Canada's Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective Service and the Mobilization of Human Resources during World War II (review)

Michael Stevenson's Canada's Greatest Wartime Muddle is a welcome addition to the historiography re-charting Canada's experience of the Second World War on the home front. This study blends two distinct genres: military history and historical policy analysis in a well-grounded empirical reconstruction of the statutory and regulatory framework of Canada's wartime labour agency, the National Selective Service. The NSS was the principal government agency charged with the unenviable task of overseeing the flow of labour through a purportedly national, most certainly overheated, economy mobilized for total war. This study is highly critical of the federal government's efforts to mount an effective human-resource mobilization plan capable of meeting Canada's military production commitments.

Stevenson's central thesis concerns the capacity for effective state regulation of markets generally, and labour markets in particular. The author is critical of the 'bureaucratic inefficiency' of NSS. The federal government was regularly criticized, even lampooned, for its inability to respond to the 1943 'manpower' crisis. He documents the considerable opposition to the NSS, from employers, within government, and cabinet. Veterans' organizations argued for preferential placement of enlisted personnel (primarily men), while unions asserted recently won collective bargaining rights, especially seniority. He suggests that failure to resolve the labour crisis reveals the practical limits of government intervention into the labour market. However, neither the gendered nor racialized dimensions of NSS regulatory measures are addressed, permitting the argument that the impact of NSS practice would be limited. For example, Stevenson carefully reconstructs Aboriginal resistance to state recruitment into active service within essential war industries. However, he does not ground Native resistance within a political discourse of rights, either citizenship or political rights of collective organization and participation (the vote).

The NSS could not maintain comprehensive and efficient control of the mobilization of Canadian human resources for the duration of the war. This inability Stevenson attributes to the absence of political will, of government refusal to institute a system of conscription, and the preference for a decentralized structure for decision making and program of implementation. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board favoured a major industrial consolidation that would have seen a massive conscription of workers from regions deemed less efficient in the overall national economic structure. However, Arthur MacNamara, head of NSS, preferred a more decentralized approach.

At the core of this argument lie two interdependent questions. What are 'human resources' in the context of historically contingent 'efficiency' measures? And how is the 'labour market' conceptualized historically, as an articulation of state, nation, and human productive capacity? A central dilemma posed in policy studies of welfare-state formation is the very incapacity for central regulatory measures to enhance full efficiency and productivity. At the core of this critique lies the ongoing tension over states-versus-markets, the trade-off between equity objectives underscoring welfare-state forms counterposed to efficiency objectives of so-called free markets. Recent studies of postwar federal labour market policies have built on Pierson's study of gender as a central organizing strategy in that hallmark feature of the Canadian welfare-state development: unemployment insurance. That is, the labour market is a social institution deeply informed by relations of gender, along with class and race.

Canada's Greatest Wartime Muddle reads as policy evaluation, a methodological challenge for historical policy analysis. To be sure, the opening chapters recount the exciting, hitherto unparalleled, review undertaken by senior federal officials grappling with the labour crisis. The goal of their review, the Labour Supply Investigation Project, was to recruit a body of labour that had been consistently ignored, if not denied recognition altogether: Canada's womanpower. This was to be an investigation of the national labour market and a conceptual map of its proper functions. But it was also a problematization of market operations. Who had rights in the labour market? In...