Two world wars and the uneasy peace between them. Discover the language of the trenches, the home front, the ballot box and the hard choices that reshaped Canada at home and abroad.
These terms were extracted from Canadian History: Post-Confederation by John Douglas Belshaw, eCampusOntario (originally published by BCcampus, 2016) which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Refers to Britain’s policy of avoiding war with Germany by making concessions.
British and French politicians blundered through attempts at appeasement of, first, Italy then Germany.
A visual and decorative style associated with the first three decades of the 20th century and, in its emphasis on symmetry and its association with technological advancement, is often regarded as the foremost modernist style.
The rise of art deco — expressed in sculpture, household decoration, and most spectacularly in architecture.
In international relations, refers to a complex of evenly weighted alliances that theoretically prohibit any one participant or side from going to war.
So long as fear of the balance of power was greater than enthusiasm for war, peace would hold.
In 1926, a statement released at the Imperial Conference and named for the conference chair, Lord Balfour. Formally recognizes the Dominions of the British Empire as autonomous nations capable of independent action internationally and in the workings of the new British Commonwealth of Nations.
The four years that followed would see an extension of Canada’s sovereignty at the 1926 Imperial Conference, recognized formally in the Balfour Declaration.
A series of aerial attacks launched by Germany against Britain beginning in July 1940 and countered by an aerial defence. Along with the strategic night bombing campaign that followed (the Blitz), it can be said to have lasted for nearly one year.
The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) played a key role training British pilots and engaged in the defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
A nearly continuous series of naval confrontations that began in 1939 and ended only with the fall of Germany in 1945.
Doing so meant expanding the size of a pitiably small pre-War navy (seven warships) into a force that could contribute to the Battle of the Atlantic.
A voluntary association of Britain and its former colonies. Established incrementally after 1919 and especially in the Balfour Declaration (1926).
The 1923 Imperial Conference gave King a chance to reiterate the case for autonomous Dominions within what was now called the British Commonwealth of Nations.
The name given to the troops sent overseas during the Great War (World War I).
The Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) arrived just in time — in March 1915 — to see the beginnings of an unprecedented war of attrition.
Created in 1919 out of several financially troubled railway companies that had been inherited by Ottawa, including the Canadian Northern Railway and the Grand Trunk Railway; constituted a trans-continental operation in competition with the CPR.
A rising economy improved the government’s fiscal position so much so that the Canadian National Railway.
Established in 1941 as a separate non-combatant unit of the Canadian Army; provided support mainly as office staff, drivers/mechanics, and canteen workers; some served overseas.
And while Canadian troops — and CWACs and Wrens and others — were waiting, the nation was not standing still.
A prison camp established to contain and punish captured populations. The British ran concentration camps for Boer prisoners in the Second Boer War; Canada placed suspected enemy aliens — Ukrainians and Germans in the Great War, Germans, Italians, and Japanese in the Second — in camps that were not punitive but nor were they appropriately provisioned; and the Germans infamously used concentration camps as the means of executing large numbers of Jewish prisoners (along with other "enemies" of the Reich). Concentration camps continue to be used.
What Canadians at home did not see and could barely be expected to imagine was the relief of slave labour camps across the Reich, and especially the liberation of concentration camps.
19 August 1942; also known as "Operation Jubilee;" an attack on the north coast of France that was meant to gather intelligence for a larger subsequent invasion; of the 6,000 Allied troops involved, 5,000 were Canadian. The mission was badly planned, atrociously researched, and tragic in its execution. Nevertheless, it contributed intelligence that helped at Normandy three years later.
The Dieppe Raid was meant to test resources, probe German coastal defences, and gather intelligence.
Leading entrepreneurs, financiers, and manufacturers on loan from their companies to the federal government for the duration of the Second World War for a nominal fee of one dollar.
Howe recruited dollar-a-year men from businesses that covered the rest of their salaries to have experienced production managers at his disposal.
Refers to the hurried evacuation of Canadian, British, and other troops from the port of the same name following their retreat in the face of Germany’s invasion of northern France in 1940.
The blitzkrieg assault allowed the Germans to capture the majority of Allied troops stationed in France, although some 300,000 (including a Canadian battalion) escaped via Dunkirk.
Held in August 1943; a top-secret high level meeting between leaders and representatives of the Canadian, British, and American governments. Canada's actual involvement did not extend far beyond hosting the event.
The First Quebec Conference allowed the two leading Allied powers — and to a lesser degree, Canada — to begin planning for the invasion and liberation of France.
Term used to describe fashionable young women in the interwar years; associated with hedonism, social rebellion, and style.
Even the flapper, that trademark female style of the 1920s, can be invoked as a landmark of change.
The Crown’s representative in Canada; appointed by the King or Queen.
This unusual interlude has been known ever since as the King-Byng Affair or, better still, the King-Byng Thing and has been a reference point for every Governor-General on election night when the possibility of a minority government looms at the polls.
A wartime pact between Canada and the United States; allowed Canadian-made goods manufactured for export to Britain to be covered under the Britain-USA Lend-Lease Agreement.
Apart from occupying Iceland on behalf of Britain in 1941, however, Canadian troops saw little action.
The period between 1918 and 1939.
The war inflated the incidence of widowhood in the interwar years; single mothers were commonplace in a way that they had not been in Laurier’s day.
The policy of isolating one’s nation-state from international turmoil and alliances.
Americans were increasingly concerned, although their government officially held fast to a policy of isolationism.
Term coined in the 1870s; denotes patriotism applied in an aggressive foreign policy. Canada’s involvement in the Second Boer War contained elements of jingoism.
The martial spirit that was inspired by the adventures of Sam Steele and his peers in 1899-1900 paired up with 19th century enthusiasms for muscular Christianity to produce a decade of jingoism.
The invasion of France in 1944 – code-named Operation Overlord – targeted a series of beaches, each of which was assigned its own operational name associated with alphabet call-letters. The American forces struck at Utah and Omaha; the British attacked Sword and Gold; the Canadian assault came at Juno. Originally the British and Canadian beaches were named for fish (i.e.: Swordfish, Goldfish) and Juno was called Jellyfish, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill objected to the idea that soldiers were bound to die on a beach code-named "Jelly" and insisted on the change to “Juno.”
Five beaches were targeted and the Canadian forces focused on a 10 km stretch between the towns of Saint-Aubin and La Rivière, code-named Juno.
Also known as the King-Byng Thing, a constitutional crisis arising from Mackenzie King’s test of Governor-General Byng’s authority to call an election when requested by a Prime Minister.
This unusual interlude has been known ever since as the King-Byng Affair or, better still, the King-Byng Thing and has been a reference point for every Governor-General on election night when the possibility of a minority government looms at the polls.
An explicitly racist, anti-Catholic illegal organization with roots in the American South; established a presence and substantial following in Saskatchewan in the 1920s, where it played a role in the outcome of the 1929 provincial election. Largely dissipated thereafter, the Klan briefly reappeared in the 1970s in British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario.
The emergence of Ku Klux Klan chapters in Ontario and on the Prairies, as well as the deeply entrenched anti-Asian sentiment among Euro-British Columbians made fertile ground for Arcand’s message.
A post-Great War international assembly established in 1919, of which Canada was a founding member. Its principal objective was to create conditions of collective security through a mutual defence pact and the application of economic sanctions; failed largely because of the United States' refusal to join and member states' (including Canada's) fear of being embroiled in conflicts (military or economic) abroad.
Nevertheless, it was an important step along a road to greater autonomy, as was Borden’s successful plea to have Canada eligible for election to the council of the League of Nations.
Prior to declaring war against the Axis Powers in 1941, the United States agreed to support the Allied war effort by selling materiel to Britain on a deferred-payment program. Canada was able to take advantage of this arrangement, which led to rapid industrial recovery and expansion. See also Hyde Park Declaration.
This Lend-Lease Agreement extended the life of Canadian sales to Britain and stimulated the Dominion’s industrial resurrection.
1942-46; a secretive and international Second World War research and development project conceived to develop the first atomic bomb. Canada contributed the uranium and, at what was still a prototype reactor on the Chalk River in Ontario, developed the processes for extracting weapons-grade plutonium.
Described as the “Minister for Everything,” Howe nationalized industries, rapidly expanded industrial production, and got the government involved in the Manhattan Project.
Individuals thought to possess the ability to act as a bridge between the living and the dead; they were the “media” through which messages could be transmitted; part of an early 20th century trend toward spiritualism that was fed, in part, by the enormous mortality of WWI.
Mackenzie King was one of many highly-placed Canadians who hoped that spiritual mediums could do for the dead what the telephone did for terrestrial voices.
A late 19th century combination of Christian piety and athleticism, especially as regards masculinity.
The martial spirit that was inspired by the adventures of Sam Steele and his peers in 1899-1900 paired up with 19th century enthusiasms for muscular Christianity to produce a decade of jingoism.
1940, a wartime accord signed between United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King; produced the Permanent Joint Board of Defence.
The Ogdensburg Agreement, as it came to be known, was an undeniable compromising of Canadian sovereignty but clearly one that King felt was essential under the circumstances.
Established in 1940. See Ogdensburg Agreement.
Out of that meeting came the Permanent Joint Board of Defense, a collaborative military body with oversight – though not control — over the armed forces of both countries.
Having declared war against Germany on 3 September 1939, France and Britain made no effort to engage the enemy in combat for the next eight months. Note that in Canadian and British English it is always spelled “Phoney,” with an "e", whereas in American English it is spelled “Phony.”
Was on the sidelines of what became known in French as the Drôle de guerre, in German as Sitzkrieg, and in English as the Phoney War.
A political alliance of left-wing, progressive parties and organizations to counter fascism in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
An anti-fascist popular front had formed across communist and social-democratic lines that replaced the pro-Empire sensibilities of August 1914 with something more ideological.
In modern warfare there are conventions regarding the appropriate treatment of captured soldiers or POWs. Most POWs are held for the duration of the war in guarded "POW camps." Camps were established in Canada to handle POWs from the European theatre of war in the Second World War.
The Canadian soldiers would spend the remainder of the war in notoriously brutal prisoner of war (POW) camps where another 267 died.
Formed in 1920 as an alliance of the various United Farmer MPs elected to Ottawa; initially a rural protest party with strong roots in Ontario.
Canadian farmers were almost universally opposed and many of them broke with the Tory Party to form the Progressive Party (see Section 7.9).
In Ontario, a provincial program to reduce the availability of French language education; introduced shortly before the Great War; contributed to tensions between Francophone Quebec and Anglophone Ontario and the federal government.
Ontario introduced severe limits on French-language instruction in 1912-1913 with Regulation 17.
Also resistance forces, resistance movements; forces aligned against either a legitimate regime or an occupying regime; an unofficial army typically comprised of soldiers who have deserted the national armed forces, as well as civilians who offer services and support to actual fighters and sometimes fight themselves.
The Alliance at this stage consisted principally of the British Commonwealth and whatever resistance armies were able to either escape occupied Europe or disappear into underground movements.
Formed in 1941 when women from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) arrived in Canada to assist training. Embarrassed, the RCAF agreed to accept women and became the first branch of the armed forces to actively recruit women.
The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) played a key role training British pilots and engaged in the defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
Established in 1924 on the remains of several Great War flying corps with Canadian personnel.
The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) played a key role training British pilots and engaged in the defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
Refers to Section 98 of the Criminal Code, which bans “unlawful associations;” introduced following the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919; targeted organizations which advocate political change through violent means; used to target the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s.
Meighen was the man behind the anti-sedition amendment to the Criminal Code, Section 98.
A legal identity created in the Indian Act, 1876. The Act determines who is, in law, an “Indian” and who is not for the purposes of government services, annuities, suffrage, etc.
In the first half of the 20th century, Canada’s Status Indians faced many challenges.
German term for a submarine.
U-boat attacks multiplied quickly and disasters occurred with fearsome regularity.
Voluntary savings scheme originating in the Great War; purchasing 5 to 15 year bonds was a means of lending funds to the federal government with which to conduct the war; paid back with interest on their maturation.
At the end of the war Ottawa owed $2 billion — almost all of it to Canadians who had purchased Victory Bonds.
Victory in Japan Day, 15 August 1945; marked the end of the war against Japan and thus the end of the Second World War.
This did not stop them from celebrating V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day), especially in Vancouver.
Last of the women’s corps to be established; founded in 1942, it was disbanded in 1946 and reformed as a reserve force during the Korean War.
Thousands of women joined the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS or, simply and elegantly, the “Wrens”).