Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (16 page)

Quebec was a lost cause for the Conservatives: the entire Nationalist movement, with Henri Bourassa in the lead, placed itself at the service of the Liberal opposition. “We ask nothing better than to assist Laurier to throw out of power the Government which has proved itself a traitor to the Nation,” Bourassa wrote in
Le Devoir
—and the Nationalists ran practically no candidates of their own in Quebec in order not to split the anti-conscription vote.

The Conservatives had good reason to worry about the Prairie provinces, too. They could more or less count on the “British” element of the Western population, but the great surge of immigration that had rapidly populated the Prairies in the two decades before the war had also included a high proportion of “foreigners”—particularly Ukrainians—who felt even less enthusiasm than French Canadians for sending their sons to die for Britain: all three Prairie provinces had voted Liberal in the most recent provincial elections.

But in the West (unlike Quebec), the Union government had an opportunity to shift the voting balance radically by disenfranchizing the Ukrainians, most of whom came from Austrian-controlled Galicia and therefore technically counted as enemy aliens. Nor would such a flagrant act of electoral manipulation alienate those Prairie voters, mostly
“British,” who were potential Conservative supporters. The Ukrainians were not actually sympathetic to their former Austrian imperial masters, of course, but Anglo-Saxon jealousy at the growing prosperity of Ukrainian homesteaders, and fury at the refusal of Ukrainian farm labourers to accept the low pre-war wages at a time of booming grain prices, easily translated into racism.

One Alberta MLA told the
Toronto Telegram
how sad it made him to see the country “being cleared of our fine Anglo-Saxon stock and the alien left to fatten on war prosperity.” The Wartime Elections Act of 1917 adroitly exploited this prejudice—and destroyed the mainstay of Liberal anti-conscriptionist sentiment in the West—by taking the vote away from all naturalized Canadians born in enemy countries who had arrived in Canada after 1902. It was election-rigging on a breathtaking scale. Borden’s government also generously gave women the vote—but only to women who might be expected to support conscription: those serving as nurses with the Canadian forces, and the far larger number of female relatives of serving soldiers. (One angry suffragette leader wrote to Borden suggesting that it would have been simpler if he just disqualified everyone who didn’t promise to vote Conservative.)

The election was held in December, six months after conscription had been introduced. The pro-Borden
Colonist
in Victoria warned voters against “Bolsheviki intoxicated with the hope of power” (the Liberals, presumably), and Toronto’s
Daily News
printed a map of Canada with Quebec outlined in black, labelled “The Foul Blot on Canada.” Meanwhile it was practically impossible for Union government candidates to get their views heard in Quebec. Albert Sévigny, a Quebec
Conservative Party Member, was shot at, stoned, and unable to say a word at Saint-Anselme, in his former riding of Dorchester, and he was howled down even in Westmount. Another Union government meeting, this time in Sherbrooke, turned into a three-hour riot.

All the careful stacking of the deck paid off. In the December 1917 election, most of the female relatives of serving soldiers (who had been promised that none of the remaining men in their families would be conscripted) voted for the government. In the Prairie provinces, where most voters of Ukrainian, German, Austrian, Hungarian and Croatian descent had been disenfranchized, Unionist candidates swept the board, winning forty-one out of forty-three seats. Despite all Borden’s massaging of the voting lists, the Conservative majority among civilian voters was still barely a hundred thousand votes. But soldiers voted almost twelve-to-one for the government, tripling its majority and changing the outcome in fourteen ridings. In the end, Borden’s Union coalition of Conservatives and Liberal defectors took 268 seats—but only three of those seats were in Quebec. Laurier’s Liberals took 62 seats in Quebec, and only 20 in all the rest of the country. Canada had never been so divided.

Only one Liberal did well out of the 1917 election, and it would have taken some foresight to realize it at the time. Mackenzie King had wavered on the conscription issue for a time: he rebuffed an approach from the Union government, which was having great success at recruiting pro-conscriptionist Liberals, but did consider simply not running. But he finally returned to his original convictions and waged an apparently suicidal anti-conscription campaign in North York (the old seat of his grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie, before the 1837 rebellion). Election day was the worst of King’s life: he was overwhelmingly defeated and his beloved mother died. But as he watched Laurier’s political destruction spelled out in the election returns, he was also aware that Quebec would remember the Conservative imposition of conscription long after the war was over: “This will make me prime minister,” he told a friend.

Just after the election, Sir Wilfrid Laurier wrote to a Liberal friend
commanding a regiment in France to explain why the English-speaking Liberals who had deserted him had been wrong: “Your reason to take the stand which you took is: ‘To us speedy reinforcements seem to take precedence of all else.’ I appreciate the point of view, but you will see how far wrong you were. The conscription measure was introduced in the first week of June [1917]. We are now in the third week of January [1918] and not ten thousand men, if indeed half that many, have been brought into the ranks by this measure.”

The defect in the Military Service Act was the high number of exemptions that could be applied for—but without those exemptions, Borden would probably never have won the election. Of the 400,000 unmarried men in Canada aged between twenty and thirty-four—the “first class”—380,000 had claimed exemptions by the end of 1917 (and Ontario, for all its electoral support of the government, claimed more exemptions than Quebec: 118,000 for Ontario, 115,000 for Quebec). Exemption tribunals were staffed by local people and reflected local loyalties and prejudices. The Quebec tribunals were accused of granting almost blanket exemptions to French-speaking applicants, while “they applied conscription against the English-speaking minority in Quebec with a rigor unparallelled,” according to the chief appeal judge, Mr. Justice Lyman Duff of the Supreme Court. Military representatives took to appealing virtually every exemption, and in early 1918 the Military Service Act was toughened. Nineteen-year-olds were ordered to report for service, and men between twenty and twenty-two were exempted only if they were the sole remaining son of military age in the family. Every young man in the first class had to carry a written proof of exemption or be liable to arrest. All over the country, young men vanished into the woods:

In Quebec opposition to the new regulations was spectacular, especially since a hasty marriage was no longer a way out of the draft (men now had to have been married prior to July 6, 1917, to claim exemption). There were still thirty thousand appeals before the courts, but the minister of justice was making arrangements to speed up the process and feelings were reaching fever pitch: the popular resistance that seemed to have crested in August 1917, and to have been almost completely dissipated by the December election, came roaring back to life.

The delayed-action conscription crisis of 1918 was quite inevitable. During all the protests of 1917, the subject had been emotional but almost entirely theoretical: the machinery ground into action so slowly that few conscripts actually disappeared into the army before the end of that year. By early 1918, however, everybody in Quebec knew someone who had already been conscripted, or who was facing the near-certainty of conscription at any moment. It put the issue in a very different light, and things came to a head at the beginning of Easter weekend in Quebec City, when the Dominion Police detained a young man named Mercier who was unable to show proof of an exemption.

Mercier finally managed to get permission to go home and produce his papers, and he was then duly released—but meanwhile a crowd of several thousand had gathered, angered by “the tactless and grossly unwise fashion in which the Federal Police in charge of the Military Service Act did their work” (as the jury put it at the subsequent inquest). To vent their anger, the crowd proceeded to burn down the police station. The mayor tried to get them to disperse—but the mob, singing
O Canada
and
La Marseillaise
, attacked the offices of the
Quebec Chronicle
and
L’Événement
instead. The following evening another mob attacked the offices of the registrar of military service and burned all the files.

In an act of singular ineptitude, the local military authorities then brought in a battalion of Toronto soldiers as reinforcements. The officer in charge of the operation was one of the army’s few senior French Canadians, Major General E.L. Lessard, but mutual incomprehension and suspicion between francophone crowds and anglophone troops did not help matters—nor did charging at the crowds with bayonets. On Sunday, March 31, the army also resorted to cavalry charges, driving back the crowds with axe handles. By then, military discipline was breaking down and some soldiers were firing at the mobs. Charles “Chubby” Power, the young Liberal MP for Quebec South, a veteran who had served overseas, reported hearing an officer from his own regiment admit that he had been unable to prevent some of his soldiers from opening fire. He had not seen any wounded, he said.

On Easter Monday, the Old Town looked like a battlefield. Using snowbanks and ice barricades for shelter, the crowds were throwing bricks, stones, blocks of ice or whatever else they could lay their hands on at the soldiers. A few shots were heard from the direction of the mob, and the troops at first replied with volleys over their heads.

There were two more bursts of machine-gun fire. An estimated thirty-five civilians were wounded, and four were killed. One of them was only fourteen years old. It was not exactly the storming of the Bastille, but the authorities feared insurrection in Quebec, and on April 4, 1918, the Governor in Council was given the power to call out the troops whether the civil authorities asked for them or not. In such a situation martial law would be declared; habeas corpus would be suspended and “persons disobedient to such military orders shall be tried and punished by court martial.”

Twenty-five Canadian soldiers were executed in the field during the First World War, all but two of them for desertion or “misbehaviour
before the enemy.” The executions were a direct measure of the mounting strain on the Canadian army. Until the war was almost two years old, Canadian soldiers convicted of desertion or cowardice all had their sentences commuted to terms of imprisonment, but then, after the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, there were seven executions in seven weeks. Executions “to encourage the others” then continued at a steady pace until the war’s end—with one particular group standing out: seven of the twenty-five men executed had French names, and five of them were from the sole French-speaking battalion, the 22nd.