Canada declares war on Germany

On 10 September 1939 Canada found itself at war with Germany. The day before, both houses of the Canadian parliament had approved the country’s participation in the war at Britain’s side, and overnight the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King prepared an order in council which on Sunday 10 September was approved in England by King George VI, acting on this occasion as King of Canada. Canada entered the war a week after Britain. The delay was not the result of hesitation, for participation in the war had been settled earlier. It was meant to show that the dominion decided for itself and that in 1939, unlike in 1914, it was not entering the war automatically by virtue of a decision taken in London.

It is usually said that Mackenzie King declared war “after it had been unanimously approved by both houses of parliament”. This needs two qualifications. In the House of Commons there was no recorded vote and the motion was adopted without a formal division, but there was no unanimity: the leader of the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, James Shaver Woodsworth, spoke against it, and several members from Quebec attempted an amendment limiting Canada’s part in the war. And formally it was not the prime minister who declared war, but the king, on the advice of the Canadian government.

From 1914 to 1939

In August 1914 Canada was at war the moment Britain declared war. As a self-governing colony it had no foreign policy of its own, and no one in Ottawa asked whether it wanted to fight. The country sent more than 400,000 soldiers overseas and lost some 60,000 dead, and the introduction of conscription for overseas service in 1917 provoked the deepest crisis in its history. French-speaking Canadians, concentrated in Quebec, were overwhelmingly opposed to it. The memory of that rift later guided the whole of Mackenzie King’s policy.

After the war Canada gained independence step by step. In 1922, during the Chanak crisis, which ended with the Armistice of Mudanya, King refused to give the British automatic support and replied that parliament would decide. The Imperial Conference of 1926 recognised the dominions as autonomous communities equal in status with Britain, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 gave this the force of law. Canada thus had the right to decide on war and peace for itself, although some lawyers held that since Canada and Britain shared a monarch, a war declared in his name also included Canada.

For years King avoided commitments. In June 1937 he met Adolf Hitler in Berlin and came away from the conversation convinced that the chancellor did not want war. He told the British that they should not count on Canada taking part in a continental war, yet privately he had no doubt that if Britain were drawn into a great war, Canada would stand by her. In March 1939, after the seizure of Prague, he declared in the House of Commons that Canada would come to Britain’s aid if bombs fell on London. In the spring of 1939 both he and the leader of the Conservative opposition, Robert Manion, publicly pledged not to introduce conscription for service overseas. In May and June 1939 George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Canada, and the enthusiasm with which they were received showed how strong the ties with the Crown were.

The first week of September

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, the government in Ottawa immediately put the country on a war footing. The army, navy and air force were placed on active service, the raising of the volunteer Canadian Active Service Force began, and under the War Measures Act of 1914 the government introduced emergency regulations for the defence of the country, censorship and price controls. On the same day the cabinet announced that if Britain became engaged in war, it would ask parliament for authority for “effective co-operation by Canada at the side of Great Britain”.

On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. That same day Australia and New Zealand entered the war, followed three days later by South Africa. On 3 September King gave a radio address in which he spoke of the “forces of evil” unleashed in the world and announced that parliament would meet the following Thursday. He gave assurances that Canada’s participation would be voluntary.

The week had a practical side as well. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed the neutrality of the United States on 5 September and imposed an arms embargo on the belligerents, but Canada was not on the list of nations at war. For a few days the dominion could therefore legally buy equipment in the United States. At the same time this cast doubt on Canada’s loyalty to Britain, which according to some historians hastened the government’s moves in Ottawa.

The debate in parliament

Parliament, which had not been due to meet until October, was summoned to a special session on 7 September. The Speech from the Throne was read by the governor-general, John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir. In it the government set out its intention to enter the war and a package of war legislation. No separate bill declaring war was introduced: parliament’s consent was to be expressed by adopting the address in reply to the Speech from the Throne. Declaring war remained a prerogative of the Crown, but the government undertook not to exercise it without the consent of the houses.

On 8 September King spoke in the House of Commons for several hours. He talked of Hitler’s aggression against one country after another and of Canada entering the war of its own free will, as a free nation of the British Commonwealth. The key speech, however, was given on 9 September by his closest colleague, the minister of justice Ernest Lapointe, leader of the Quebec Liberals. He assured French Canadians that the government would not introduce conscription for overseas service, and warned that neutrality was impossible, because an attempt to maintain it would split a country whose majority wanted to fight. Robert Manion, on behalf of the Conservatives, supported the government and repeated his opposition to conscription.

Woodsworth, a pacifist since the First World War, spoke against the war. His party was divided, and some of its members supported limited participation in the war. Several members from Quebec, among them Liguori Lacombe, backed an amendment opposing Canadian participation in a war outside the country’s borders. It won no wider support. On 9 September the address was adopted first by the Senate and in the evening by the House of Commons, without a recorded vote.

The proclamation of 10 September

That same night the cabinet passed an order in council asking the king to issue a proclamation of a state of war with the German Reich. On Sunday 10 September the Canadian High Commissioner in London, Vincent Massey, took the document to George VI at Royal Lodge, Windsor. According to King’s later statement in the House of Commons, the government received word of the king’s approval at 11.15 a.m. The proclamation, signed in the king’s name by the governor-general, was published in a special edition of the Canada Gazette: a state of war with the German Reich “exists and has existed from the tenth day of September 1939”. On the same day Roosevelt extended the American neutrality proclamation to Canada.

Leonard Brockington, a lawyer and the first chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, captured the meaning of this procedure in a phrase that found its way into the textbooks: the King of England had not asked Canadians to declare war for him; they had asked the King of Canada to declare it for them. Canada afterwards declared war on each enemy separately – on Italy in June 1940 and on Japan in December 1941, even before the United States.

Place in the war

King wanted a “limited” war: one division overseas, another at home, and above all supplies of food, raw materials and armaments. As early as 16 September the first HX convoy sailed from Halifax for Britain, escorted by Canadian destroyers. Major General Andrew McNaughton’s 1st Canadian Infantry Division reached Britain in December 1939. On 26 September the British proposed that Canada become the flying school of the Empire, and in December the agreement on the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was signed in Ottawa. By 1945 more than 130,000 airmen from all over the Commonwealth had passed through it.

The pledge of 9 September shaped Canadian war policy for five years. It helped the Liberals defeat Maurice Duplessis, an opponent of the war, in Quebec in October 1939, and to win the federal election in March 1940. After the fall of France conscription for home defence was introduced, but only volunteers were sent to fight overseas. In 1942 King obtained release from his pledge in a plebiscite, although Quebec voted against, and coined the formula “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”. Only in November 1944, after heavy losses in Italy and Normandy, did he send conscripts to the front.

Canada went from having small armed forces to being one of the most important allies in the war. Some 1.1 million people served in its armed forces, and some 42,000–45,000 were killed or died. Canadians defended Hong Kong in December 1941, suffered heavy losses in the Dieppe Raid in August 1942, fought in Sicily and Italy, landed in Normandy on Juno Beach on 6 June 1944, and in 1945 liberated the Netherlands. The Royal Canadian Navy, which in September 1939 had little more than a dozen ships, was by the end of the war one of the largest navies in the world and bore a large share of convoy escort in the North Atlantic. All of this began with the week in which, for the first time in its history, Canada decided on war for itself.