The Home Front: Total War, Women, Workers and the Conscription Crisis

Hook: the Bren Gun Girl

In 1941, a National Film Board photographer took pictures of Veronica Foster, a young worker at the John Inglis factory in Toronto, admiring a finished Bren light machine gun. "Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl" became one of Canada's best-known wartime images. It was propaganda, meant to encourage women to take war jobs, but it also showed something real: the war was changing who worked, what they did and how Canadians lived.

Total war ends the Depression

The war did what a decade of government policy had not: it ended mass unemployment.

• C. D. Howe, the Minister of Munitions and Supply, organized production on a huge scale. Factories made trucks, ships, aircraft, guns and ammunition. The government created Crown corporations for goods private companies could not supply, such as synthetic rubber at Polymer Corporation in Sarnia.
• The economy roughly doubled in size during the war, and unemployment fell to very low levels.
• To pay for the war, the federal government raised income taxes and Canadians bought Victory Bonds in a series of loan campaigns.
• The Wartime Prices and Trade Board set price and wage ceilings (from late 1941) to stop inflation, and introduced rationing of sugar, tea, coffee, butter, meat and gasoline, with ration books from 1942.
• Families planted gardens, and children collected scrap metal, rubber, paper and even kitchen fat and bones (used in making explosives) in salvage drives.

Women in the war effort

• Hundreds of thousands of women took paid jobs, many in war industries that had been considered "men's work": munitions, shipyards and aircraft plants. Engineer Elsie MacGill supervised the production of Hurricane fighter planes at Fort William (now Thunder Bay), Ontario.
• About 50,000 women joined the armed forces: the Canadian Women's Army Corps, the RCAF Women's Division, and the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service ("Wrens"). Nursing Sisters served overseas. Women in uniform were paid less than men and mostly kept out of combat.
• Governments opened some daycares in Ontario and Quebec so mothers could work.
• Millions of women volunteered at home: knitting, packing parcels for prisoners of war, organizing salvage drives.
• After the war, many women were expected to give up their jobs to returning soldiers, but the war had changed expectations, a change you will see grow in Unit D.

Workers, farmers and young people

• Workers joined unions in record numbers. In 1944, federal order-in-council PC 1003 recognized workers' right to collective bargaining.
• In 1945, workers at the Ford plant in Windsor, Ontario, struck for 99 days for union security. The settlement, the Rand Formula (1946), required all workers covered by a union contract to pay union dues, without forcing anyone to join. It still shapes Canadian labour law.
• Farmers benefited from high prices and demand, though they lost workers to the forces and factories.
• Young people left school for work or the forces, and helped with salvage drives and Victory Bond campaigns.
• Black Canadians served in the forces and worked in war industries, though some faced discrimination when they tried to enlist or find jobs. Black sleeping car porters on the railways organized a union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which signed its first contract with the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1945.

Censorship and propaganda

Under the War Measures Act, the Defence of Canada Regulations allowed the government to censor newspapers and mail, ban organizations it saw as dangerous (such as the Communist Party and the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1940), and intern people without trial. The National Film Board and government posters encouraged people to buy bonds, save scrap, keep secrets ("Careless talk costs lives") and accept rationing.

The conscription crisis, again

In the First World War, conscription (1917) had bitterly divided English and French Canada. Mackenzie King wanted to avoid that.

• 1939: King promised no conscription for overseas service.
• 1940: the NRMA allowed conscription for home defence only.
• April 27, 1942: King held a plebiscite asking voters to release the government from its promise. About 64% of Canadians voted yes, but more than 70% of voters in Quebec voted no. King's famous summary: "Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary." In Quebec, groups such as the Ligue pour la défense du Canada had campaigned for no.
• 1944: After heavy losses in Normandy and Italy, the army reported a shortage of trained infantry. Defence Minister J. L. Ralston, who favoured conscription, left the cabinet. In November 1944, King finally agreed to send 16,000 NRMA conscripts overseas. Some NRMA soldiers protested, and Quebec was angry again, but the crisis was less severe than in 1917. Only about 2,500 conscripts reached front-line units before the war ended.