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3. The Home Front and War Production
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
| A. Canadians and World War II - 1939-1945 →→ 1. Canada Goes to War → 2. Early Disasters → 3. The Home Front and War Production → 4. The Road to Victory →→ B. Canada Comes of Age - 1945-1963 |
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Contents |
The War Economy
The War Measures Act, invoked in 1939, empowered Ottawa to take whatever measures the government believed necessary for the successful prosecution of the war.
When the War began, the Canadian government took full control of the economy, and turned it into a war-winning weapon. Canadian war factories were safe from bombing, so Canada became an arsenal for Britain.
Canadian industries were faced with the challenge of creating a strong industrial base to produce weapons and war supplies for Canada, the United States, Britain, and other Allied countries.
In April, 1940, the federal government established the Department of Munitions and Supply to control the production of munitions for Canada and its allies. The department was led by engineer and Member of Parliament C.D. Howe, the co-called "Minister of Everything".
C.D. Howe's Dollar-a-Year Men
To ensure proper channeling of activities, C. D. Howe and his department controlled almost every commodity in the country.
Munitions and Supply not only supplied 30% of production to equip Canada's armed forces, but also supplied the balance in munitions and supplies to other countries, chiefly Britain, to replace what had been lost and left behind at Dunkirk.
The ministry also controlled the raw materials needed to make munitions, and created whole new industries to produce them. Howe and his team of "dollar-a-year men" - business leaders named after the salary they took - created 28 Crown corporations to produce everything from rifles to synthetic rubber to the uranium used in the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb.
Munitions and Supply became one of the biggest businesses in the world, coordinating all purchases of vehicles, tanks, cargo and military ships, aircraft, machine guns and small arms, howitzers, mortars, naval guns, artillery shells and bullets as well as radar sets and electronics, minesweeping equipment, parachutes, firefighting equipment, uniforms and hospital supplies.
By 1945 Canada's war production was ranked 4th among the Allied nations, behind only the US, USSR and UK. The total value of Canadian war production was almost $10 billion - approximately $100 billion in today's dollars.
The value of production was as follows: merchant ships $614 million, naval ships $541 million, aircraft $1,151 million, mechanical transport $1,582 million, armoured vehicles $525 million, guns and small arms $552 million, artillery shells $655 million, small arms ammunition $239 million, explosives, etc. $492 million, instruments and signals $600 million, miscellaneous $1,665 million.
The total cost of the war to Canada was over $15,000,000,000, of which two-thirds was met by taxation.
Vehicle and Arms Production
The most important of Canada's wartime output was the mass production of 815,729 military vehicles, including tanks and other armoured gun carriers. Of this total, 168,000 were issued to Canadian forces. Canada also produced rifles, submachine guns, light machine guns, antitank guns and antiaircraft guns, as well as the multipurpose 25-pounder artillery piece.
- Canadian industry produced over 800,000 military transport vehicles, 45,710 tanks, 40,000 field, naval, and anti-aircraft guns, and 1,700,000 small arms.
- The Canadian Army in the field had a ratio of one vehicle for every three soldiers, making it the most mechanized field force in the war.
- The Bombardier company of Valcourt, Québec, manufactured over 150 military snowmobiles. General Motors in Oshawa, Ontario, developed a frame for another snowmobile, of which 300 were built.
- Canadian Pacific Railway's Angus Shop in Montréal built 788 Valentine tanks, using a diesel engine built by General Motors in Oshawa. A workforce of 3,500 built the tanks from 40,000 parts at a cost of $90,000 per tank.
- Montreal Locomotive Works built 2,150 twenty-five pounder "Sexton" self-propelled guns. A total of 5,200 tanks were built at Angus and MLW works by the end of the war.
- General Motors developed a heavy utility vehicle body, and 4,000 were manufactured in Oshawa. This body could be mounted on a 4x4 chassis and could be modified to serve as a personnel carrier, ambulance, light wireless, truck or machinery truck.
Canadian armoured vehicles helped the British to win the final North African campaign and the Russians to defeat Germany.
Warships and Merchant Vessels
After the fall of France in May 1940, it became a priority to replace lost ships and build naval escort vessels to guard Atlantic convoys against German submarines.
In 1940, Canada had only just started to build patrol vessels to protect its own coasts, but Britain soon placed orders for 26 10,000 tonne cargo ships, folllowed by orders for naval escorts and minesweepers. What began as three shipyards employing fewer than 4,000 men expanded to 90 plants across Canada.
Canadian shipyards employed up to 126,000 men and women. Some 57,000 workers built merchant ships and a further 27,000 worked in naval shipbuilding, building destroyers, frigates, corvettes, and minesweepers.
Production consisted of:
- 4,047 naval vessels
- 300 anti-submarine warships
- 4 Tribal class destroyers
- 410 cargo vessels, including 348 10,000 tonne merchant ships that were the backbone of the convoy effort
During 1941, it took an average of 307 days to build a 10,000 tonne ship. One year later, average production time had dropped to 163 days. At its peak in September 1943, the shipbulders were able to deliver the SS Fort Romaine in a record 58 days from the laying of the keel.
Aircraft Production
Before the war, Canada had only eight small aircraft plants in the entire country, making about 40 airplanes per annum.
By the end of the war, the Canadian aircraft industry had grown to employ nearly 120,000 workers, 30,000 of whom were women, producing 4,000 military aircraft a year. Factory space for the production of aircraft grew from 500,000 square feet before the war to a high of 14,000,000 square feet at its peak.
The industry delivered a total of 16,418 aircraft to the RCAF, to the BCATP and to the Allies, chiefly Britain and the US. The most famous were the Avro Lancaster bomber, built at Malton, Ontario, as well as the smaller Mosquito fighter-bomber - 1,100 were built in Canada.
Canadian aviation industries also built parts for bombers and fighters like the Wasp, Mosquito, and Hawker Hurricane. The Hurricane's fuselage was made of BC plywood and laminates. There was a lot of cooperation in the industry. For the Mosquito fighter-bomber, General Motors made the fuselages, Massey Ferguson made the wings, Boeing made the tailplanes, the flaps were made by Canadian Power Boat Company, and the undercarriages were built by Otaco. De Havilland did the final assembly.
Radar and Sonar
Canada took a leading part in developing equipment using new scientific discoveries and know-how. New war technologies included many types of radar, some of which enabled the allies to counter German air attacks, as well as "asdic" apparatus for submarine detection.
Canada supplied the war effort with almost $600 million worth of radar, asdic, and improved telephone and telegraph instruments, both wired and wireless. About 75% of the total went to the Allies.
Rationing and Controls
Women became a major part of the workforce during the war. In Québec, this was reflected in women finally winning the vote in 1940, due to the efforts of Idola Saint-Jean and other feminists.
Veterans Affairs
As the result of pressure from the Canadian Legion and veterans in the Parliament and civil service, the government set up the Department of Veterans Affairs to assist in the re-establishment of veterans when the war was over.
Veterans were to receive their choice of low interest mortgages or educational benefits, which enabled amany to attend schools and universities after release. The Canadian Legion Educational Services helped prepare the troops for this in wartime.
Volunteering for the War Effort
In addition to those in military service or working in war industries or agriculture, millions of Canadians contributed to the total war effort by volunteering or participating in salvage campaigns, gathering everything that could be recycled for the war effort, from scrap metal and rubber to newsprint.
Under the direction of the Ministry of War Services, groups like the Canadian Legion, the Salvation Army, the Y.M.C.A., and the Knights of Columbus set up "Auxiliary Services" to provide recreation and sometimes lodging for men and women at home and for the troops in every theatre of war.
The Canadian Legion Educational Services gave schooling to people in the service, in Canada and overseas, including 3 million library books and hundreds of thousands of textbooks.
The major work of the Canadian Red Cross was in providing food parcels for prisoners of war. They delivered a total of 16,000,000 parcels through the International Red Cross at Geneva, which also forwarded books from the Canadian Legion to allied prisoners of war in Europe. The Canadian Red Cross also held blood-donor clinics and provided volunteer ambulance drivers in Canada and overseas.
The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire furnished clothing, food and other comforts to the people of Britain and to Canadian armed services, especially the Navy and Merchant Marine. They also organized welcomes for the many women and children evacuated from Britain.
Other organizations were set up for fire-fighting and for Civil Defence against sabotage.
Through it all, millions of Canadian families listened to radio reports and read official casualty reports in the newspapers, worrying about the fate of their friends and loved ones overseas.
Victory Bonds and Financial Aid
To support the war effort financially, Canada did not accept American Lend-Lease aid, but rather ran its own lend-lease program for its allies, primarily Britain, through the Canadian Mutual Aid Board.
The CMAB supplied the allies with $4 billion worth of war materiel. A further credit of $1 billion dollars was given to Britain interest-free, atogether with a gift of war supplies in January 1942.
Conscription if Necessary
When the war broke out, the Liberal and Conservative parties agreed there would be no conscription for overseas service. Canada’s war overseas was to be almost entirely a volunteer effort.
After the defeat of France in June 1940, Parliament passed the National Resources Mobilization Act, bringing in conscription for service only within Canada.
As the war wore on, King realized that his government needed to be released from the commitment not to bring in conscription. He accomplished this by a national plebiscite held on April 27, 1942.
King's government asked Canadians to release it from its "no conscription" pledge if, in the future, Ottawa decided conscripts were needed overseas. As in 1917-1918, Canada divided along linguistic lines - over 70% of Canadians voted "yes" to amend the National Resources Mobilization Act. But at the same time 80% of Quebecers voted "no", once again revealing deep divisions between Québec and English Canada.
The Crisis of 1944
The political astuteness of Mackenzie King, combined with much greater military sensitivity to Quebec volunteers resulted in a Conscription Crisis in 1944 that was minor compared to that of World War I.
In November 1944, after the Normandy invasion, and after heavy losses in front-line infantry units serving in Italy, the drain on manpower became so severe that Ottawa authorized the dispatch of 16,000 home defence conscripts overseas for the first time. The call up for home defence was speeded up, Atlantic and Pacific Commands were established, and women's divisions were formed in all three armed services.
The government organized a National Selective Service, which managed placements and postponements of military service for essential workers. 247, 336 postponements were granted, the majority for agriculture. At peak there were 95,705 in the Royal Canadian navy, 481,500 in the Canadian Army and 206,350 in the Royal Canadian; Air Force.
Beginning in January 1945, 13,000 conscripts were sent to Britain, but the war was coming to an end, and only a few thousand entered combat in Europe.
Even in Quebec, the conscription law met with little more than passive resistance, and the King government successfully sidestepped a threat to national unity.
Internment Camps
Canada set up many prison and internment camps during the war, as thousands of Axis prisoners of war were shipped to Canada, and the country interned hundreds of German, Italian and Japanese nationals and Canadians of German, Italian and Japanese origin as potentially dangerous.
The Japanese Canadian Internment
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Empire bombed the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the United States and then Canada into the War. Within hours, the Canadian government, acting under the War Measures Act (1914), ordered that all fishing boats operated by Japanese-Canadian fishermen be impounded. There were fears that some Japanese citizens in the fishing industry were charting the coastline for the Japanese navy. All Japanese natioinals had to be registered with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
On February 2, 1942, Minister of National Defence, James Ralston, proclaimed western British Columbia a 'protected area' under wartime regulations, and classified all Japanese nationals resident in Canada as "enemy aliens". He then ordered that every male between ages eighteen and forty-five, born in Japan, be removed 100 miles from the Coast by April 1, 1942.
The following day the orders were put into effect for "reasons of national security", and Canada moved to intern more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians. It would be the greatest mass movement of people in the history of modern Canada.
On March 4, 1942, the BC Security Commission was established and 20,881 Japanese, 75% of them Canadian citizens, were given 24 hours to pack, before being rounded up, registered, and uprooted from their homes. Most were initially interned in a temporary facility in Vancouver called Hastings Park Race Track.
The Americans also interned more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, but Canada went further in terms of severity of treatment, in that Japanese Canadians were stripped of their non-portable property, much of which was sold at auction. Unlike the United States internment, where families were generally kept together, Canada sent the men to road and railroad camps in the British Columbia interior, or to sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba.
Women and children were moved to six inland B.C. towns created or revived to house them. New Denver and Slocan were the largest. Other "self-supporting" camps were Lillooet, Bridge River, Minto City, McGillivray Falls and Christina Lake. In addition, 1,161 internees paid for their relocation and leasing of farms in these desolate areas that provided a less restrictive, less punitive environment.
Men on the road crews who complained of the separation from families, as well as others who violated curfew hours were sent to prisoner of war camps in Ontario (699 men). They were forced to wear shirts with round, red targets on their backs.
In addition, between 1943 and 1946, the federal government sold off all property and businesses belonging to Japanese-Canadians, down to simple possessions like their fishing boats. The trustees sold the property for as low as 10 cents on the dollar, with the money going for the upkeep of the prisoners.
Most Japanese Canadians didn't openly support Japan's involvement in the war, and no Japanese Canadian was ever charged with disloyalty to Canada during the war. Japanese Canadians had fought in Canadian uniform in World War I, and many Canadian military officers at the time questioned the federal government's decision to treat Japanese Canadians as enemy aliens.
At the end of the war in 1945, the federal government gave these people the choice of returning to Japan or moving inward to areas east of the Rocky Mountains. About 4,000 of them succumbed to pressure and left Canada for Japan under the federal government's "repatriation" scheme. Of these, more than half were Canadian-born and two-thirds were Canadian citizens.
In April, 1949, four years after Japan had surrendered, all Japanese people living in Canada became enfranchised citizens again, and were allowed to return to British Columbia. However, since their property had long before been confiscated or sold, many resettled in other parts of Canada.
New Japanese immigrants were barred from entering Canada until 1967, however, when the Points System was introduced. The Point System, which is still in place, judges potential immigrants primarily on their labour market skills and adaptability to Canadian culture, rather than their racial or ethnic backgrounds.
On September 22, 1988, at 11:00 a.m., Prime Minister Brian Mulroney rose in the House of Commons to acknowledge the past injustices suffered by Canadians of Japanese ancestry and announced that a comprehensive redress settlement had been reached with the National Association of Japanese Canadians. The settlement amounted to $21,000 apiece of redress money to the Japanese community for the internments and abuses of World War II.
Ed Broadbent, leader of the New Democratic Party, praised the government for reaching an agreement on redress, and read a moving passage from the book 'Obasan' with author Joy Kogawa sitting in the gallery.
The CCF Win the Saskatchewan Election
On June 15, 1944, Baptist preacher Tommy Douglas led the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to a majority win in the Saskatchewan Election.
Modelled on the British Labour party, the CCF was founded in Calgary in 1932. The party had split earlier in World War II, and most members turned from those who supported pacifist leader J. S. Woodsworth, to those who backed the War, led by M. J. Coldwell. In 1942, Coldwell's CCF won the York South by-election. In 1943, they won enough seats to form the Official Opposition in Ontario.
Douglas won Saskatchewan in a landslide, taking 47 of the 55 seats against William Patterson's Liberals, who took 5 seats. The CCF on taking power formed Canada's and North America’s first avowedly socialist government.
Douglas had resigned his Commons seat to run provincially. He serve as Premier for the next 17 years, resigning to become First head of the New Democratic Party (NDP).
| Home Front and War Production - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Student Activities | Student Projects |
| A. Canadians and World War II - 1939-1945 →→ 1. Canada Goes to War → 2. Early Disasters → 3. The Home Front and War Production → 4. The Road to Victory →→ B. Canada Comes of Age - 1945-1963 |
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