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Canada Was The Basis Of The Conscription Crisis

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Canada is a country that was established as a union of two nations, the English and the French, that agreed to live side by side. Throughout Canadian history, there were periods of peace and agreement, when the two nations were able to put aside their differences and share Canada as their homeland. There were also periods of hardship, when the English and the French were in conflict and could not find solutions that pleased them both. The two nations living side by side in one country was the the basis of the French-English relations in terms of the conscription crisis of World War I, the Quebecois philosophy of “maitres chez nous” and the French language laws. One of the biggest French-English relations clashes was the conscription crisis …show more content…

When he was elected as Prime Minister, Robert Borden promised that there wouldn’t be conscription for military service outside of Canada (textbook, page 31). However, after returning from the Imperial War Conference and visiting the trenches in France, helping soldiers became Borden’s first priority. Almost all French-Canadians opposed conscription while almost all English-Canadians supported it (canadian encyclopedia - conscription). The Anglophones viewed francophones’ opposition to conscription as being cowardly, while the francophones viewed the war as an imperialist war and refused to fight in it (ww1). As well, most of Quebec was rural, so farmers needed manpower to run their farms (military service act, canadian encyclopedia). One of the riots caused by conscription in Quebec occurred between March 28th and April 1, 1918, when more than 2,000 people rioted in the streets of Quebec City because two police constables arrested Joseph Mercier for not having a conscription exemption certificate (ww1). Like many, Henri Bourassa, a Canadian nationalist, saw the Confederation as a pact between the English and French Canadians, and the fact that Ontario passed a …show more content…

Firstly, “maitres chez nous”, which literally means “masters of our own house”, was a prominent theme during the Richard riot of 1955. Maurice Richard, a Montreal Canadien, represented the downtrodden people of Quebec who were dominated by the Anglos in Quebec (Macleans.ca). On March 13, 1955, Richard was struck on the head by a Boston Bruins player, so he responded by beating the player (our history). He was suspended by Clarence Campbell, NHL’s president, for the rest of the season while the Bruins player went unpunished. The Quebecois viewed this as discrimination against francophones. During the following game, Campbell was met with boos and had things thrown at him. A tear gas bomb exploded, forcing everyone to evacuate the Forum. This resulted in a riot where people expressed their anger at being treated as inferior to Anglos. Secondly, the people of Quebec put “maitres chez nous” in action when they held the asbestos strike. It was an illegal strike that started on February 14, 1949 and lasted 5 months. Traditionally, unions and the government had non confrontational relationships, but this was the workers’ way of challenging the Duplessis government. They wanted better pay in the form of a 15 cent pay increase as well as better working conditions (cbc) The company that they worked for, Johns Manville, was an American-owned. Rudolf Hamel spoke about the unfair

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This gave the Prime Minister William Mackenzie a much worse position to be in as the military population is declining due to the lack of volunteers joining in. Mackenzie however had to go back on his word in 1944, because the troop shortages were so severe to the point where they have to send conscripts to fight in the war. William Mackenzie has sent around 12-16 thousand conscripts overseas, not too much and not too little. In return, Quebec wasn’t too upset and the war was ending. At the end of the war, a total of 42,042 Canadian men and women of Canada’s armed forces died, around 22-23 thousand in the Canadian army, around 17, 000 in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and around 2,000 in the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) were wounded and around 9,000 were taken prisoner.

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