The French-Canadian Conscription Crisis

During the First World War, Canada suffered a great conscription crisis that divided the nation. The French-Canadian nationalists, led by Henri Bourassa, opposed conscription and felt that they were fighting an English war, and therefore felt no obligation to fight. The vast majority of those who enlisted during the age of voluntary recruitment were Anglophones; in contrast, very few Francophones volunteered to fight. On 17 May 1917, Prime Minister Robert Borden announced that military service was to become compulsory among men of fighting age of all classes. French-Canadians protested; however, despite their best efforts, the Military Service Bill came into effect. The protest eventually led to lengthy riots. Following this, Canada became

much more heavily split between the French and the English populations.

Tensions were already high between English- and French-Canadians, especially after Ontario had stopped teaching French in Catholic Schools, and the conscription crisis only served to increase them.

Prime Minister Borden had promised to provide 500,000 troops to aid in the war against the axis. When news of the gruesome trench conditions and the staggering number of casualties began to reach Canadians on the home front, the number of volunteers diminished at an astonishing rate, and the lack of reinforcements to the front lines proved detrimental to the Canadian war effort. Borden argued that obligatory military service of all men from the ages of 20 to 45 was the only way to provide these necessary reinforcements. The Francophones detested the idea of being forced to fight amongst those who had discriminated against them for years and had shown them and their culture little respect. Riots quickly ensued, and the divide between English and French Canada quickly

intensified. The Liberal Party leader, Wilfred Laurier, disagreed with the conscription policy, making him unpopular with the English-Canadians. Robert Borden took advantage of Laurier’s position and called an election. In order to garner support, Borden brought about the Military Voters Act in August 1917. The Military Voters Act gave the vote to all British members of the Canadian Armed Forces, even to those serving overseas. The Wartime Elections Act followed, giving the vote to close female relatives of military members. Finally, Borden’s Unionist cabinet included dissident Liberal members who were willing to side with Borden against Laurier. Laurier turned to the French-Canadians for support and called for a referendum on the policy. The results clearly demonstrated the great divide between the French and the English. In the federal election called by Borden himself to demonstrate his capabilities and competence, his government won 153 seats, while the Liberals won only 82, most of which were filled by Québécois.
Henri Bourassa, leader of the French-Canadian nationalists, viewed Borden’s actions as attempts to legitimize conscription, and believed his government to be autocratic and militaristic. He had even warned Borden’s government that the then-peaceful French-Canadians would turn rebellious against the “military regime” if the conscription bill were to be passed. Bourassa fought rigorously to end the conscription crisis and reunite the nation. He claimed that the French-Canadians would only accept conscription if it were also accepted by the absolute majority of all voters in Canada. Unfortunately, French-Canadians were far from accepting conscription and had begun to resort to violent acts of rebellion. This served to further widen the gap between the French- and English-speaking people of Canada; the English wanted peace within the country, and, according to Bourassa, those Anglophones who were initially for conscription only as a way to put the French-Canadians “in their place” would fight for it now more resolutely than before. Since the French-Canadian culture was not being respected, Francophones felt a great deal of resentment toward the rest of the country, and therefore did not feel the need risk their lives defending it. Tensions continued to rise until 28 March 1918, when a young man was arrested at a bowling alley in Quebec City for not having his conscription papers. Although he was released shortly after his arrest, crowds had already begun surrounding a nearby police station. These crowds were wreaking havoc in the city. They destroyed English-Canadians’ stores and looted the offices of military officers. After four days of rioting, Ottawa finally deployed troops to disperse the crowd. Unfortunately, four unarmed civilians were killed in the process, and dozens more had been wounded. The results of the riot revealed that, to the French-Canadians, the issue of conscription was not solely based on the imposition of government-mandated military service, but instead, a crude and inconsiderate policy administered by an English institution that did not take the French-Canadian population’s opinions into account.
Bourassa suggested several solutions and alternatives to conscription, all of which were either denied or completely ignored.

The bill for conscription was passed in a matter of weeks, showing French-Canadians that the federal government was not considering their interests. French-Canadians were also fighting for their own cultural rights, such as the right to use French in Catholic schools in Ontario. Regulation 17 was introduced in 1912 and “restricted French-language education in the province and reignited the simmering debate over language rights.” Multiple school acts in the past had given the French and English populations equal status in the education system until Regulation 17 was brought about and amended all previous acts, infuriating the French population. In the years before the war, Bourassa had spent much of his time “campaigning for greater autonomy and linguistic parity.” When war finally broke out, he was in France, where he had fled in order to return home. On his journey home, he had witnessed Frenchmen unite and pray for the safety of France, and realized that this war could be a uniting moment for Canadians, as well. However, in 1914, Bourassa’s support for the war effort earned the disdain of many English-speaking Canadians who thought the war was a “crusade against evil and required unqualified support.” Bourassa quickly adopted his views about the war and the divide between the English-Canadian imperial nationalists and the French-Canadian

defensive nationalists intensified. Regulation 17 created tensions between the English and French populations that only intensified when the Great War broke out. These tensions would continue to develop until the issue of conscription arose. Had the tensions not already been so high, the reaction to conscription might not have been so extreme and detrimental.
The Canadian conscription crisis of World War I separated the nation between the French- and English-speaking populations further than ever before. The Francophone population, whose language and culture had not been treated with proper respect by English-Canadians in the past, felt no need to defend those who they believed had wronged them. Furthermore, the riots begun in protest to conscription served to widen the divide, because they worsened the image of French Canada in the eyes of the English. The fact that the bill for conscription was passed with little to no consideration of the French-Canadians’ concerns, and regardless of Bourassa’s many attempts to find alternate solutions, showed the French-Canadians that they were not being respected by the federal government, which consisted primarily of Anglophones. These are the primary ways in which the conscription crisis divided the nation in the early twentieth century.