Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014

by Gwynne Dyer

  Long after the war, John Jefferson, who was then 99 years old, was asked why he had been eager to risk his life in South Africa: “I was young and foolish,” he said, “and I wanted adventure.” Then thoughtfully he added, “If I’d known then what I know now, I’d not have gone. I risked my life so that a few rich men could have full control of the gold and diamonds of the Transvaal. I was taken in by a lot of propaganda.”

  At the Forks of the Grand, vol. 2

  Having persuaded the colonial prime ministers to contribute troops to the Boer War, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain invited them all to another Imperial Conference in 1902. He now wanted to make the arrangement permanent by getting them to commit some of their forces to a special “Imperial Reserve” that would be available for service anywhere in the world.

  The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden many years. We think it is time our children should assist us to support it.

  Joseph Chamberlain to the colonial prime ministers, Imperial Conference, London, 1902

  Canada’s contribution to the proposed Imperial Reserve would be one infantry brigade and one artillery brigade (about 4,500 men). That was only half the size of Australia’s, but Chamberlain charitably explained the discrepancy by observing that Australia didn’t have to worry about its own territory being invaded, whereas Canada had the United States next door. However, Laurier objected strongly to the whole idea, and the conference ended with no formal Canadian commitment.

  There is a school in England and in Canada, a school which is perhaps represented on the floor of this Parliament, a school which wants to bring Canada into the vortex of militarism which is the curse and the blight of Europe. I am not prepared to endorse any such policy.

  Sir Wilfrid Laurier to the House of Commons, Ottawa, before the Imperial Conference of 1902

  Laurier was equally unhelpful to the enthusiastic new British commander of the Canadian militia, Major-General the Earl of Dundonald, who was full of grand ideas for building new training areas and fortifications in Canada and raising the strength of the peacetime militia to 50,000, with provisions for expanding it instantly to 100,000 at the outbreak of war. He also wanted to make cadet corps compulsory in Canadian schools, in order to facilitate the further expansion of the Canadian army to 200,000 men in the early months of a war.

  It was all still allegedly in the context of defending Canada against an American attack, but it is hard to believe that Lord Dundonald was not also thinking of other possible uses for a large Canadian army. Laurier was not amused: “You must not take the militia seriously, for though it is useful for suppressing internal disturbances, it will not be required for the defence of the country, as the Monroe Doctrine protects us from enemy aggression.” By 1904 Dundonald had been dismissed, ostensibly for trying to stop political interference in militia affairs, but really for showing an excess of zeal. But despite Laurier’s refusal to make any overt military commitments to imperial defence, he found it impossible to resist the undertow that was drawing Canada into deeper waters. A new Liberal government in Britain had more success in implicating Canada in imperial defence by subtle means than Joseph Chamberlain had ever had with his direct appeals, and the militia budget crept inexorably upward, more than quadrupling between 1898 and 1911.

  It is hard to explain why this happened, for the key Canadian actors did not change. Laurier was prime minister continuously from 1896 to 1911, and his minister of militia throughout all fifteen years was Frederick Borden, a Nova Scotia physician, merchant and politician who combined a gregarious fondness for the social aspects of militia life (he played the fiddle or performed Scottish dances at the slightest provocation) with a stern appreciation of the militia’s severely limited military and political value to Canada. There was, it is true, a steady rise in imperialist sentiment in English Canada throughout this period, and any Canadian government concerned to stay in office had to cater to it to a limited extent, but there was certainly no popular demand for a direct Canadian military contribution to the imperial forces.

  Yet something must have changed to make Frederick Borden respond more favourably to imperial claims on Canadian resources. His own son had been killed in South Africa, which (as any amateur psychologist will tell you) could have made him more supportive of the empire his son had died for. A less convoluted reason would be simply the warm friendship and easy working relationship that Borden enjoyed with Percy Lake, a British officer with strong Canadian family ties who had already served in Ottawa in the late 1890s, and who returned after Dundonald’s abrupt departure in 1904 to serve as Chief of the (Canadian) General Staff until 1908. (He then remained on as inspector general, at Borden’s request, until 1910.) At any rate, while there was no sudden and drastic change of direction in Canadian military policy during this period, there was a steady drift.

  It began with Ottawa’s response when Britain began to concentrate its navy in home waters in 1905. As a natural consequence, London decided to withdraw its garrisons from the imperial naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt. If Canada had not volunteered to take up the slack, the British would simply have abandoned these fortified bases. And that is what certainly would have happened if this withdrawal had occurred as little as a decade before, when Canadian governments had still been quite clear that the whole point of belonging to the empire was that it defended you. But by 1905 this simple formula was getting blurred, and so the Canadian government agreed to replace the British garrisons in Halifax and Esquimalt with its own regular troops, and increased the authorized size of the Permanent Force to four thousand in order to find the men. It was an ambiguous measure—you could argue that these bases were relevant to Canadian defence too, and not just imperial defence, if you really wanted to—and a pretty modest one. Besides, the Canadian government did not really expand its regular forces as promised: in 1908 the Permanent Force still numbered only 2,730 men. But it was the start of a trend.

  Five years after Laurier’s firm stand in 1902 against Canadian involvement in the “vortex of [European] militarism,” there was another Imperial Conference in London, this time orchestrated by the much more congenial Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There was no pushy Joe Chamberlain around in 1907 to queer the pitch with his demands for explicit military commitments from the overseas Dominions; just a soothing resolution that, without committing any of the governments at the conference to any particular action, affirmed the need for “a General Staff selected from the forces of the Empire as a whole, which … shall undertake the preparation of schemes of defence on a common principle.” Each local section of the General Staff, in Ottawa and the other Dominion capitals, would advise the local government on military matters, but would exercise no powers of command.

  There seemed no harm in that, no infringement of Canadian autonomy. Nor was there anything obviously objectionable about the special Imperial Defence Conference of 1909. There were no calls for Canada to earmark troops for overseas service, just a great deal of detailed work by the soldiers on the “standardization” of uniforms, weapons and training throughout the armed forces of the empire. The aim, as Prime Minister Herbert Asquith explained in the British House of Commons that year, was to ensure that “should the Dominions desire to assist in the defence of the Empire in a real emergency, their forces could be rapidly combined into one Imperial Army.”

  It was all carefully couched in conditional phrases, so as not to startle the prey, but in fact this was how Canada effectively became committed to defending Britain in Europe, even though there was never a parliamentary debate or a cabinet discussion of the question. After 1909 Canadian officers regularly attended Staff College courses in Britain, and British officers in Ottawa organized a Canadian branch of the General Staff. Even in English Canada, however, there were some alert observers who understood the implications of all this and had the gravest reservations about where it was leading. Dr. O.D. Skelton, then a professor at Queen’s University a
nd later the founder of the modern Department of External Affairs, wrote to a friend in a public letter of 1909:

  You calmly assume that in all the wars in which Britain is engaged she is “assailed” rather than “assailing.” A recollection of the process by which the British Empire has expanded … might suggest that she has had at least her share of attacking.… There are real difficulties in any plan of Canadian neutrality while Britain is at war, I admit, but they are not so serious as the problems presented by the proposal to accept all Britain’s wars as ours.

  But voices like Skelton’s were very scarce in English Canada. For most English Canadians, allegiance to Britain, even to the extent of automatic involvement in her wars, was not something to be weighed rationally. It was instinctive.

  Politics wore a complexion strictly local, provincial or Dominion. The last step of France in Siam, the disputed influence of Germany in the Persian Gulf, the struggle of the Powers in China were not matters greatly talked over in Elgin; the theatre of European diplomacy had no absorbed spectators here. Nor can I claim that interest in the affairs of Great Britain was in any way extravagant.…

  It was recognised dimly that England had a foreign policy, more or less had to have it, as they would have said in Elgin; it was part of the huge unnecessary scheme of things for which she was responsible—unnecessary from Elgin’s point of view as a father’s financial obligations might be to a child he had parted with at birth. It all lay outside the facts of life, far beyond the actual horizon.…

  [But] belief in England was in the blood.… Indifferent, apathetic, self-centred—until whenever, down the wind, across the Atlantic, came the faint far music of the call to arms.… The sense of kinship, lying too deep for the touch of ordinary circumstance, quickened to that; and in a moment, “we” were fighting, “we” had lost or won.

  Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist, 1904

  Sara Duncan’s “Elgin” was actually Brantford, Ontario, where she grew up. Her novel was a fair representation of what people felt in the small towns of English Canada (and Canada was still a country of small towns): a sentimental loyalty to Britain that didn’t count the cost, and never even imagined there might be much cost. Their only example, after all, was the Boer War, which had been cheap and glorious. The unobserved drift toward a European military commitment in the Militia Department in Ottawa coincided with the drift of sentiment in English Canada, and would not rouse strong conflicting emotions in French Canada until and unless Canadian forces were actually sent to Europe.

  If Laurier had realized what was happening, perhaps he could have stopped it. But as his prime ministership entered its second decade his political troubles began to mount, and he wasn’t looking for any extra fights. Besides, it was hard to put your finger on exactly what was happening unless you immersed yourself in the flow of paper across the militia minister’s desk.

  So it is much to be doubted that Sir Wilfrid Laurier, preoccupied with preparations for an imminent election, even knew that in July 1911 his minister of militia approved the assignment of a staff officer to draw up plans for sending overseas a Canadian expeditionary force of 25,000 men—six times larger than the one Laurier had rejected a decade before. Let alone the fact that the staff officer in question was specifically instructed to assume that the force would be going to a war “in a civilized country with a temperate climate.”

  The election Laurier was preparing for in 1911 was precipitated by another defence-related issue: the British request for financial contributions from the dominions and colonies to keep the Royal Navy ahead of the Germans in the battleship race, and Laurier’s preference for a modest Canadian navy under Canadian control. The Conservative leader, Robert Borden, mocked Laurier’s “tinpot navy,” and won the election by a landslide. But when he then gave Britain $35 million to buy new battleships in 1912, he at least hoped that Canada would in return have an increased influence on British foreign policy in the form of a permanent representative on the Committee of Imperial Defence. He was being naïve. In December 1912 the secretary of state for the colonies gently explained to Prime Minister Borden that imperial defence policy “is and must remain the sole prerogative of [the British] Cabinet, subject to the support of the House of Commons.” In other words: We asked for your money, not your advice.

  That was as far as British frankness went, however. The assumption that imperial defence included the defence of Canada itself was still accepted almost universally in Canada, but the old bargain was really long dead and starting to smell. By now the British had brought themselves to the point of admitting explicitly (but only in their secret documents) that they had no intention of helping Canada in the event of an attack by the United States, the only plausible military threat to Canadian interests.

  The question of Britain’s responsibility for Canadian defence had been repeatedly discussed (and generally fudged) by the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) in London during the preceding decade, but in 1905 the decision never to send military help to defend Canada against the United States became explicit. In this year Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, prevented the CID from discussing American infringements of the Rush-Bagot Treaty that limited the number and size of warships on the Great Lakes by stating that “he had no desire to discuss the question of what action would be taken by us in the event of a war with the United States.”

  The same conscious distortion of strategic realities was becoming British policy in personal contacts with Canadian politicians. In the summer of 1912, for example, when a joint CID meeting with Canadian ministers was being considered, Maurice Hankey, secretary of the CID, warned Prime Minister Asquith that they must at all costs avoid discussing the possibility of war with the United States with the Canadians:

  The peculiar delicacy of this question is that in 1905 the Committee of Imperial Defence came to the conclusion that the Admiralty could not either themselves undertake the Defence of the Canadian Lakes, nor recommend any measures by which Canada could herself undertake their defence (a conclusion which vitiates any measure of military defence)—and this conclusion was not discussed with Canada, nor communicated to her Government. [Emphasis in original.]

  This was a perfectly reasonable foreign policy for Britain; nor was it particularly bad for Canadian interests, since in fact the United States was very unlikely to embark on the conquest of Canada. But the British were guiltily conscious of the fact that many Canadians had not yet figured that out, and that they were exploiting obsolete Canadian fears of American attack in order to get Canadian support in their wars. Thus, for example, Sir William Nicholson, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, objected to sending Ottawa a document in 1912 saying that war with the United States was “in the last degree unlikely,” and that Canadian coasts were safe from attack by any other power because America would intervene to protect them, on the grounds that this was inconsistent with London’s continual encouragement to the Canadians to build up their own military power. That power was wanted for imperial defence purposes, and so the offending admission was deleted from the document sent to Ottawa.

  However, apart from French Canada and a handful of English Canadians, few “colonials” were willing to question the imperial government’s judgment on questions of war and peace. Moreover, Borden had to deal with the political realities of English Canada. It was the fantasy world of the Boy’s Own Annual: the great majority of English Canadians were convinced that any war Britain got involved in would be just, and very many believed that war, or at least militarism, was a positive moral good. And although Borden himself was not a militarist, he had little choice but to give the portfolio of militia and national defence to Colonel Sam Hughes, a Conservative politician and part-time soldier who most certainly was.

  Hughes had funded an entire political career on being an enthusiastic promoter of the militia. During the Boer War, when his offer to raise a volunteer force was rejected by the British, he had invented a job for himself with the railway line of c
ommunications forces there. The British commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, tried beyond endurance by Hughes’s bumptious and loudly stated conviction of his own inestimable military worth (especially compared to the plodding and limited intellects of mere professional soldiers), eventually sent Hughes home, but that rebuff simply confirmed Hughes in his lifelong belief that the only thing wrong with the British empire was the fact that it was run by the English. It was, nevertheless, the best game in town for a militarist, and in 1913 Hughes told an audience in Napanee, Ontario, why Canada needed a strong militia and an unconditional commitment to take part in the wars of the empire:

  To make the youth of Canada self-controlled, erect, decent and patriotic through military training, instead of growing up as under present conditions of no control, into young ruffians or young gadabouts; to ensure peace by national preparedness for war; to make the military camps and drill halls throughout Canada clean, wholesome, sober and attractive to boys and young men; to give that final touch to imperial unity, and crown the arch of responsible government by an inter-Imperial Parliament dealing only with Imperial affairs.