Real Canadians: Exclusion, Participation, Belonging, and Male Military Mobilization in Wartime Canada, 1939–45

Abstract

This article demonstrates the role that exclusionary rationalities within Canada’s Second World War mobilization system had on what kinds of peoples were able to contribute to polity, nationalism, and cultural identity during the war period. With the onset of the Second World War, cultural understandings of belonging and Canadianness were tied to a vision of civic nationalism bound tightly to participation in the war effort. During the war, Canada’s National Registration program was employed to identify Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Negro, and other racialized populations for the specific purpose of excluding them from being mobilized to serve in the Armed Forces, thus from participating in Canadian society in this crucial way. This article demonstrates how policies adopted by mobilization officials in the calling of men into service between 1939 and 1945 worked to govern those who could take up these key identity performances tied to civic nationalism, racialize those who could not, and normalize British white male soldier/worker-citizens as real Canadians.