Opposition to Conscription in Canada and Quebec
When in August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany, Canada, as a dominion of the British Empire, was automatically bound to take part.
Robert Laird Borden, then Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, was eager to participate in the war. By Sunday, August 9, 1914, the basic orders-in-council had been proclaimed, and a war session of parliament opened just two weeks after the conflict began. Legislation was quickly passed to secure the country's financial institutions and raise tariff duties on some high-demand consumer items. The War Measures Act 1914, giving the government extraordinary powers of coercion over Canadians, was rushed through all three readings.[1]
Businessman William Price (of Price Brothers and Company -- predecessor of Resolute Forest Products) was mandated to create a training camp at Valcartier, near Quebec City. Some 126 farms were expropriated to expand the camp's area to 12,428 acres (50 square kilometres). "From the start of the conflict, a range of 1,500 targets was built, including shelters, firing positions and signs, making it the largest and most successful shooting range in the world on August 22, 1914. The camp housed 33,644 men in 1914."[2] At the time Valcartier was the largest military base in Canada.
Early in the war, Prime Minister Borden had promised not to conscript Canadians into military service.[3] However, by the summer of 1917, Canada had been at war for nearly three years. More than 130,000 Canadians belonging to the Canadian Expeditionary Force had been killed or maimed.[4] The number of volunteers continuously declined with the growing refusal to serve as cannon fodder for imperialist powers and as a result of the profound impact of the war efforts on the country's economy. There was pressure on all the commonwealth countries and British colonies to continue providing troops for the British imperial war effort, yet the government was not able to provide a convincing argument for working people to agree to sacrifice their lives for the British Empire.
The lack of enthusiasm for the war was such that the Borden government imposed conscription through the Military Service Act, August 29, 1917. It stipulated that "All the male inhabitants of Canada, of the age of eighteen years and upwards, and under sixty, not exempt or disqualified by law, and being British subjects, shall be liable to service in the Militia: Provided that the Governor General may require all the male inhabitants of Canada, capable of bearing arms, to serve in the case of a levée en masse." The law was in force through the end of the war.
Borden also decided that the best way to bring about conscription was through a wartime coalition government. He offered the Liberals equal seats at the Cabinet table in exchange for their support for conscription. After months of political manoeuvring, he announced a Union Government in October, made up of loyal Conservatives, plus a handful of pro-conscription Liberals and independent members of Parliament.
Borden was in his sixth year of his first term. In the months just prior to the election he engineered two pieces of legislation, stacking the Unionist side.
Under previous laws, soldiers were excluded from voting in wartime. The new Military Voters Act allowed all 400,000 Canadian men in uniform, including those who were under age or were British-born, to vote in the coming election.
The second piece of legislation, the Wartime Elections Act, gave women the right to vote for the first time in a federal election -- but only women who were the relatives of Canadian soldiers overseas. With these two laws, a vast new constituency of voters, the majority of whom supported the war effort and conscription, were suddenly enfranchised in time for the election. Borden's Unionists won that election with a majority of 153 seats, only three of which were from Quebec.
Posters to
mobilize women for imperialist war. Poster on left
calls on women eligible to vote under Wartime
Elections
Act to vote
for the Union government.
Conscription
Conscription went into effect January 1, 1918. Exemption boards were set up all over the country, before which a high percentage of men appealed their call-up for service. Besides Quebeckers, who as a whole opposed conscription because they had no intention of fighting for their colonial master, the British Empire, many Canadians across the country were also opposed, including anti-imperialists, farmers, unionized workers, the unemployed, religious groups and peace activists. By February 1918, 52,000 draftees had sought exemption across the country. The lack of support for the war was reiterated by the fact that of more than 400,000 men called up for service, 380,510 appealed through the various options for exemption and appeal in the Military Service Act.
Ultimately, some 125,000 Canadians -- just over a quarter of those eligible to be drafted -- were conscripted into the military. Of these, just over 24,000 were sent to Europe before the war's end.
Many Canadian men simply did not show up when they were called to report and join the army. Winnipeg was second only to Montreal in the percentage of men who did not report or defaulted -- almost 20 per cent of those conscripted compared to around 25 per cent in Montreal, according to reports published in the Winnipeg Telegram at the time. These men were pursued by the police and could receive heavy jail sentences if caught and tried.
Opposition to the War and Conscription in Quebec
Posters
aimed at getting Quebeckers to join the British Army in World
War
I.
Among
the Canadian state's clumsy chauvinist Anglo-Canadian attempts
to
recruit Quebeckers to its unjust cause of imperialist war, were
those
which exhorted them to enlist on the basis of loyalty to their
former
colonial power, France. There were also calls to oppose tyranny
by
supporting the new colonial power, Britain; and for the
people to protect themselves from foreign invasion.
On October 15, 1914, the 22nd Regiment was officially created to bolster the involvement of Quebeckers. As the only combatant unit in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) whose official language was French, the 22nd (French Canadian) Infantry Battalion, commonly referred to as the "Van Doos" (from vingt-deux, meaning 22 in French), was subject to more scrutiny than most Canadian units in the First World War. After months of training in Canada and England, the battalion finally arrived in France on September 15, 1915.[5]
In April 1916, the Van Doos participated in one of the unit's most dangerous assignments of the entire war, the Battle of St. Eloi Craters. St. Eloi was fought on a very narrow Belgian battlefield. The fierce battle resulted in heavy casualties. Following St. Eloi, the battalion prepared to take the French village of Courcelette in the Somme sector of France. The battalion suffered hundreds of casualties. To many it showed just how violent war could really be. In the months following the Somme operations, the battalion began suffering from desertion and absence without leave. According to battalion officers, the months following Courcelette witnessed a complete breakdown in troop morale. In the next 10 months, 70 soldiers were brought before a court-martial (48 for illegal absences) and several were executed by firing squad.[6]
Despite the establishment of the Van Doos, the people of Quebec, expressing their anti-war sentiment, were at the forefront of the opposition to conscription. The Canadian establishment at the time blamed Quebeckers for the "the lack of French-Canadian participation in the war."[7]
In Quebec, of the 3,458 individuals from the City of Hull called-up by military authorities who had not been granted an exemption, 1,902 men did not report and were never apprehended, for a total conscription evasion rate of 55 per cent. This was the highest evasion rate of all Canadian registration districts, followed closely by Quebec City at 46.6 per cent, and Montreal at 35.2 per cent. Further, 99 per cent of those called up by the City of Hull applied for an exemption, the highest application rate in all of Canada.[8]
War Measures Act
Quebeckers organized militant protests against attempts by the Canadian government to use its police powers to impose conscription on the working people and youth of Canada and Quebec. The Borden government responded by invoking the War Measures Act to quell this opposition. The government proclaimed martial law and deployed over 6,000 soldiers to Quebec City between March 28 and April 1, 1918.
On the evening of March 28, 1918, federal police raided a bowling alley and arrested the youth there. Faced with the arbitrariness and violence of the police, 3,000 people besieged the police station and continued their demonstration in the streets during the night.
Thousands of demonstrators march to
Place
Montcalm on March 29, 1918.
The next day, a crowd of nearly 10,000 gathered in front of the Place Montcalm auditorium (currently called Capitole de Quebec), where the conscripts' files were administered. The military, with bayonets and cannons, were called in and shortly after the Riot Act was read, giving them permission to fire.
Within the conditions of the day, the ruling elite in Canada found a wall of resistance among the working people of Quebec to being forcibly sent to war. The aspirations of the Québécois for nationhood had been put down prior to Confederation through force of British arms. Along with the subjugation of the Indigenous Peoples and the settlers in Upper Canada, the basis was laid for the establishment of an Anglo-Canadian state and Confederation. It is not hard to imagine that the Quebec working class would not look favourably on being mowed down on the battlefields of Europe in the service of the British Empire.
Notes
1. "Sir Robert Laird Borden," greatwaralbum.ca.
2. "Les débuts du camp de Valcartier et d'une armée improvisée de toutes piéces," Pierre Vennat, Le Québec et les guerres mondiales, December 17, 2011.
3. Richard Foot, "Election of 1917," August 12, 2015, Canadian Encyclopedia.
4. Ibid.
5. Maxime Dagenais, "The 'Van Doos' and the Great War," November 5, 2018, Canadian Encyclopedia.
6. Ibid.
7. "The First World War" by Sean Mills (under the direction of Brian Young, McGill University), McCord Museum website.
8. Claude Harb, "Le Droit et l'Outaouais pendant la Premi re Guerre mondiale," Bulletin de l'Institut Pierre Renouvin, Spring 2017 (No. 45), publisher: UMR Sirice.
This article was published in
Volume 54
Number 52 - November 11, 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54526.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca