Canadian support for Britain in the First World War

At the outbreak of the First World War, Canada, which was automatically at war by virtue of its status as a colony within the British empire, was bursting with enthusiasm. When the political parties agreed to help the mother country and send volunteer troops overseas, both francophones and anglophones supported these measures.

In December 1916 the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, initiated a revolutionary change in the United Kingdom’s relations with its dominions. He desperately needed more fighting men but realized that the time had come to give the dominions and India some say in the direction of the war. “They are fighting not for us,” he was reported as saying, “but with us.” In the spring of 1917 Borden, the leader of the senior dominion, attended the first imperial war cabinet and conference. Between regular visits to Canada’s soldiers in military hospitals, Borden participated in war-cabinet discussions of a wide range of matters, including possible peace terms. At meetings of the conference he and his brilliant young legal adviser, Loring Cheney Christie, led the passage of Resolution IX, which called for a post-war constitutional conference to “provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern, and for such necessary concerted action, founded on consultation, as the several Governments may determine.”

As the war dragged on, with its enormous demand for human and material resources and with voluntary recruitment declining, Borden imposed military conscription in the summer of 1917. This decision went against the country’s military and political traditions and broke the promises previously made by politicians. Some workers and farmers, and the vast majority of French Canadians, were stunned. Entrenched in their traditional way of thinking and swayed by the stinging speeches of Henri Bourassa’s Nationalistes, French Canadians vigorously demonstrated their opposition. Borden held his ground, sustained by his principles, the necessities of war, and the repeated calls to stand fast from numerous English-speaking Canadians, both Liberal and Conservative. Believing that Canada was fighting as a nation and that the war would put the country on the world map, inspired by the ideology of service, filled with notions of honour, and, in some cases, with progressive social thinking, many English-speaking Canadians saw themselves as engaged in a moral crusade that had to be supported by all-out effort. They never understood the French Canadians, whom they wrongly characterized as traitors to the nation. In 1917 cultural and partisan differences reached new heights in Canada.

In June 1918 Borden and several colleagues had returned to London for the second set of meetings of the imperial war cabinet and conference. He was angry that he had not been consulted before the Canadian Corps had suffered huge losses at Passchendaele, and he threatened Lloyd George that he would send no more troops to the front if such a situation arose again. More serious still, he had received reports throughout the war critical of the performance of the British high command and of British military planning, reports that reached a peak in his consultations with Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur William Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps. At the second meeting of the war cabinet Borden gave an impassioned speech detailing the faults of the high command. It resulted in the appointment of a prime ministers’ committee which held intensive hearings with officials and senior commanders about the war effort. Its draft report, completed in mid August, gloomily forecast that the war could go on until at least 1920, perhaps longer. It reinforced the commitment to participation by the dominions in war policy and highlighted the need for the civil authorities to exert control over their military commanders. But the report was outdated before it was discussed. Allied forces, spearheaded by Canadian and Australian troops, had attacked at Amiens, launching the final offensive that carried on as Borden returned to Canada.

On 27 October Lloyd George summoned Borden back to Britain to prepare for possible peace talks. Two days later Borden replied that “the press and the people of this country take it for granted that Canada will be represented at the Peace Conference.” Lloyd George was sympathetic but predicted “difficult problems.” In January, after the conference had assembled at Paris, Lloyd George persuaded American president Woodrow Wilson and French premier Georges Clemenceau that Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India would have two delegates and New Zealand one at its plenary meetings. Borden recognized that these were more matters of form than substance and that representation was “largely a question of sentiment.” But, he told his wife, Laura, “Canada got nothing out of the war except recognition.” It was a point worth pressing to its logical conclusion: formal acknowledgement of Canada’s international status.