Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War ed. by Tim Cook and J. L. Granatstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War ed. by Tim Cook and J. L. Granatstein Jack Cunningham Cook, Tim, and J. L. Granatstein, eds. – Canada 1919: A Nation Shaped by War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020. 338 p. In the First World War, Canada mobilized more than 650,000 men and women, of whom 66,000 perished and 172,000 suffered lesser injuries—an impressive feat for a country of eight million, still a stripling among nations. The war also saw an unprecedented degree of state intervention in the economy and everyday life, and more than a few violations of civil liberties. But arguably as consequential as anything that happened during the war itself were the events of 1919, when wartime developments were accepted, modified, or outright rejected. In that year, Canada was no longer the country of farms and villages of the Laurier boom, but not yet the industrial powerhouse over which Mackenzie King was to preside. This collection of essays by established historians and emerging scholars, based on a 2019 conference at the Canadian War Museum, provides a richly detailed, if not quite comprehensive, portrait of Canada on the precipice of modernity. The very process of repatriating Canadian troops from Europe, as Dean Oliver and William F. Stewart make clear in their chapters, was something of a bureaucratic bungle: soldiers were subjected to mind-numbing boredom and delays, culminating in the 1918/1919 demobilization riots in Britain. Their work nicely augments Desmond Morton’s treatment of this topic. Serge Marc Durflinger forces a reconsideration of traditional thinking in his account of the thunderous reception offered the 22nd Battalion, the fabled Van Doos, upon their return to the City of Québec. Kandace Bogaert’s chapter demonstrates that the federal government did build upon the rudimentary welfare state created in wartime for the benefit of soldiers [End Page 661] and their dependents, but tried to do so on the cheap, with inadequate pensions that led, against the backdrop of a sharp postwar recession, to disillusionment. As Jeff Keshen notes, while the government may have acquired unprecedented powers while hostilities persisted, too many policymakers clung to prewar orthodoxies, and were keen to unleash the private sector and curtail state initiatives once the war was over. Attachment to the prewar order and fear of Bolshevism on the part of Canada’s governing classes clashed with soldiers’ disillusionment in the streets of Winnipeg. David Bercuson revisits the General Strike, during which respectively angry and complacent veterans added to the militancy of both the strikers and those who broke them. It was not only inflation and unemployment with which returning veterans and their families had to contend, but also the influenza pandemic, which Mark Osborne Humphries, who has written at greater length on the topic, limns in an unexpectedly timely contribution. It was a dramatically changed political landscape to which the veterans returned. The imposition of conscription and the Borden government’s ruthless machinations surrounding the 1917 election had generated fierce hostility in Quebec and most of rural Canada, leading to the splintering of the two-party system that had prevailed under Macdonald and Laurier. The formation of the Progressives as a low-tariff party of agrarian protest and the rise of the United Farmers of Ontario, who formed a provincial government in 1919, inaugurated the new age of multi-party politics with which, J. L. Granatstein contends, we live, mutatis mutandis, today. On the international stage, Canada counted for more in 1919 too. As Norman Hillmer informs us, Borden adroitly augmented Canada’s autonomy with a separate signature on the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the new League of Nations, but those pundits and policymakers who hoped for a strong Canadian role within a more integrated British empire saw their aspirations founder on intractably domestic preoccupations on the part of the electorate and thus its politicians. What standing Canada might have rested on a flimsy military base, because, as Roger Sarty and Douglas Delaney note in their chapters, the impressive wartime military machine was rapidly dismantled. The army, navy, and rudimentary air force were pared to the bone, with the result that in 1939 Canada was as...