British leaders, on the whole, did not really want to share power with the Dominions, but they had a practical problem: they couldn’t afford the rapidly rising cost of imperial defense caused by the naval arms race with Germany in the decade before 1914. They, therefore, appealed for help to the Dominions, thinking—not unreasonably—that they should contribute to the cost of the Royal Navy since they benefited from the protection it provided to the entire Empire.
This inevitably brings to mind British efforts to impose taxes on the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s and 1770s, which led to the outbreak of the American Revolution. There is a parallel because Britain had fought a major global war with France that ended in 1763 with the annexation of French territories in North America, a step taken not because those territories had any significant value to Britain but to eliminate the longstanding threat posed by the French and their native allies to New England and the other northern colonies. Britain came out of the war with a large debt, while still bearing responsibility for defense of the expanding American frontier, so it thought the Thirteen Colonies should contribute to their own defense. As we all know, that didn’t work out too well.
There was a critical difference between the two situations, however. Britain had neither the legal power nor the desire to tax the Dominions, so all its leaders could do was to explain the situation and appeal to them to accept some responsibility for their own defense. And at least some British leaders, including Asquith, recognized that something would have to be given in return. In July 1912, he told the British House of Commons that “side by side with this growing participation in the active burdens of the Empire, on the part of our Dominions there rests with us undoubtedly the duty of making such response as we can to their obviously reasonable appeal that they should be entitled to be heard in the determination of the policy and in the direction of Imperial affairs.”[9]
Canada went into the World War I willingly, but Borden had not abandoned his prewar views on how the imperial relationship should evolve. Speaking in Montreal on December 7, 1914, he expressed his confidence that the day was not far off “when the men of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the other dominions will have the same just voice in these questions [peace and war] as those who live within the British Isles. Any man who doubts that will come, doubts that the Empire will hold together.”[10]
As we have seen, the Borden government had repeatedly increased its initial manpower contribution until, by 1915, it had raised three divisions and planned to raise a fourth, but there was a serious problem. British and French generals appeared to be wasting men on a profligate scale in offensives like those at Ypres and the Somme that made no sense to reasonable people. What was worse, perhaps, was that the British government was allowing them to do so. Even worse, Canadian troops were being included in the slaughter—without any consultation with or input from the Canadian government. If Borden was not impressed by the British generals, neither was he impressed by British political leadership in the management of the war.
Thus, Borden and his government found themselves in the totally unacceptable position of having to answer to Canadians for how things were going without having any control over the situation. This was not a position in which any politician wants to find himself, nor is it a position in which he ever should find himself. A six-week visit to London in the summer of 1915 included several meetings with British ministers and even sitting in on a Cabinet meeting, but at the end of it, Borden was more frustrated than ever, not only with the lack of consultation but with the quality of the information being provided.
He now bluntly told Andrew Bonar Law, the colonial secretary—and a former Canadian—that, unless he started receiving better information, he would “return to Canada with no definite intention of urging my fellow countrymen to continue in the war work they have already begun or with the intensive preparation which I am sure they are ready to undertake.”[11] This had some effect as he then got a serious briefing from David Lloyd George, the outspoken and ambitious Minister of Munitions, but he still returned to Canada dissatisfied.
In October 1915, after the government raised Canada’s commitment from 150,000 men to 250,000, Borden again pleaded for more information, pointing out that Dominion governments were answerable to their electorates. He now went a step further, declaring that they must also have a role in the policy-making process. The unimaginative Bonar Law assured Borden that, while he accepted “the right of the Canadian Government to have some share of the control in a war in which Canada is playing so big a part,” he was “not able to see any way in which this could be practically done.”[12] He did, however, promise to provide more information. This was an unacceptable response, which Borden brooded over for a couple of months.
Then, early in January 1916, without consulting his Cabinet, Borden made the astonishing announcement that Canada would raise its commitment to 500,000 men. It seems likely that this dramatic gesture was intended not only to impress the British but to strengthen his hand in demanding a meaningful role in the determination of policy. At precisely the same time, he wrote a strongly worded letter to Perley, intended for Bonar Law, declaring that “it can hardly be expected that we shall put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice and receiving no more consideration than if we were toy automata. Any person cherishing such an expectation harbors an unfortunate and even dangerous delusion.” If this war was being waged by the British Empire, he asked, “why do the statesmen of the British Isles arrogate to themselves solely the methods by which it shall be carried on?”[13]
Upon reflection, Borden told Perley not to pass the letter on to Bonar Law, but Perley undoubtedly did alert Bonar Law and other British ministers to Borden’s frustration. This may have contributed to some extent to the drastic changes that took place in the British government in 1916 because many prominent British politicians shared Borden’s frustration with the Asquith government. First, Lloyd George became Secretary of State for War in June 1916 and began his struggle to establish effective civilian control over the war. Then in December he became prime minister, replacing the ineffective Asquith.[14]
Lloyd George immediately reorganized the British government, concentrating power in a new War Cabinet comprising the five most powerful ministers. He also recognized that if Britain wanted the Dominions to maintain, or even increase, their level of support for the war effort, “they should feel that they have a share in our councils as well as in our burdens.”[15] As one of his advisors pointed out, the Dominions were “fighting not for us but with us.”[16]
He therefore called an Imperial War Conference in 1917 so that Dominion leaders could be both informed and consulted on war policy. More significantly, he also created the Imperial War Cabinet, which included the members of the War Cabinet and the Dominion prime ministers (or, in the case of South Africa, the prime minister’s representative). Here the Dominion leaders could receive all kinds of confidential information to which they had not previously been privy and had the opportunity to present their views and share in determining policy. This marked a significant change in the imperial relationship.
As of the spring of 1917, therefore, when the Imperial War Cabinet met for the first time, Canada and the other Dominions had a meaningful voice in foreign and defense policy. At the same time, the Imperial War Conference, meeting concurrently, adopted Resolution IX promising that as soon as possible after the war the constitutional structure of the empire would be adjusted to recognize that, while the Dominions were “autonomous nations” possessing “complete control” over their domestic affairs, they also had “a right . . . to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations.” This would require the creation of a system of “effective” and “continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern.” Despite the hagiography that quickly built up around the charismatic Jan Smuts, who represented South Africa’s Prime Minister Louis Botha in London and became the darli
ng of Britain’s ruling class, Resolution IX originated with and was introduced by Borden.[17]
Lloyd George’s action in creating the Imperial War Cabinet was “perhaps the most uniquely imaginative in the modern history of the British community” and marked the beginning of the transition from empire to commonwealth.[18] As Borden said during an Imperial War Cabinet meeting on May 2, 1917, it “met the national consciousness of the Overseas Dominions in a way in which it had never been met before,”[19] and Resolution IX would build on this to establish the equality of the Dominions with Britain. This new status “had been won by their soldiers on the battlefield, but the initiative towards obtaining the recognition had been largely Borden’s.”[20]
But the Imperial War Cabinet was not really a cabinet because, while it could make decisions affecting the empire as a whole, each country also retained its autonomy. In other words, it was, and in reality could only be, a conference whose decisions were subject to the approval of the various parliaments. In view of the fact that its overseas participants were the prime ministers of the Dominions, however, it was normally safe to assume that this would not be a problem. A larger problem was the fact that the Imperial War Cabinet could only function when the Dominion leaders were in London, and as heads of governments, they obviously could not be there most of the time.
The reality, indeed, was that, while the Imperial War Cabinet was consulted on a number of issues during its meetings in 1917 and the Dominion leaders were able to express their views, the British government continued to manage the war effort. It was after the Dominion leaders returned home, for example, that the British government approved the disastrous Somme offensive, in which the Canadian Corps suffered heavy unnecessary losses at Passchendaele. As usual, Canada was informed but not consulted. Not surprisingly, Borden was outraged because by this time he had formed a coalition government and fought and won a terribly divisive wartime election so that Canada could maintain the size of its manpower contribution—at the cost of major ethnic, social, and regional divisions.
When the Imperial War Cabinet met again in June 1918, Borden made clear his utter dissatisfaction, blaming the failures of the past year not on the soldiers but on “the lack of foresight, lack of preparation, and . . . defects of system and organization.” Privately, he noted that Currie had given him “an awful picture of the situation among the British. Says incompetent officers not removed, officers too casual, too cocksure.”[21] “For God’s sake,” he bluntly told the Imperial War Cabinet, “let us get down to earnest endeavor and hold this line until the Americans can come in and help us to sustain it till the end.”[22]
Henry Borden, who accompanied his uncle, the prime minister, to England in June 1918, was present when the members of the Imperial War Cabinet gathered before going into one of their meetings. “I do not recall the statement of Mr. Lloyd George which provoked my uncle’s remarks,” he later wrote, “but I have never forgotten his words, the pointed finger, his voice shaking with emotion: ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I want to tell you that if ever there is a repetition of the battle of Passchendaele, not a Canadian soldier will leave the shores of Canada so long as the Canadian people entrust the government of their country to my hands.’”[23]
It was strong language, and not the sort of thing that British politicians were accustomed to hearing from their Dominion counterparts. But Lloyd George was delighted, because he agreed with Borden’s criticisms of British army commanders, and responded by establishing a Committee of Prime Ministers within the Imperial War Cabinet to review war strategy and recommend future policy. With Lloyd George himself in the chair, the Committee sought to assert the supremacy of the politicians over the generals by requiring them to provide detailed explanations of past failures and projections of future plans. In truth, the Committee’s success was limited because people understandably doubted if politicians understood war better than generals, and Haig enjoyed the strong personal support of the king.
Nevertheless, the creation of the Imperial War Cabinet and the Committee of Prime Ministers demonstrated dramatically the change in Anglo-Canadian relations brought about by the war. It had been a long time coming and had taken the prospect of British defeat and the clever opportunism of Lloyd George to bring about the recognition of Canada’s right to a voice in imperial policy-making. It was a significant step forward, although it came too late to be of much importance in the war. Germany was on the brink of collapse, and within weeks, the British and Dominion leaders were discussing peace terms.
1. Borden to Perley, January 4, 1916, quoted in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 192.
2. Cited in Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 275.
3. Quoted in Stacey, 162.
4. Quoted in Stacey, 153–54.
5. Borden, speaking in the House of Commons in 1912, quoted in Stacey, 164.
6. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 71.
7. Wood, 72.
8. Stacey, 168.
9. Quoted in Stacey, 154.
10. Quoted in Stacey, 184.
11. Quoted in Stacey, 189.
12. Quoted in Stacey, 190.
13. Borden to Perley, January 4, 1916, quoted in Stacey, 192.
14. Bonar Law was appointed chancellor of the exchequer (minister of finance) in the new government and was succeeded at the Colonial Office by Walter Long, whose primary interest was the problem of Ireland.
15. David Lloyd, War Memoirs, quoted in Stacey, 103.
16. Quoted in Cook, Warlords, 88.
17. Cf. Brian Douglas Tennyson, Canadian Relations with South Africa: A Diplomatic History (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), 45–48.
18. Stacey, 205.
19. Quoted in Stacey, 210.
20. Stacey, 216.
21. Borden diary, quoted in Brown and Cook, 284.
22. Quoted in Brown and Cook, 284.
23. Quoted in Borden, Letters to Limbo, vi.
Chapter 11
Partners in a Common Cause
Even war itself would be cheaply purchased if, in a great and noble cause, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.
—Joseph Chamberlain, 1898[1]
Despite the fact that the Conservative party had won the 1911 election largely by means of an emotional campaign denouncing Laurier’s inadequate support for the mother country and opposing reciprocity with the United States, Borden wasted no time in reassuring Canada’s most important neighbor that his government was not anti-American.
Indeed, in a speech at Halifax in November 1911, he enunciated what came to be known as the “linchpin” concept of Canada’s nascent foreign policy: the notion that Canada had a special role to play in bridging the Anglo-American relationship. “Canada’s voice and influence,” he declared, “should always be for harmony . . . between our Empire and the great Republic and I believe that she will always be a bond of abiding friendship between them.”[2]
He hadn’t factored in the impact of a global war. When the United States failed to protest Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in August 1914, which most Canadians regarded as the real justification for their participation in the war, they were shocked. As Hugh Keenleyside said in a 1929 study of Canadian-American relations, Canadians “did not expect the United States to enter the war, but they did expect a protest from the government that had so often and so emphatically proclaimed its allegiance to the principles of international law.”[3] The declaration by Newton D. Baker, President Wilson’s Secretary of War, that because of its neutrality the United States was “now in the dominant moral position in the world,” was greeted with ridicule by Canadians who felt that they, rather than the Americans, “had recognized and accepted the task of fighting to maintain the moral standards of civilization.”[4] This contempt—for such it became—grew with time as the United States clung to neutrality “while long lists of wounded and dead and missing were filling Ca
nadian newspapers.”[5]
Incidents such as the visit of a German cargo submarine to Baltimore in July 1916 to load nickel—vital in the production of armored plating—also shocked Canadians for its insensitivity and real significance because metal mined by an American company in Sudbury, Ontario, and shipped from what was supposed to be a neutral port would likely be used against Canadian soldiers. Even more annoying was the American response to U-53, the first German combat submarine to cross the Atlantic, when it visited Newport, Rhode Island, in October 1916. After being welcomed by officers of the U.S. Navy and after offering tours to the general public, it sailed out and sank five Allied merchant vessels just off the coast. Two U.S. naval ships passively witnessed the sinking of one of them but did not attempt to prevent the attack because that would have been a violation of U.S. neutrality. A passenger liner sailing from New York to Halifax rescued the survivors.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 21