A Country Divided: The Conscription Crisis and Wartime Politics

The question that split the country

In January 1916, Prime Minister Robert Borden promised 500 000 soldiers. By 1917 that goal looked impossible. Casualties at the Somme, Vimy, Hill 70 and Passchendaele were high, and the number of new volunteers had fallen sharply. Borden visited soldiers in hospitals in Europe and returned convinced that Canada must send reinforcements. In May 1917 he announced conscription. Few decisions in Canadian history have divided the country so deeply.

Two visions of Canada

To understand the crisis, you need to understand perspectives that existed long before 1917.

Imperialists, mostly English Canadians, saw Canada as part of a great British family. Helping Britain was a duty. Many had relatives in the war, and they felt French Canadians were not doing their share.

Henri Bourassa, founder of the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir (1910), argued for a Canada that was independent of British imperial interests and bicultural, with French and English as equal partners. He wanted Canada to defend Canada, not fight for the Empire. He also asked a sharp question: how could Canada fight for freedom in Europe while Ontario was taking away French-language rights at home?

The Ontario Schools Question (Regulation 17)

In 1912, Ontario issued Regulation 17, which limited French as a language of teaching to the first two years of school (you met it in Grade 8). Franco-Ontarians resisted. The Association canadienne-française d'éducation d'Ontario, with Senator Napoléon Belcourt, challenged the rule in court; in 1916 the courts upheld it. In Ottawa, teachers kept teaching in French, and parents (many of them mothers) guarded schools such as École Guigues to keep officials out. Quebec newspapers and politicians supported the Franco-Ontarians. For many French Canadians, Regulation 17 proved that English Canada did not respect them, which made them even less willing to fight overseas. The rule was relaxed in 1927 and finally removed in 1944.

A debate in public: in 1916, Captain Talbot Papineau, a bilingual officer from a well-known Quebec family and a relative of Bourassa, wrote an open letter urging French Canadians to support the war. Bourassa replied that French Canadians owed their loyalty first to Canada. Papineau was killed at Passchendaele in 1917. Their exchange is a primary source showing that French Canadians themselves disagreed.

How conscription happened

• Military Service Act (August 1917): men aged 20 to 45 could be called up. Men could apply for exemptions (for example, essential work, farming, health, religious objection), and most did.
• Military Voters Act (September 1917): every member of the forces could vote, including nursing sisters and soldiers under 21. Soldiers who did not name a riding could have their votes assigned by the government, which helped the government's candidates.
• Wartime Elections Act (September 1917): gave the vote to the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of soldiers, who were likely to support conscription, and took the vote away from conscientious objectors and from immigrants born in enemy countries who had been naturalized after 1902.
• Union government (October 1917): Borden formed a coalition with pro-conscription Liberals. Laurier refused to join and led the anti-conscription Liberals.
• Election of 17 December 1917: the Unionists won 153 seats, but only 3 in Quebec. Laurier's Liberals won 82 seats, 62 of them in Quebec.

Consequences

• In December 1917, a motion was placed before the Quebec legislature saying Quebec would accept leaving Confederation if the rest of Canada felt it was an obstacle. It was debated in January 1918 and withdrawn without a vote, but it showed how deep the anger ran.
• In Quebec City, over the Easter weekend of 1918 (28 March to 1 April), protests against the arrest of a man without his exemption papers turned into riots. Troops were sent in; on 1 April soldiers fired on a crowd and four civilians were killed.
• In April 1918, after a major German offensive, the government cancelled exemptions for farmers' sons. Farmers felt betrayed, and thousands protested in Ottawa in May. This anger helped create new farmers' political parties after the war.
• In January 1918, Status First Nations men were exempted from overseas combat service after many First Nations protested that, as treaty allies who could not vote, they should not be conscripted.
• Results: about 125 000 men were conscripted and about 24 000 reached the front before the war ended. The political cost was enormous. The Conservative Party was weak in Quebec for decades, and French-English trust was badly damaged.