The Home Front: Total War, the Wartime Economy and the Halifax Explosion

Everyone was in it

The First World War was a total war. Winning needed more than soldiers. It needed shells from factories, food from farms, money from savers and the work of millions of civilians. In Canada, the war reached into every kitchen, factory and classroom. Expectation B1.4 asks how the war affected Canadian society and politics; B1.3 asks about economic trends.

The wartime economy

• A munitions boom. At first, Canadian munitions contracts were slow and plagued by scandal. In 1915 Britain set up the Imperial Munitions Board in Canada, led by businessman Joseph Flavelle. Hundreds of factories across Ontario, Quebec and beyond produced shells, and later ships and aircraft.
• Farming. Europe needed food. Prairie farmers ploughed more land for wheat, and prices rose. Many borrowed money to expand, which hurt them when prices fell after the war.
• Prices and profits. Inflation made food, fuel and rent more expensive, while wages often lagged behind. Stories of profiteering, such as companies making large profits selling food to the army, angered Canadians whose sons were at the front.
• Paying for the war. The government borrowed heavily, including from ordinary Canadians through Victory Loans (from 1917). It brought in a Business Profits War Tax (1916) and the Income War Tax Act (1917), described as temporary. Income tax never went away.
• Saving at home. A Food Controller was appointed in 1917 and families were urged to waste less, eat less meat and wheat, and grow vegetables. Provinces brought in prohibition of alcohol during the war, partly to save grain and support the war effort.

Women's war work (B3.3)

With hundreds of thousands of men overseas, women took on work that had been closed to them:

• Munitions factories: tens of thousands of women made shells.
• Offices, banks and transport: clerks, bookkeepers, streetcar conductors.
• Farms: young women from towns worked on farms in summer.
• Volunteer work: knitting socks, packing parcels and raising money through the Red Cross, the Canadian Patriotic Fund (which supported soldiers' families), the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire and Women's Institutes.
• Nursing sisters served overseas (previous lesson).

Women were usually paid less than men for the same work, and many were expected to give up their jobs when soldiers came home. But the war changed how many people saw women's abilities, and it helped win women the vote (later lesson).

Propaganda and censorship

The government and its supporters used posters, newspapers, films and speeches to encourage enlistment, saving and buying Victory Loans. Posters often used guilt ("Why aren't you in uniform?"), fear of the enemy, or pride. A Chief Press Censor checked newspapers, and soldiers' letters were censored. As historians, we read these sources as evidence of what the government wanted people to believe.

The Halifax Explosion, 6 December 1917

Halifax was Canada's busiest wartime port: troops and supplies left from its harbour to cross the Atlantic. On the morning of 6 December 1917, the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, loaded with explosives, collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in the narrow part of the harbour called the Narrows. A fire started on the Mont-Blanc. About twenty minutes later it exploded.

• About 2 000 people were killed and about 9 000 injured, many by flying glass.
• The Richmond neighbourhood in north-end Halifax was flattened. Damage reached across the harbour to Dartmouth, where the Mi'kmaw community at Turtle Grove was destroyed, and to Africville, the Black community on the harbour's edge.
• Railway dispatcher Vince Coleman stayed at his post to send a telegraph warning that stopped an incoming passenger train; he was killed.
• A blizzard struck the next day, making rescue even harder.
• Help came from across Canada and especially from Boston and Massachusetts. Since 1971, Nova Scotia has sent Boston a large Christmas tree every year as thanks.

Consequences: rebuilding included new housing in the Hydrostone district; the disaster led to improvements in harbour safety and in medical care, especially for eye injuries; and families and communities, including Africville and the Mi'kmaq of Turtle Grove, carried the losses for generations.