Conscription in Canada

In February 1942 conscription became, for the second time in a quarter of a century, the dominant issue in the domestic politics of Canada. Some calendars state under 19 February that “a military conscription act was passed in Canada”. That did not happen. Conscription for home defence had been in force in Canada since 1940, and in February 1942 the parliament in Ottawa was dealing with something else: a bill for a national plebiscite in which the government of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King asked voters to release it from its pledge not to send conscripts to fight overseas. The act that made this possible was not passed until the summer of 1942, and the first conscripts were sent to Europe in November 1944.

The pledge of 1939

The memory of the First World War weighed heavily on Canadian politics. In 1917 the government of Robert Borden had introduced conscription for overseas service. French-speaking Canadians were overwhelmingly opposed, and in the spring of 1918 riots broke out in Quebec City in which four people were killed by soldiers’ bullets. The Liberal Party split into English-speaking and French-speaking wings, and King, who lived through that split, made national unity the supreme value of his politics.

When Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939, both the government and the Conservative opposition undertook not to introduce conscription for overseas service. The pledge was put most emphatically in parliament by the leader of the Liberals from the province of Quebec, the Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe. It helped the Liberals defeat the anti-war Maurice Duplessis in the provincial election of October 1939 and win the federal election of March 1940. King wanted a “limited” war, based on the air force, the navy, the training of aircrew and supplies. Even so, as early as December 1939 the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, made up entirely of volunteers, reached Britain.

Conscription for home defence

The fall of France changed the situation. On 21 June 1940 parliament passed the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA). It gave the government the power to dispose of the persons and property of citizens for the defence of the country and the prosecution of the war, but expressly stipulated that conscripts could not be sent to serve outside Canada. In August 1940 a national registration of men and women was carried out. The first conscripts underwent 30 days of training, extended to four months in 1941, after which they were kept in the army for the duration of the war. The mayor of Montreal, Camillien Houde, called in August 1940 for a boycott of registration and was interned without trial under emergency regulations until 1944.

From then on the army had two categories of soldiers: volunteers, who had enlisted to serve wherever they were sent, and NRMA conscripts, who served only at home. The volunteers contemptuously called the latter “zombies”, since they were soldiers who could not fight. The conscripts were under constant pressure to “go active”, and many of them did in fact do so.

The winter of 1941–1942

At the end of 1941 the supporters of conscription for overseas service went on the offensive. According to a Gallup poll of November 1941, some 60 per cent of Canadians wanted conscripts sent overseas. On 13 November the former prime minister Arthur Meighen, in 1917 one of the authors of the conscription act and now a champion of “total war”, again became leader of the Conservative Party. The premiers of Ontario and New Brunswick declared for conscription, and the Canadian Legion, the largest veterans’ organisation, issued a manifesto, “A Call for Total War”, endorsed by hundreds of associations in English-speaking Canada.

The surrender of Hong Kong in December 1941 came as a shock. Two Canadian battalions, the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada, almost 2,000 men in all, had fought in the defence of the colony after being sent out in the autumn despite their poor training. Nearly 300 of them were killed, and the rest went into Japanese captivity, in which more than 260 more later died. The Conservatives saw this as proof of the government’s incompetence, and the government appointed a royal commission under the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Lyman Duff, to investigate the circumstances in which the battalions had been sent. At the same time Canada had five divisions of volunteers overseas and was not yet short of soldiers. The dispute was therefore less about numbers than about principles and the future.

A plebiscite instead of an act

King found a way out that allowed the decision to be postponed. On 22 January 1942 the Speech from the Throne opening the new session of parliament announced that the government would ask the voters to release it from its past commitments. A pledge made to the nation was to be lifted by the nation itself, not by the cabinet. The idea was also tactical. Meighen, who had resigned his Senate seat, was standing for the House of Commons in a by-election in the Toronto riding of York South, with conscription as his main slogan. The Liberals did not field a candidate but unofficially backed a schoolteacher from the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Joseph Noseworthy. On 9 February 1942 Noseworthy unexpectedly defeated Meighen. The same month the lawyer Louis St. Laurent, who had succeeded Lapointe (who died in November 1941) as leader of the Quebec Liberals, entered the House of Commons in a by-election in Quebec East.

In Quebec the announcement of a plebiscite was taken as preparation for breaking the pledge. At the turn of January and February nationalists, among them the journalist André Laurendeau, the MP Maxime Raymond and the young Jean Drapeau, founded the League for the Defence of Canada (Ligue pour la défense du Canada), which called for a “no” vote. Its slogan was “Never, never… said Mr Lapointe”. On 11 February the League’s first rally, at the Saint-Jacques market hall in Montreal, was addressed by Henri Bourassa, a veteran of the fight against conscription in 1917. After the rally there were clashes with the police, and according to some accounts some of the participants attacked passers-by and Jewish shops. The anti-conscription movement was not free of sympathy for Vichy France and of antisemitic feeling, although most of its supporters were simply convinced that this was not French Canadians’ war. The premier of Quebec, Adélard Godbout, an ally of King, also spoke out against conscription.

In the second half of February the House of Commons debated the plebiscite bill. Members from Quebec argued that the 1939 pledge had been made to their province and that only it could release the government from it; the Conservatives argued that the plebiscite was a subterfuge, since the government could change the law itself. According to Canadian chronologies, the House passed the bill at the end of February and it received royal assent at the beginning of March. The date of 19 February thus falls during this debate, not on the adoption of conscription.

The February disputes took place against the background of defeats in the Far East. Singapore surrendered to the Japanese, and fear of an attack on the Pacific coast gripped British Columbia. On that same 19 February President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in Washington, and on 24 February the government in Ottawa ordered the removal of all persons of Japanese origin from a 100-mile coastal strip of British Columbia. More than 20,000 people, most of them Canadian citizens, were sent to camps and settlements in the interior, against the views of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which did not regard them as a threat.

Place in the war

The plebiscite was held on 27 April 1942. Asked whether they would release the government “from any obligation arising out of any past commitments restricting the methods of raising men for military service”, between 64 and 66 per cent of those voting across the country, depending on the tally, answered “yes”, on a turnout of about 71 per cent. In Quebec about 72 per cent said “no”. King responded to this division with a formula that passed into history: “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary”. In the summer of 1942 parliament passed Bill 80, which struck out of the NRMA the ban on sending conscripts abroad. In protest the Minister of Public Works, Arthur Cardin, left the government, and in the autumn some of the nationalists founded the Bloc populaire canadien party in Quebec. The Minister of National Defence, James Ralston, a supporter of conscription, tendered his resignation, which King did not accept.

NRMA conscripts first served outside Canada in August 1943, when a brigade made up mostly of them landed on the island of Kiska in the Aleutians, which the Japanese had already abandoned. The crisis came in the autumn of 1944, when heavy infantry losses in Italy, in Normandy and in the Battle of the Scheldt exhausted the reserves of volunteers. On 1 November King dismissed Ralston and gave the defence portfolio to General Andrew McNaughton, an opponent of conscription, but volunteers were still lacking. On 22 November 1944 the government decided to send 16,000 conscripts to Europe. Just under 13,000 sailed overseas, and about 2,500 of them reached the front, of whom several dozen were killed. The Liberals lost some of their Quebec members, but the government survived and the party did not split as it had in 1917.

Canada’s road to conscription was the longest among the major Allies. Britain introduced conscription before the war and the United States in 1940, while Canada fielded an almost entirely volunteer army at the front throughout the war. Set against what was happening in the Pacific in February 1942, the conscription dispute may look like a domestic matter, but it concerned a question fundamental to a multinational dominion: could the English-speaking majority impose on the French-speaking minority the duty to fight in a war that the minority did not regard as its own? King’s answer, which consisted of putting off the decision until the last moment, preserved the unity of the country at the cost of many months of uncertainty in the army.