had a son serving overseas with the Allies (they were also exempt from conscription). Anyone exempted from conscription such as conscientious objectors and members of pacifist churches (such as Mennonites) were also disfranchised. All soldiers serving overseas, including those who were underage (twenty-one) or British-born, were allowed to vote, and they could opt either to vote for a specific candidate in their home constituency or to vote simply by party. This meant that the parties could allocate these votes to constituencies where they were needed. Because the overseas soldiers overwhelmingly supported conscription, this option obviously favored the government. Just to make victory even more likely, the government promised during the election campaign that the sons of farmers would be exempt from conscription.

  The 1917 federal election was, without question, the ugliest and most vicious in Canadian history. The Unionists played the patriotic card, urging Canadians to support their boys overseas, to support the motherland, and to send a clear message to people whose loyalty was suspect—namely Laurier and his French-Canadian followers—that this was a British country with British ideals and values. One Toronto newspaper infamously printed a map of Canada on its front page with Quebec alone painted black, above a cutline declaring the province “the foul blot on Canada.”[30]

  Not surprisingly, the government won the election, seemingly confirming public support for conscription. But even a cursory analysis of the results makes clear that if the electoral laws had not been rewritten, the results would have been much closer, and if farmers’ sons had not been exempted, the Unionists might even have lost because many farmers were prepared to vote for conscription as long as their sons were exempt. And the enfranchisement of pro-conscription women and disenfranchisement of immigrants from enemy countries totally distorted the results everywhere.

  As always in parliamentary elections, the comfortable majority of seats that Borden won in parliament needs to be compared with the popular vote. Even after rewriting the electoral laws, the Unionists won only 1,070,694 out of 1,880,702 cast, and the Liberals returned to parliament with only three fewer seats than they had won in 1911. Allowing the overseas soldiers’ votes to be manipulated turned over fourteen constituencies from the Liberals to the Unionists. All things considered, it was hardly a ringing endorsement for conscription.

  What was worse was that Canada now had, for the first time and in the midst of the greatest crisis the country had ever faced, an English-speaking Protestant government and a French-speaking Catholic opposition. Every government from 1867 to 1911 had included the majority of seats in Quebec, regardless of which party—Conservative or Liberal—won the election. Borden had won in 1911 without Quebec, and now he had done it again, with a vengeance. As one prominent journalist later wrote, “Canada had lost nearly as much ground in its struggle for unity as it had won in the previous one hundred and fifty-eight years since the Plains of Abraham.”[31]

  Québécois were so distressed by conscription and the fact that it was clearly aimed at them that in January 1918 the province’s Legislative Assembly debated—but fortunately did not vote on—a motion proposing that Quebec should separate from Canada if “in the view of the other provinces, it is believed that she is an obstacle to the union, progress, and development of Canada.” It was, although no one realized it at the time, the birth of the sovereignist movement in Quebec.

  Quebec was deeply alienated, and most of the men simply didn’t report for service when called up. Across the country more than 24,000 men defaulted, but almost 19,000 of them were from Quebec. Many fled into the woods, but hundreds crossed the border into the United States. There was rioting in Quebec City on March 28 when federal police tried to arrest defaulters, and a mob burned the Military Service Registry office, including its records, and pillaged English-Canadian businesses while municipal officials stood by. The government cynically sent in troops from Toronto led by Major General François-Louis Lessard, one of the few French-Canadian generals in the army—who was never sent overseas—to restore order. On April 1, they opened fire, killing four civilians and injuring as many as seventy-five others. The subsequent coroner’s jury blamed Ottawa for tactless enforcement of the Military Service Act.

  But opposition to conscription among those likely to be conscripted was almost as great in English Canada as it was in Quebec. Of the 401,882 men who were called up, 379,629 filed appeals, and they were by no means all French Canadians. Frank Carvell, minister of public works in Borden’s new Unionist government, told the House of Commons that “there are thousands and tens of thousands, yes, hundreds of thousands, of people in the rest of Canada who have tried assiduously to evade military service.”[32] He was right. After going through the appeals process, the exemption rate in Quebec was 9%, but in Ontario, which was so vociferous in proclaiming its loyalty and denouncing French-Canadian disloyalty, the rate was 8.2%, not a significant difference.

  Ralph Allen has claimed, no doubt correctly, that “the hearing of appeals took far more time than the swearing in and training of new soldiers.”[33] John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminent Harvard economist who grew up in southwestern Ontario, later recalled that his father “was the dominant influence on the local draft board,” which “granted exemptions on the basis of one grave necessity or another to nearly all who did not wish to die. The Scotch who made up the farm community of the area were not strongly so inclined.”[34]

  If they were not exempted by the local tribunal, conscripted men could appeal to the courts, right up to the ultimate appeal judge, Mr. Justice Lyman Duff of the Supreme Court. Some 42,000 men did appeal their cases to Duff, and he exempted most farmers and their sons because the government had promised during the election campaign to do so. He also exempted Catholic novices in holy orders but not Protestant divinity students. Conscientious objectors such as Mennonites and Doukhobors were exempted, while members of other groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, to whom pacifism was not a core belief, were not. In January 1918, the government amended the legislation to exempt Aboriginal men.

  Meanwhile, the Fifth Division, commanded by Sam Hughes’s son, Garnet, was sitting idly in England when only politics was preventing its 21,000 officers and men from being used to reinforce the Canadian Corps. But the Fifth had only been created in December 1916 as a result of intense pressure from the British and, of course, Sam Hughes, who had been determined from the outset of the war that Garnet should command a division. However reluctantly, Borden gave in—his last ill-judged concession to Sam Hughes—and Garnet got his division.

  Inevitably, this led to a nasty cat-fight because Garnet was determined to take the Fifth Division into combat, even though there obviously were not enough men to support five divisions. Canada could, of course, follow the questionable British lead by reducing the number of battalions in a division, but Currie adamantly opposed this idea. Aside from the fact that he did not want Garnet Hughes in France, he knew that four divisions were Canada’s limit. Perley agreed with him, and eventually Borden did as well, so in February 1918 the Fifth Division was broken up to provide reinforcements for the other four divisions. “Political e
xpediency [had] led to its formation, the appointment of its commander, its continued survival in the face of Canadian manpower shortages, and finally to its eventual disbandment.”[35] “It was,” as the Toronto Daily Star said, “a mistake from the start.”[36]

  The political crisis generated by the introduction of conscription wasn’t over yet. When Germany’s last major offensive in March 1918, hoping to knock the Allies out of the war before the Americans arrived in strength, broke through the Allied lines, the sense of crisis was profound. More troops were urgently needed, and the government, panicking, cancelled the exemption for farmers’ sons.

  Outrage spread throughout rural Canada, not just in Quebec but in English Canada as well. Farmers from all across the country organized rallies, signed petitions, and lobbied the politicians. Trainloads of them converged on Ottawa and rallied in front of parliament, where they pounded on the locked doors demanding that Borden come out and face them. He did so but didn’t back down. Since the government had just won a comfortable majority in the 1917 election, there was nothing the farmers could do except fume and rage. But having concluded that they could no longer trust politicians—the Unionist government was a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives—they began to organize with a view to electing farmers to represent rural Canada and to do so outside of the party system.

  The result over the next three years was a political revolution which saw provincial governments toppled by informal coalitions of farmers and urban workers that in some cases didn’t even have a leader. The Conservative government of Ontario fell in 1919, the Liberal government of Manitoba survived the 1920 election, although with only a minority of seats in the Legislature, and the Liberal governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan were both defeated in 1921. When the next federal election came, also in 1921, the farmers, now organized as the United Farmers of Canada, elected sixty-five members. The Unionists, now calling themselves the Unionist and Conservative Party, came in a pathetic third with fifty seats. A new era had dawned in Canadian politics.