In 1939, hundreds of thousands of Canadians were still out of work. By 1943, factories were running around the clock and employers could not find enough workers. The Second World War was a total war: a war in which a country commits all of its people, industries and resources to winning. The government took sweeping powers, even greater than in the First World War, telling factories what to make, setting prices and wages, rationing food, and deciding who could live where. Total war brought prosperity and new opportunities for many Canadians, and grave injustice for others.
A total war economy
- Production: Minister of Munitions and Supply C. D. Howe directed industry and created dozens of Crown corporations. Canadian plants built ships, aircraft, hundreds of thousands of military vehicles, guns and ammunition. Canada's gross national product roughly doubled between 1939 and 1945, and unemployment practically disappeared.
- Controls: the Wartime Prices and Trade Board froze prices and wages from late 1941 to stop the runaway inflation that had hurt Canadians in the First World War.
- Rationing: from 1942, Canadians used ration books to buy limited amounts of sugar, tea, coffee, butter and meat, and gasoline and tires were restricted. Families planted Victory Gardens and collected scrap metal, rubber and fat for salvage drives.
- Paying for the war: higher income taxes, plus nine Victory Loan campaigns in which Canadians lent the government about 12 billion dollars by buying Victory Bonds.
- Persuasion and censorship: posters, radio and National Film Board films urged Canadians to work, save and keep secrets, while censors controlled news about the war.
Women's war
With men in uniform and factories desperate for workers, the government actively recruited women, first single women and then married women. The number of women in paid work roughly doubled, from about 600,000 in 1939 to about 1.2 million in 1944. Women welded ships, assembled Bren guns and built aircraft; posters of Veronica Foster, "Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl", became a symbol of this work. Elsie MacGill, the first woman in Canada to earn a degree in electrical engineering and a pioneering aeronautical engineer, managed production of more than 1,450 Hawker Hurricane fighters at Fort William (now Thunder Bay). Ontario and Quebec opened government-funded day nurseries for the children of war workers. About 50,000 women served in uniform: in the RCAF Women's Division (1941), the Canadian Women's Army Corps (1941), the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (1942) and as nursing sisters in the medical services. Quebec women finally won the provincial vote on April 25, 1940, after a long campaign led by Thérèse Casgrain and others.
Conscription again: from 1940 to 1944
- September 1939: King promises there will be no conscription for overseas service.
- June 21, 1940: the National Resources Mobilization Act (NRMA) allows conscription for home defence only.
- April 27, 1942: King holds a national plebiscite asking voters to release the government from its promise. About 65 per cent say yes, but about 73 per cent of Quebec voters say no. King's policy becomes "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary".
- 1944: heavy losses in Normandy, the Scheldt and Italy create a shortage of trained infantry. Defence Minister J. L. Ralston demands conscription and leaves the cabinet in November.
- November 1944: King agrees to send 16,000 NRMA conscripts overseas. Protests break out in Quebec, and conscripts in Terrace, British Columbia, mutiny for several days. About 13,000 conscripts went overseas; 2,463 reached units at the front before the war ended, and 69 were killed.
"Enemy aliens" and the uprooting of Japanese Canadians
Under the War Measures Act and the Defence of Canada Regulations, the cabinet could rule by order-in-council and suspend normal rights. When Italy joined the war on June 10, 1940, about 31,000 Italian Canadians were registered as "enemy aliens" and about 600 were interned, many at Camp Petawawa in Ontario; none was ever charged with a crime against Canada. About 850 German Canadians were also interned, along with Canadian fascists and communists.
The harshest treatment fell on Japanese Canadians. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong in December 1941, long-standing anti-Asian racism in British Columbia boiled over, even though senior military and RCMP officers reported that Japanese Canadians posed no real threat. An order-in-council of February 24, 1942 (P.C. 1486) allowed the government to remove everyone of Japanese origin from a "protected area" stretching about 160 kilometres (100 miles) inland from the Pacific coast. About 22,000 people were uprooted, about three-quarters of them Canadian citizens by birth or naturalization. Many men were sent to road camps; families were held in livestock barns at Hastings Park in Vancouver and then sent to crowded camps in the BC interior, or to work on sugar beet farms on the Prairies. In January 1943, the government authorized the sale of their homes, farms, fishing boats and businesses without their consent, often at low prices. In 1945 they were told to move east of the Rockies or go to Japan, and about 4,000 were sent to Japan in 1946, many of them Canadian-born. Restrictions were not lifted until April 1, 1949.
The war also changed working life and citizenship. Labour shortages gave unions bargaining power, and after a wave of strikes the government issued PC 1003 (February 1944), the first federal measure to require employers to recognize unions chosen by their workers and bargain with them. The Family Allowance Act (1944) promised monthly payments for children, with the first cheques in 1945. Chinese Canadians, still denied the vote in British Columbia, enlisted anyway; airman Kam Len Douglas Sam, shot down over France in 1944, fought with the French Resistance. Their service strengthened the case for ending the Chinese Immigration Act and extending the vote after the war.