Mackenzie King thought, or at least hoped, that the conscription issue had been buried in an all-party agreement, at the war’s outset, that voluntary enlistment was the best policy. But by early 1942 that consensus had disintegrated. Arthur Meighen had resigned from the Senate to resume the leadership of the Conservative party.
Relinquished fifteen years earlier. His policy was conscription, a policy with a growing appeal in English-speaking Canada. King decided that the only way to undercut Meighen was to hold a national plebiscite asking the people to release the government from its pledge not to introduce conscription. There was some resistance to the plan among his Quebec ministers, but Louis St. Laurent, who had replaced Ernest Lapointe, accepted the new policy. In English Canada the forces supporting an affirmative vote were overwhelming. Among French-speaking Canadians, who felt betrayed, opposition was even more powerful. The outcome of the first crisis was exactly what Mackenzie King had most feared: a country starkly divided along cultural lines. As he looked at the returns, he confided to his diary:
I thought of Durham’s report on the state of Quebec when he arrived there after the Rebellion of 1837-38, and said he found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state. That would be the case in Canada, as applied to Canada as a whole, unless the whole question of conscription from now on is approached with the utmost care.
On D-Day—June 6, 1944—the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade went ashore at Bernieres-sur-Mer, Normandy, marking the long-awaited beginning of the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany’s domination. Photo by Gilbert A. Milne.
Tank Advance, Italy: an oil (1944) by Lawren R Harris. The artist, son of Group of Seven founder Lawren Harris, served with the 5th Division in Italy as an official war artist. The inscription on the reverse reads, in part, “Tanks of the 3rd Cdn Regt (gghg) moving into action... in the Melfa River area. Ruins of Abbe di Montecassino on Monastery Hill in background.”
King, with his sense of history, had not yet played his final card. Though his government had been released from the no-conscription pledge, the Prime Minister contended that the time had not yet arrived to jettison the voluntary system. There were some rumblings in his cabinet: J. L. Ralston, the Minister of National Defence, offered his resignation, but it was not accepted. King prevailed with a policy that was a masterpiece of calculated ambiguity: “Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.” The meaning of “necessary” was left undefined.
For some “necessary” meant the obvious: if the voluntary-recruitment system failed to produce the required reinforcements, compulsion would be adopted. By the autumn of 1944, the military was convinced that that point had been reached. The Minister of National Defence agreed. But for King “national unity”—and Liberal-party unity—was a prior necessity. If he accepted Ralston’s advice, he would lose his Quebec following. King concluded that one last effort at voluntary recruitment should be made. Ralston disagreed, and King now, ruthlessly, accepted his resignation. Ralston was replaced by the popular General A. G. L. McNaughton who was not convinced that the voluntary system had been exhausted. He would try once more.
McNaughton failed too. If the men were there, they refused to volunteer. King now convinced himself that an about-face was necessary, for if conscription was not adopted, some of the army’s leaders would challenge the authority of the civil government. He had shown his good faith to the French Canadians when he sacked Ralston, now he hoped that the French Canadians would support him. Louis St.
The “Bren Gun Girl,” one of thousands of women who worked in the war industries during the Second World War, admires her handiwork during a cigarette break at the James Inglis plant in Toronto. Both the job and the cigarette reveal something of women s changing status in the 1940s. Still (May 1944) from a National Film Board documentary.
Laurent, who had never been committed to the no-conscription pledge, accepted his leader’s position. The decision was made to dispatch men to the front who had been conscripted for home service. By the war’s end only about 2,500 men had departed. But the second conscription crisis had been overcome, just as the first had been in 1942, by King’s political skill and good luck. By administering the hated medicine in two doses. King had managed to so dilute it as to avoid a repetition of 1917. He had maintained the country’s unity, though there were those who were disenchanted in both French and English Canada. His reward was re-election in 1945.
King’s 1945 victory, however, was more than an endorsement of his wartime leadership. It was also, at least partly, due to his government’s decision to prepare for the post-war years by the adoption of social and economic policies that would, it was hoped, prevent a renewal of the Depression. The cautious pre-war beginnings of Keynesian counter-cyclical policies were to be strengthened. In 1940 an unemployment-insurance scheme had been added to the Old Age Pension Plan of 1927. In 1944 a system of family allowances was introduced, giving mothers a monthly cheque earmarked for child care. A firm basis for the welfare state was thus laid. Policies to promote home building, to provide work for demobilized war veterans, and to increase federal aid to health care all indicated a turn towards a new involvement by the federal government in social and economic affairs.
There was more than new economic thinking behind the Liberals’ new-found zeal for social security. There was also fear that the impressive increase in popular support for the CCF would result in a repetition of the party fragmentation that had followed the Great War. In 1943 the CCF had won enough seats to form the Opposition in Ontario. The following year the party in Saskatchewan, led by the
John Grierson came to Canada from Great Britain in 1939 and directed the founding of the National Film Board. His brilliance as a documentary filmmaker was soon put to use creating the “Canada Carries On” series, designed to stimulate wartime patriotism. He is seen here with poster designer Harry Mayerovitch.
Dynamic and imaginative Reverend T. C. (Tommy)
Douglas, formed the first socialist government in
North America. The public-opinion polls revealed the party’s rising strength at the federal level. King, and his party, moved to cut off the threat on the left by adopting some of the ccf’s most popular policies. As the 1945 election results showed, the tactic was an effective one. King remained the master 'of Canadian politics as the country moved from war to peace.
World History
