The Canadian conscription plebiscite

On Monday 27 April 1942 voters across Canada answered a single question: “Are you in favour of releasing the Government from any obligation arising out of any past commitments restricting the methods of raising men for military service?” Popular chronologies say that the plebiscite “went in favour of conscription”. That is a simplification. The vote did not introduce conscription for service overseas; it merely freed the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King from its promise that there would be no such conscription. The first conscripts were sent to fight in Europe only in November 1944. It is true, on the other hand, that the main opponents were French-speaking Canadians, though not only they.

A promise to be lifted

In September 1939, when Canada declared war on Germany, the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition both gave assurances that they would not introduce conscription for overseas service. The memory of the crisis of 1917, when conscription had divided the country along linguistic lines, was still vivid, and the promise was made above all to the people of Quebec. The National Resources Mobilization Act of June 1940 introduced conscription, but only for home defence. Only volunteers went overseas.

By the turn of 1941 and 1942 the pressure from advocates of “total war” had become so strong that King decided to put the question to the voters. The announcement of the plebiscite, the defeat of the Conservative leader Arthur Meighen in a by-election in Toronto and the parliamentary disputes over the plebiscite bill filled the winter of 1942. The question deliberately made no mention of conscription or of Europe. The government asked only for freedom of action, without saying whether or when it would use it.

The campaign

The Liberals and Conservatives, the English-language press and veterans’ organisations all supported a “yes”. In Toronto the so-called Committee for Total War – the “Two Hundred”, a group of wealthy citizens – paid for newspaper advertisements in favour of “total war”. Even the Communist Party of Canada, banned in 1940, campaigned for “yes”: after the German attack on the Soviet Union it had become an ardent supporter of the war and set up committees named after its leader, Tim Buck. The government ran an information campaign in Quebec but did not formally campaign, because it would then have had to give equal resources to the other side.

On the “no” side stood the League for the Defence of Canada (Ligue pour la défense du Canada), founded at the beginning of the year by Quebec nationalists. Its secretary was the journalist André Laurendeau, and Henri Bourassa, a veteran of the fight against conscription in 1917, spoke at its rallies. The League printed leaflets in both official languages, and its views were championed by the Montreal daily Le Devoir. The public broadcaster Radio-Canada gave it no airtime because it was not a political party, so the League bought broadcasts on private stations. Its slogan recalled the words of the minister Ernest Lapointe, who had died in 1941 and who in 1939 had promised that conscription for overseas service would “never” be introduced. The Premier of Quebec, Adélard Godbout, a Liberal and an ally of King, publicly leaned towards “no” and was rebuked for it by his colleagues in Ottawa. Most of the French-speaking federal ministers defended a “yes” without much enthusiasm.

The campaign took place against the background of a disastrous spring in the Pacific. The Japanese had overrun the Dutch East Indies, in April their carriers attacked Ceylon, and on 9 April the defenders of Bataan surrendered in the Philippines. Canadians remembered the two battalions lost at Hong Kong in December 1941, and in British Columbia there were fears of an attack on the coast. For the English-speaking majority, the argument that the government could not have its hands tied was self-evident in this situation. For many French-speaking Canadians the war remained Britain’s affair, and the promise of 1939 was an agreement made with their province which the rest of the country had no right to revoke by a majority vote.

The result

About 70 per cent of those eligible went to the polls. Tallies of the results differ slightly depending on whether they include the soldiers’ votes and what corrections were applied to them: between about 64 and 66 per cent of voters, close to 3 million people, answered “yes”, and just over 1.5 million “no”. About 80 per cent of the votes cast in the armed forces, at home and overseas, were “yes”.

Behind these figures lay a deep rift. In Ontario 84 per cent voted to release the government from its promise, in British Columbia and Manitoba about 80 per cent each, and on Prince Edward Island almost 83 per cent. In Quebec about 72–73 per cent of voters, close to a million people, answered “no”. Since the English-speaking ridings of Montreal and the Eastern Townships voted “yes”, opposition among the province’s French-speaking inhabitants was even stronger. Outside Quebec, six ridings with French-speaking majorities in New Brunswick and Ontario voted “no”, as did several prairie ridings populated largely by immigrants of German and Ukrainian origin, among them Vegreville in Alberta and Rosthern in Saskatchewan. Quebec was the only province that rejected the government’s request as a whole.

King had hoped that “yes” would win in all nine provinces. The result worried him: legally he had gained freedom of action, but politically he had been given proof that the country was divided over conscription exactly as it had been in 1917. The League for the Defence of Canada announced that French-speaking Canadians had not released the government from the promise that had been made precisely to them.

Aftermath

In May 1942 the government introduced Bill 80 in Parliament, striking out of the Mobilization Act the ban on sending conscripts outside Canada. The Minister of Public Works, Arthur Cardin, resigned from the cabinet in protest. In June King summed up his policy in the House of Commons with a formula that went down in history: “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”. In July the bill passed the House of Commons by 158 votes to 58, and in the summer it received royal assent. The Minister of National Defence, James Ralston, a supporter of conscription, considered the Prime Minister’s approach too cautious and submitted a letter of resignation. King did not accept it, but kept it for later. In the autumn some opponents of conscription, among them the MP Maxime Raymond and Laurendeau, founded the Bloc populaire canadien party in Quebec.

Place in the war

The plebiscite postponed the crisis by two and a half years. During that time the Canadian Army fought in Sicily, Italy and Normandy with volunteers alone, and conscripts raised under the Mobilization Act left the country for the first time in August 1943, in the expedition to the island of Kiska in the Aleutians, which the Japanese had already abandoned. When, in the autumn of 1944, heavy infantry losses exhausted the reserves, King first accepted Ralston’s resignation, which he had been holding since 1942, and then on 22 November agreed to send more than ten thousand conscripts to Europe. Few of them reached front-line units before the war ended.

27 April 1942 was thus the day on which the English-speaking majority gave the government a mandate and the French-speaking minority made clear that it did not. King decided not to use that mandate until he absolutely had to. This tactic cost the army months of uncertainty, but it avoided a repeat of 1917: Canada came through the war without a split in the governing party and without bloody riots, and its war effort, voluntary almost to the end, was one of the largest among the Allied nations.