Answer questions separately, paragraph will be fine as long as the questions is completely and clearly answered. 

Textbook Reading: HCP, Ch8 (the file I attached)

Learning Pod Discussion:  UCM on Tom Thomson

“Painting Canada”: Immersing a Nation in Place

Theme: Our discussion will examine the development of a ‘new’ CDN identity that emerged out of the angst of diminishing British-CDN attachments in the early 20th century. How did the desire for belonging of a new generation find expression in ‘place’ within the artistic expression of Thomson (and by extension the Group of Seven)?

For this week you should cover the following content: 

– All of the top tabs entitled “Tragedy”, “Portraits”, “Landscapes”, “Artists’ Worlds”, and “Investigations” and all of the associated side tabs

– You should get a good sampling of the ‘primary documents’ (at least two from each ‘category’ of documents (ie: “Diaries, Journals or Reminiscences, “Letters”, “Magazines”, “Government Documents”, etc.) that are associated with each side-tab. 

– You might also want to supplement your exposure to Thomson’s art by doing a google search. 

Questions to consider as you read through the site:

1. How would you describe Canadian society in the early 20th century?

               – rural to urban; British norms to something else; farming to industrial life; fixed society to fluid relations; poverty (in the recession) to affluence (of the early 1900s)

2. What did Algonquin Park represent and why was it so important to Thomson and later to Canadians? Why the shift in interests from timber to tourism? 

          – places like AP made up the “New Ontario”; these “wilderness” places were seen as therapy to cure the ills of city living; how does this represent the changing nature of CDN society (urbanizing, industrializing, affluence, etc)?  How does this suggest that Ontarians wanted to protect “their own” land and to see themselves in this nature? 

3. Describe Thomson’s artistic style? How did it differ from traditional forms of art? How did the new art form represent a distinctly Canadian identity?

               – consider brush strokes, vibrant bold colours, blurred lines, limited visible forms of human experience, etc.  What did this form allow CDNs to do when interpreting the art?  Look at some examples of TT’s artwork to explore these themes.

4. What are the three different theories on the cause of Thomson’s death? Which one do you find most plausible? Why? 

                 – list the three theories and discuss their merits; if you were a detective, which one would you have chosen?

5. Why are the circumstances surrounding Thomson’s death still of interest to Canadians? What is the importance of Thomson’s work (and the broader work of the so-called “Group of Seven” painters) in the early formation of Canadian nationalism?

             – how does TT’s artwork serve as a ‘proxy’ for CDN identity (and nationalism)?  Can you see how it allows for CDNs to negotiate their identity in and through the art’s interpretation?  How does TT’s life, artwork and death contribute to the dialogue that CDNs were having (and continue to have) on the uniqueness of the CDN experience/culture?  Where do you ‘ground’ your identity as a CDN (or in relation to this identity as a student of Canada)?

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 322 12/23/15 5:08 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 323 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 324 12/23/15 5:09 PM

325

8 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 325 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 326 12/23/15 5:09 PM

3278 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 327 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 328 12/23/15 5:09 PM

3298 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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?

901491_08_Ch08.indd 329 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 330 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 331 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 332 12/23/15 5:09 PM

3338 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 333 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 334 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 335 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 336 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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…

901491_08_Ch08.indd 337 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 338 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 339 12/23/15 5:09 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 340 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 341 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 342 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 343 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 344 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3458 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 345 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 346 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3478 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

(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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 347 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 348 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3498 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 349 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 350 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3518 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 351 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 352 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 353 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 354 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 355 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 356 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3578 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 357 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 358 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 359 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 360 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 361 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 362 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3638 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 363 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 364 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3658 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 365 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 366 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3678 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 367 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 368 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3698 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 369 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 370 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3718 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 371 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 372 12/23/15 5:10 PM

3738 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 373 12/23/15 5:10 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 374 12/23/15 5:11 PM

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.

901491_08_Ch08.indd 375 12/23/15 5:11 PM

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?

901491_08_Ch08.indd 376 12/23/15 5:11 PM

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

901491_08_Ch08.indd 377 12/23/15 5:12 PM

• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Introduction

Understanding History
The Value of History
The Elusive Fact
The Conventions of History
New Interpretations

• 1 | The Beginnings

Timeline
The First Arrivals
The First Nations Population around 1500
The First Peoples: A Regional Introduction
The First Arrivals from Europe
Europe around 1500
The European Entry into North America
The Impact of Disease on the Aboriginal Peoples
European Contact and the Development of Cultural Conflict
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 2 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

Timeline
The First European Communities
Newfoundland
The French Maritime Region to 1667
Acadia after 1670
Canada Fights for Survival
Canada, 1663–1760
Women in New France
Common Life and Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 3 | Struggling for a Continent, 1627–1763

Timeline
The Beginnings of Overland Exploration
The “Pays d’en Haut”
Lower Louisiana
Upper Louisiana
Beyond the Formal Empires: Hudson Bay and the Prairies
Acadia and Nova Scotia
The First Three Anglo–French Wars
The Seven Years War
The Conquest and Its Aftermath
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 4 | Becoming and Remaining British, 1759–1815

Timeline
From the Proclamation to the Rebellion
The First American Civil War
Accommodating the Loyalists
Reinventing British North America
Immigration and Settlement, 1790–1815
The War of 1812
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 5 | Relying on Resources, 1815–1840

Timeline
The Resource Economy
The Staple Resources
The Mercantile System
Immigration
The Resource Society
Religion and Education
Colonial Culture
The Politics of the Elite
Reform and Rebellion
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 6 | Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885

Timeline
The Mobile Society
From Mercantilism to Free Trade
The Rise of Industrialism
Westward
Responsible Government and the Reorientation of Politics
The New Imperial Relationship
Victorian Society
The Creation of Cultural Infrastructure
The Road to Confederation
Adding New Territory
The Development of National Policies
The Quest for Regional and National Identity
Religion and the Churches
Cultural Life
The Struggle for the West
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 7 | Becoming Modern, 1885–1915

Timeline
The Developing Political and Constitutional System
The Economic Infrastructure
Another Round of Industrialization
Natural Resources
Urban and Rural Canada
Other Identities
Culture
Imperialism, Reform, and Racism
Short Bibliography
Study Questions
8 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945
Timeline
Returning to “Normalcy”
Regional Protest in the 1920s
The Depression and Responses to It
Canadian Society between the Wars
Canadian Culture between the Wars
World War II
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 9 | Prospering Together, 1945–1960

Timeline
Affluence
The Cold War
The Baby Boom and the Suburban Society
Immigration
Aboriginal People
The Growth of the State
The Shape of Politics
French Canada after World War II
Federal–Provincial Relations
The Rise of Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 10 | Edging towards the Abyss, 1958–1972

Timeline
The “Radical Sixties”
A Still Buoyant Economy
Political Leadership
Immigration Reform
The Beginning of International Drift
The Expansion of the Welfare State
Quebec
The Nation and Quebec
Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 11 | Coming Apart, 1972–1992

Timeline
The Problems of Liberal Federalist Nationalism
The Shape of Federal Politics
The Provinces, the Constitution, and the Charter of Rights
The Rise of Aboriginal Rights
The Economy
Canadian Society
Immigration
Canadian Culture
International Affairs
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 12 | Freefalling into the Twenty-First Century, 1992–2001

Timeline
Politics
The Constitution
The Economy
Globalization
External Affairs
Canadian Society
Canadian Culture
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• 13 | Into the New Millennium

Homeland Security
The Tale of Two Mad Cows
Softwood Lumber
Energy
Global Issues
Canadian Politics
The Canadian Economy
Canadian Society and Culture in the Meltdown Era
Conclusion
Short Bibliography
Study Questions

• Epilogue | The Speed and Balance of Canadian History

The Speed of History
History in the Balance
Notes

• References
• Index