Canada's Great War, 1914-1918

by Brian Douglas Tennyson

  16. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 77.

  17. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 90.

  18. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 91, 95.

  19. Isitt, From Victoria, 2. Forty soldiers were arrested and marched at bayonet point into a shed, where they received summary sentences ranging from seven to twenty-eight days’ field punishment. A dozen others were remanded into custody and court martialed after arrival in Vladivostok. All but one were convicted and sentenced to prison at hard labor for periods ranging from one to three years, but as the Canadians prepared to return home and questions were being raised in parliament over the legality of deploying conscripts, their sentences were quietly commuted. Isitt, 104.

  20. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 177.

  21. Quoted in Isitt, From Victoria, 223.

  22. An immigrant from England, he had been in the army since December 1914 and died on March 13, 1919.

  23. Stacey, 284.

  24. Sebastian Faulks, The Tragic Englishman (London: Random House, 1997), 200.

  25. English, Borden, 128.

  26. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 103.

  27. Quoted in Brown and Cook, Canada 1896–1921, 292.

  28. Brown and Cook, 293.

  Chapter 16

  North American Nation

  The main business of Canada in foreign relations is to remain friendly with the United States while preserving its own self-respect.

  —Sir Clifford Sifton[1]

  Everything changed with the federal election in September 1921, when the Liberal Party led by William Lyon Mackenzie King returned to office after ten years in opposition. The Liberals did not win a majority in parliament, however, but only a plurality, their strongest support being in Quebec. The second largest group was the Progressive Party, which had only come into existence in the previous couple of years. It was largely comprised of farmers—many of them disillusioned Liberals—workers, and others who were angry about the Borden-Meighen government’s wartime policies and proposed postwar economic policies.

  King was an ambitious young man from Kitchener (formerly Berlin), Ontario. He earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University and served as the first deputy minister when Laurier created the federal Department of Labour in 1900. Elected to parliament in 1907, he became the first full-time minister of labour but went down to defeat in the 1911 election. He sought re-election in a Toronto suburban constituency as an anti-conscription Laurier Liberal in the notorious 1917 federal election and, not surprisingly, was defeated. Taking the long view, which King did throughout his career, he knew he would be rewarded for this sacrificial act when Laurier died or retired, because the next leader of the Liberal party would have to be someone who had been loyal to the old man in 1917 but was not French. There weren’t many men who met those qualifications.

  King had spent the war years working as a labor relations consultant, mostly in the United States, where he advised and became a trusted friend of John D. Rockefeller, most notably and effectively after the notorious Ludlow massacre at Rockefeller’s coal mines in Colorado in 1914. King turned down the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation because he was biding his time until the Liberal leadership became vacant, but Rockefeller helped him to obtain consulting contracts and was a generous supporter for many years.[2] When King became prime minister in 1921, he was and remains the best educated man to hold that office. He was also the one with the best knowledge and practical experience of the United States.

  King emphatically did not agree with Borden’s view of autonomy within the empire, or with Meighen’s slightly more daring concept of autonomy with special conditions. Like Laurier, he believed that autonomy could not be shared, either by Britain or by Canada. He was also determined, as he said repeatedly over the years, that Canadians would make their own decisions, although that did not preclude cooperation. This view extended to Canada’s relationship with the League of Nations, membership in which also infringed on Canadian autonomy. And he was always well aware that he was operating in the 1920s, not in the prewar or war years, and was leading a minority government dominated by Quebec and dependent on the support of the western agrarian Progressives. There was very little taste in Quebec or western Canada after the war for imperial cooperation or an active foreign policy.

  Within months of taking office, King went to Washington to negotiate revisions to the Rush-Bagot Treaty, an 1817 Anglo-American agreement that limited naval armaments on the Great Lakes and other shared waterways. In the end, the revisions were not made, but King had made it clear to the British government that, if they were, he expected full powers, without British participation, to sign agreements that only concerned Canadian issues. Two years later, Canada did negotiate an agreement regulating the Pacific halibut fishery, and King again insisted, over vigorous British objections, on having his Minister of Marine and Fisheries sign it alone on behalf of Canada. The British yielded, fearing that if they did not King would go further and establish diplomatic relations with the United States, thereby destroying the concept of a common foreign policy.

  That came four years later anyway, when the 1926 Imperial Conference agreed that Britain and the Dominions were all fully autonomous nations equal in status, linked together in what was now being called the commonwealth only by history and allegiance to a common Crown. King immediately followed up by appointing a minister to Washington, and, because the 1926 conference had also redefined the role of the governor general so that he represented the Crown but not the government, Canada and Britain exchanged high commissioners—the title given to intra-Commonwealth ambassadors—in 1928. Other diplomatic appointments soon followed.

  While most Canadians took pride in what they now thought was their very clear sovereign status, achieved without a revolution, Americans could be forgiven if they found the situation confusing, assuming that they thought about it at all. Was Canada part of the British Empire or was it an independent nation? The answer, which was not very helpful, was that it was both, although the empire was morphing into the commonwealth. Britain and the Dominions doubtless confused matters when they described themselves as “autonomous” rather than independent, which Americans and others would have understood. But that word was too politically charged in the 1920s because it implied total separation, and it was not quite accurate anyway because all members of the commonwealth shared the common Crown.

  The first Canadian minister in Washington, Vincent Massey, was a member of a wealthy manufacturing family, a prominent Liberal (and the brother of Raymond Massey, the actor). “Travelling widely and speaking often, Massey argued for Canada’s position as a new North American nation with an ancient British allegiance, uniquely qualified to act as an interpreter and peacemaker in Anglo-American affairs.”[3] Washington responded by appointing William Phillips as the U.S. minister in Ottawa. A former undersecretary in the State Department and ambassador to Belgium, his posting to what many Americans would have regarded as a minor posting indicated that the United States government understood the importance of its relationship with its northern neighbor.

  The new importance to Canada of the United States had a profound impact upon Canada’s view of the world after the war. It sought not only to avoid conflict with the United States but to limit commonwealth and League of Nations commitments which might cause complications with the United States. Thus, just as the U.S. Senate refused to join the League because of the collective security clauses, the Canadian government worked assiduously throughout the 1920s to weaken them. In fact, if Canada can be said to have played any significant role on the world stage in the 1920s, it was in helping to destroy collective security.

  To be fair, it was only leading the other powers, with the understandable exception of France, in the direction in which they fervently wished to go. So if pulling the League’s teeth in the 1920s contributed significantly to the outbreak of the Second World War, Canada is certainly guilty of displaying excessive zeal in wielding the
pliers, but almost every other government, including that of the United States, was cheering it on.

  At the same time, Canada’s postwar governments continued to believe that Britain and the United States—the Anglo-Saxon powers as they were then called—represented the greatest force for peace and good values in the world. If the League could not guarantee peace, it was thought that Britain and the United States, acting in concert, could. And since Canada liked to think that it understood the Americans better than the British and the British better than the Americans, it clung for many years to the belief that it had a unique role to be the linchpin, or interpreter and mediator, between them. It should be noted that neither Britain nor the United States ever encouraged Canada to play this role and always dealt directly with each other, although Canada often sought to be helpful.

  The old days, when Canadians thought the only threat to their security came from the United States, were clearly over. Well, perhaps not quite. The Department of National Defence continued into the 1930s to have only one war plan, which assumed an American invasion. It proposed Canadian counterattacks on American border cities that might serve as bases for an invasion, while waiting—no doubt with fingers firmly crossed—for the British army to arrive. If this sounds ludicrous, the U.S. army also still had a plan for the conquest of Canada in the event of war with Britain, after which Canada would be absorbed and carved up into new states and territories.

  But the existence of these plans should not be interpreted to mean that anyone seriously thought that either an Anglo-American or a Canadian-American war was even conceivable. And anyone in Canada who thought the British army would come to the defense of Canada in the event of an American attack clearly had not been paying attention since the turn of the century. These plans were in reality—perhaps not the ideal word in this context—just hypothetical planning exercises. Military staff needed practice in forward planning, and both countries felt very secure from the rest of the world, from which they believed they were protected by vast oceans.

  Meanwhile, Canada’s economic integration with the United States continued apace. American investment in Canada rose dramatically from about $750 million in 1914 to almost $4 billion by the end of the 1920s, double the level of British investment. Much of this investment was going into natural resource industries, the basis of the Canadian economy, because increasingly the United States needed to import natural resources like wood pulp, iron ore, and nickel. This meant that Canadian prosperity, such as it was in the 1920s, largely reflected rising exports of these products to the United States. American investment enabled U.S. firms to circumvent the protective tariff but also, more importantly, to gain access to the British market at the preferential tariff rate which member states of the commonwealth granted to each other.

  Often overlooked, especially by nationalistic Canadians who worried about the political implications of heavy American investment, was the fact that Canadians were investing significantly in the United States as well. In fact, on a per capita basis, Canadians invested more heavily in the United States than Americans did in Canada. W. C. Clark, the long-time Deputy Minister of the Canadian Department of Finance, later described this situation as “the most extraordinary example in world history of the financial interrelationship of two countries,” which he regarded as a good thing because it must certainly lead “to a better mutual understanding and a closer fellowship between the two countries.”[4]

  It was not just money that was moving in greater volume between the two countries. About 150,000 Canadians emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, encouraged to do so by the U.S. government, which excluded Canadians from its immigration quota system. By the end of the decade, there were 1.3 million Canadian-born people living in the United States. As J. W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, once ruefully observed, one of Canada’s major industries appeared to be “the equipping of young men in our universities for opportunities in the United States.”[5]

  Americans continued to move to Canada as well, although in lower numbers than in the prewar years. The 1931 census reported 334,574 American-born permanent residents living in Canada, out of a total population of 10.4 million, representing about 3%. It has been calculated, however, that if American temporary workers, tourists, and other travelers in Canada—according to the U. S. Department of Commerce, more than three million cars crossed into Canada for a day or more in the year 1928 alone[6]—had been included, Americans in Canada would actually have constituted about 10% of the Canadian population.[7] Whatever the precise numbers, the extraordinary free movement of people back and forth between the two countries meant that Canadians and Americans by the 1920s were “more intermarried and interrelated than any other two peoples with an international boundary between them.”[8]

  Canada was integrating culturally with the United States as well, as could be seen in the growing popularity of American magazines, radio broadcasting, and films. British immigrants to Canada in the 1920s were often surprised to discover how “American” Canada was in many ways, although the ties of kinship to the “old country” clearly remained strong as well. Some people worried about the implications of “the invasion of materialistic and low-minded Americanism,”[9] as 50 million copies of American magazines were being bought annually in Canada in the mid-1920s, outselling Canadian magazines by a large margin. Ladies Home Journal, for example, sold 152,011 copies, compared to Canadian Home Journal’s 68,054, and Saturday Evening Post sold 128,574 copies compared to Saturday Night’s 30,858. Put another way, eight American magazines were imported for every one published in Canada.

  Canadian publishers naturally complained of what they considered unfair competition because the American magazines being sold in Canada were just the surplus of large print runs. They also complained of what the long-term impact of so many American magazines might be on Canada. “Without the slightest notion of flag-waving or sloppy patriotism,” the editor of Saturday Night wrote, “it must be apparent that if we depend on these United States centers for our reading matter we might as well move our government to Washington, for under such conditions it will go there in the end. The press is a stronger cohesive agent than Parliament.”[10]

  Somewhat surprisingly, the government agreed and allowed Canadian magazine publishers to claim a substantial rebate on the tariff paid for certain paper imports; in 1931 the new Conservative government went further and slapped a protective tariff on imported magazines. The result was that American magazine sales dropped significantly and Canadian magazine sales rose. Nevertheless, when King returned to office in 1935, his government revoked the tariff, and American magazine sales quickly bounced back.[11]

  Meanwhile, radio broadcasting was the latest communication and entertainment technology in the 1920s, and the number of stations was growing rapidly throughout North America, as was the sale of radio receivers. If anything, this was an even more important cultural issue for Canadians than magazines because almost all of the major urban centers in the country were situated close to the border, meaning that American radio transmissions were easily received by most Canadians.

  In the course of the 1920s, American broadcasting became organized into national networks, giving them greater financial resources that enabled them to build more powerful transmitters and to create increasingly attractive programs. What was Canada to do? It did nothing in the 1920s, but in 1932, after much public debate, the government created the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, forerunner of today’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and by 1937 its transmissions were reaching 76% of the Canadian population.[12] It was, however, up to Canadians which programs they chose to listen to, and American programs were very popular.

  The situation was similar with the film industry. In the early days of film, there were several companies making and distributing films in Canada, but in the course of the 1920s, the Hollywood film companies acquired control of most of the movie theatres throughout Canada and naturally used them to show only their own
films. The government chose not to intervene, with the result that the Canadian film industry died, and Canadians have since lived on a steady diet of American films.[13]

  Ironically, some of the biggest film stars from the earliest times have actually been Canadian. Eminent examples include Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, Marie Dressler, Raymond Massey, Vincent Price, and, more recently, Donald Sutherland, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Christopher Plummer, and Ryan Gosling, not to mention directors like Norman Jewison, James Cameron, and David Cronenberg.

  Some Canadians have worried since the 1920s that the increasingly intimate Canadian-American relationship may have dangerous political ramifications in view of the obvious inequality in population and financial, economic and military power of the two countries. Curiously, however, in the ninety-six years since the end of the Great War, the Canadian sense of identity and distinctiveness from the United States has actually grown, despite all the modern complexities of trade, finance, and external threats. Americans no longer talk about seizing Canada, or even muse about gradually absorbing it, nor do many Canadians now debate the possible advantages of joining the United States. Each nation seems content with the relationship they have developed: close friends with much in common but an appreciation of their differences, sharing the North American continent.

  1. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 103.

  2. On King’s involvement with Rockefeller, see Kirk Hallahan, “W. L. Mackenzie King: Rockefeller’s ‘Other’ Public Relations Counselor in Colorado,” Public Relations Review 29 (2003): 401–14.