First World War began in 1914 The
Canadian Forces and
civilian participation in the First World War helped to foster a sense of
British-Canadian nationhood. The highpoints of
Canadian military achievement during the First World War came during the
Somme,
Vimy,
Passchendaele battles and what later became known as "
Canada's Hundred Days". The reputation Canadian troops earned, along with the success of Canadian flying aces including
William George Barker and
Billy Bishop, helped to give the
nation a new sense of identity. The
War Office in 1922 reported approximately 67,000 killed and 173,000 wounded during the war. Support for Great Britain during the First World War caused a major
political crisis over conscription, with
Francophones, mainly from Quebec,
rejecting national policies. During the crisis, large numbers of enemy aliens (especially German and Ukrainian immigrants) were put under government controls. The
Liberal party was deeply split, with most of its
Anglophone leaders joining the
unionist government headed by Prime Minister Borden, the leader of the
Conservative party. The Liberals regained their influence after the war under the leadership of
William Lyon Mackenzie King, who served as prime minister with three separate terms between 1921 and 1949.
Women's suffrage When Canada was founded, women could not vote in federal elections. Women did have a local vote in some provinces, as in
Canada West from 1850, where women owning land could vote for school trustees. By 1900 other provinces adopted similar provisions, and in 1916 Manitoba took the lead in extending full
women's suffrage. Simultaneously suffragists gave strong support to the prohibition movement, especially in Ontario and the Western provinces. casting their votes for the 1917 general election The
Military Voters Act of 1917 gave the vote to British women who were war widows or had sons or husbands serving overseas. Unionist Prime Minister Borden pledged himself during the 1917 campaign to equal suffrage for women. After his landslide victory, he introduced a bill in 1918 for extending the franchise to women. This passed without division but did not apply to Quebec provincial and municipal elections. The women of Quebec gained full suffrage in 1940. The first woman elected to Parliament was
Agnes Macphail of Ontario in 1921.
1920s On the world stage , surrounded by
Allied delegates. The Canadian delegate,
George Foster is visible in the back row (fourth from the left), in the
Hall of Mirrors at the
Palace of Versailles Convinced that Canada had proven itself on the battlefields of Europe, Prime Minister Borden demanded that it have a separate seat at the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This was initially opposed not only by Britain but also by the United States, which saw such a delegation as an extra British vote. Borden responded by pointing out that since Canada had lost nearly 60,000 men, a far larger proportion of its men, its right to equal status as a nation had been consecrated on the battlefield. British Prime Minister
David Lloyd George eventually relented, and convinced the reluctant Americans to accept the presence of delegations from Canada,
India, Australia,
Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa. These also received their own seats in the League of Nations. Canada asked for neither reparations nor mandates. It played only a modest role in Paris, but just having a seat was a matter of pride. It was cautiously optimistic about the new League of Nations, in which it played an active and independent role. In 1922 British Prime Minister David Lloyd George appealed repeatedly for Canadian support in the
Chanak crisis, in which a war threatened between Britain and Turkey. Canada refused, leading to the fall of Lloyd George. The
Department of External Affairs, which had been founded in 1909, was expanded and promoted Canadian autonomy as Canada reduced its reliance on British diplomats and used its own foreign service. Thus began the careers of such important diplomats as
Norman Robertson and
Hume Wrong, and future prime minister
Lester Pearson. In the 1920s, Canada set up a successful wheat marketing "pool" to keep prices high. Canada negotiated with the United States, Australia, and the Soviet Union to expand the pool, but the effort failed when the Great Depression caused distrust and low prices. '', a Canadian ship used to
smuggle alcohol across the border during the alcohol prohibition era in the United States With prohibition underway in the United States, smugglers bought large quantities of Canadian liquor. Both the Canadian distillers and the U.S. State Department put heavy pressure on the Customs and Excise Department to loosen or tighten border controls. Liquor interests paid off corrupt Canadian border officials until the U.S. finally ended prohibition in 1933.
Domestic affairs In 1921 to 1926, William Lyon Mackenzie King's Liberal government pursued a conservative domestic policy with the object of lowering wartime taxes and, especially, cooling wartime ethnic tensions, as well as defusing postwar labour conflicts. The Progressives refused to join the government but did help the Liberals defeat non-confidence motions. King faced a delicate balancing act of reducing tariffs enough to please the Prairie-based Progressives, but not too much to alienate his vital support in industrial Ontario and Quebec, which needed tariffs to compete with American imports. King and Conservative leader
Arthur Meighen sparred constantly and bitterly in Commons debates. The Progressives gradually weakened. Their effective and passionate leader,
Thomas Crerar, resigned to return to his grain business, and was replaced by the more placid
Robert Forke. The socialist reformer
J. S. Woodsworth gradually gained influence and power among the Progressives, and he reached an accommodation with King on policy matters. (left) at the
1926 Imperial Conference in London. King sought to redefine the role of governor general at the conference, as a result of the
King-Byng affair earlier that year. In 1926 Prime Minister Mackenzie King advised the
Governor General,
Lord Byng, to dissolve Parliament and call another election, but Byng refused, the only time that the Governor General has exercised such a power. Instead, Byng called upon Meighen, the Conservative Party leader, to form a government. Meighen attempted to do so but was unable to obtain a majority in the Commons and he, too, advised dissolution, which this time was accepted. The episode, the
King–Byng affair, marks a constitutional crisis that was resolved by a new tradition of complete non-interference in Canadian political affairs on the part of the British government.
Great Depression and
Wasa, British Columbia by Relief Project workers, 1934 Canada was hit hard by the worldwide
Great Depression that began in 1929. Between 1929 and 1933, the gross national product dropped 40 per cent (compared to 37 per cent in the US). Unemployment reached 27 per cent at the depth of the Depression in 1933. Urban unemployment nationwide was 19 per cent; Toronto's rate was 17 per cent, according to the census of 1931. Farmers who stayed on their farms were not considered unemployed. By 1933, 30 per cent of the labour force was out of work, and one-fifth of the population became dependent on government assistance. Wages fell as did prices. The worst hit were areas dependent on primary industries such as farming,
mining and logging, as prices fell and there were few alternative jobs. Most families had moderate losses and little hardship, though they too became pessimistic and their debts became heavier as prices fell. Some families saw most or all of their assets disappear and suffered severely. In 1930, in the first stage of the long depression, Prime Minister Mackenzie King believed that the crisis was a temporary swing of the business cycle and that the economy would soon recover without government intervention. He refused to provide unemployment relief or federal aid to the provinces, saying that if Conservative provincial governments demanded federal dollars, he would not give them "a five-cent piece." The main issue was the rapid deterioration in the economy and whether the prime minister was out of touch with the hardships of ordinary people. The winner of the 1930 election was
Richard Bedford Bennett and the Conservatives. Bennett had promised high tariffs and large-scale spending, but as deficits increased, he became wary and cut back severely on Federal spending. With falling support and the depression getting only worse, Bennett attempted to introduce policies based on the
New Deal of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in the United States, but he got little passed. Bennett's government became a focus of popular discontent. For example, auto owners saved on gasoline by using horses to pull their cars, dubbing them
Bennett Buggies. The Conservative failure to restore prosperity led to the return of Mackenzie King's Liberals in the
1935 election. In 1935, the Liberals used the slogan "King or Chaos" to win a landslide in the 1935 election. Promising a much-desired trade treaty with the U.S., the Mackenzie King government passed the 1935 Reciprocal Trade Agreement. It marked the turning point in Canadian-American economic relations, reversing the disastrous trade war of 1930–31, lowering tariffs and yielding a dramatic increase in trade. The worst of the Depression had passed by 1935, as the Government of Canada launched relief programs such as the
National Housing Act and the National Employment Commission. The
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation became a
crown corporation in 1936. Trans-Canada Airlines (the precursor to
Air Canada) was formed in 1937, as was the
National Film Board of Canada in 1939. In 1938, Parliament transformed the
Bank of Canada from a private entity to a crown corporation. One political response was a highly restrictive immigration policy and a rise in
nativism. , en route to Eastern Canada, 1935 Times were especially hard in western Canada, where a full recovery did not occur until the Second World War began in 1939. One response was the creation of new political parties such as the
Social Credit movement and the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, as well as popular protest in the form of the
On-to-Ottawa Trek.
Statute of Westminster Following the
Balfour Declaration of 1926, the British Parliament passed the
Statute of Westminster in 1931 which acknowledged Canada as coequal with the United Kingdom and the other
Commonwealth realms. It was a crucial step in the development of Canada as a separate state in that it provided for nearly complete legislative autonomy from the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Although the United Kingdom retained formal authority over certain Canadian constitutional changes, it relinquished this authority with the passing of the
Canada Act 1982 which was the final step in achieving full sovereignty.
Second World War en route to the UK, taken from in 1940
Canada's involvement in the Second World War began when Canada declared war on
Nazi Germany on September 10, 1939, delaying it one week after Britain acted to symbolically demonstrate independence. Canada played a major role in supplying food, raw materials, munitions and money to the hard-pressed British economy, training airmen for the Commonwealth, guarding the western half of the
North Atlantic Ocean against German
U-boats, and providing combat troops for the invasions of Italy, France and Germany in 1943–45. Of a population of approximately 11.5 million, 1.1 million Canadians served in the armed forces in the Second World War. Many thousands more served with the
Canadian Merchant Navy. In all, more than died, and another were wounded. Building up the
Royal Canadian Air Force was a high priority; it was kept separate from Britain's
Royal Air Force. The
British Commonwealth Air Training Plan Agreement, signed in December 1939, bound Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia to a program that eventually trained half the airmen from those four nations in the Second World War. The
Battle of the Atlantic began immediately, and from 1943 to 1945 was led by
Leonard W. Murray, from Nova Scotia. German U-boats operated in Canadian and Newfoundland waters throughout the war, sinking many naval and merchant vessels. The
Canadian army was involved in the failed
defence of Hong Kong, the unsuccessful
Dieppe Raid in August 1942, the
Allied invasion of Italy, and the highly successful
invasion of France and the Netherlands in 1944–45. voting on a plebiscite to introduce conscription for overseas service in 1942 On the political side, Mackenzie King rejected any notion of a government of national unity. The
1940 federal election was held as normally scheduled, producing another majority for the Liberals. The
Conscription Crisis of 1944 greatly affected unity between French and English-speaking Canadians, though was not as politically intrusive as that of the First World War. During the war, Canada became more closely linked to the U.S. The Americans took virtual control of Yukon in order to build the
Alaska Highway, and were a major presence in the British colony of Newfoundland with major airbases. After the start of the war with Japan in December 1941, the government, in cooperation with the U.S., began the
Japanese-Canadian internment, which sent British Columbia residents of Japanese descent to relocation camps far from the coast. The reason was intense public demand for removal and fears of espionage or sabotage. The government ignored reports from the RCMP and Canadian military that most of the Japanese were law-abiding and not a threat. ==Post-war era (1945–1960)==