Polarity, Patriotism, and Dissent in Great War Canada, 1914-1919 by Brock Millman (review)

World War I has an important place in this country's development and self-consciousness. Much of the conversation, at the time and since, has focused on unity. A unanimity of patriotic response was seen as necessary at the time, and its relative success is partly why the conflict is often remembered as a nation-making event. Repression of dissent formal and informal was an important aspect of this unity. It is somewhat surprising that a wide-ranging study of government efforts to suppress and punish dissent at home has waited this long.

One of the strengths of this book is Brock Millman's perspective. Comparisons to Britain and the United States during the war highlight Canadian idiosyncracies. One is that repression of dissent in this country was surprisingly strong. It was also surprisingly overt. Millman explains that the study was originally intended to unearth repression and punishment of dissent in Canada, but he found that the actions of the government were obvious and unapologetic. The focus of the book instead became an analysis less of what the government did than of why.

He finds much of his answer in the communities that made up Edwardian Canada. Millman divides the country into British Canada, French Canada, and New Canada, made up of more recent immigrants. These communities tended to have distinctive and mutually antagonistic responses to the war. British Canada's antagonism to especially New Canadians was a large part of what gave the wartime home front its distinctive character. The Canadian government, in its unusually harsh reactions against dissent, was following, not leading. Repression was "an attempt not simply to contain dissent but to avoid intercommunal violence by giving British Canada … the minimum it was willing to accept." The severity of response to dissent, he argues, was less a means to limit anti-war violence than it was to limit violence against minorities by the patriotic majority.

It is worth adding, I think, that the book is a pleasure to read. Millman's writing is spare and eloquent, and the book is scattered with neat epigrams. He contexualizes particular examples by showing how they fit into Edwardian Canadian identity or were supported by the legal and political mores of Canada before the war.

Polarity, Patriotism, and Dissent shows that, at home, the war was not an aberration; it was in many ways a continuation, exaggerated, of life before, and wartime repression continued into 1919 after the fighting overseas had ended. This wider context offers important insight into the war's larger place and effect in and on this country. As well, while he offers a useful counter to a historiography that sometimes falls into laudatory nationalism, Millman does so in a calm and fair-minded way. Yes, British Canadians responded to the war with a virulent insistence on unanimity that was often dangerous to those outside their community. But, he notes, they had sacrificed much, and were under tremendous pressure to see the war through. The government followed their lead in this: "War management in Canada may not have been elegant, and it was certainly not edifying. It was, however, one of the many compromises required of the emerging country. It is difficult to see how things could have been otherwise, Canada being then what it was."