Chapter 11

History: The World Wars

The First World War and Remembrance Day, women winning the vote, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.

The First World War

Germany’s attack on Belgium and France in 1914 brought Britain into the war, and Ottawa raised the Canadian Expeditionary Force, later known as the Canadian Corps. Out of a population of eight million, more than 600,000 Canadians served, the great majority as volunteers.
At Vimy Ridge in April 1917 the Canadian Corps took the ridge at a cost of 10,000 killed or wounded, and earned the Canadians a lasting reputation for valour. April 9 is celebrated as Vimy Day.
In 1918, under General Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian Corps advanced in the last hundred days. The Armistice of November 11, 1918 brought the war to an end. In total 60,000 Canadians were killed and 170,000 wounded.

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Each year on November 11 Canadians remember the sacrifices of veterans and the fallen in all wars up to the present day in which Canadians took part.
Canadians wear the red poppy and observe a moment of silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, honouring the many who have served and the 110,000 who have given their lives.
“In Flanders Fields”, the poem often recited on Remembrance Day, was written in 1915 by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian medical officer.

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At the time of Confederation the vote was limited to property-owning adult white males, as was common in most democratic countries then. The effort by women to change this is known as the women’s suffrage movement, founded in Canada by Dr. Emily Stowe.
Women first won the provincial vote in Manitoba, in 1916.
In 1917 the federal government gave women the right to vote in federal elections — first nurses at the battle front, then women related to men in active service. In 1918 most Canadian female citizens aged 21 and over were granted the federal vote.
The first woman MP was Agnes Macphail, a farmer and teacher, elected in 1921. Quebec granted women the provincial vote in 1940.

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In the years after the First World War the British Empire turned into the British Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of states, and Canada is still one of its leading members.
The stock market crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, or the “Dirty Thirties”. Unemployment reached 27% in 1933, and farmers in Western Canada were hit hardest by low grain prices and drought.
To manage the money supply and steady the financial system, a central bank, the Bank of Canada, was set up in 1934.

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The Second World War began in 1939 when Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, invaded Poland. Canada joined its democratic allies in the fight.
More than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served, out of a population of 11.5 million — a high proportion — and of these 44,000 were killed.
Canadians suffered losses in the unsuccessful defence of Hong Kong in 1941 and in a failed raid on Dieppe in 1942.
No other Commonwealth country did more for the Allied air effort: over 130,000 Allied air crew trained in Canada. By the end of the war Canada had the third-largest navy in the world.
In the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, 15,000 Canadian troops stormed and captured Juno Beach. Roughly one Allied soldier in ten that day was Canadian. The Canadian Army liberated the Netherlands in 1944–45.
Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945. During the war the federal government forcibly relocated Canadians of Japanese origin and sold their property without compensation; the Government of Canada apologized in 1988 and compensated the victims.

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