A Conflict of Nationalisms: The Win the War and National Unity Convention, 1917

A Conflict ofNationalisms: The Win the War and National Unity Convention, 1917 R. MATTHEW BRAY In May, 1917, over 650 Canadians, English and French, attended at Windsor Hall in Montreal the "Win the War and National Unity Convention " which, according to its chronicler, Dr. W.H. Atherton of McGill, was designed "to organise, co-ordinate and unify, along nonpolitical and non-partizan lines, all available Canadian patriotism...[and to] suggest policies to the Government for the winning of the war and also impress upon it the wishes of the people and the extent to which the people would back the Government in aggressive measures to the above effect." 1 For the most part, details of this singular conference have remained buried in historical obscurity, overshadowed then and since by the controversial conscription and union government crises which captured public attention during that year. Unfortunately, the rather cursory glance at the Win the War idea by Brian Cameron in his article on the "Bonne Entente" in a recent issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies has done little to improve this situation, because by misinterpreting the relationship between the two movements, he has failed to explain fully the significance of either.2 Yet as a measure of the contradictory French and English-Canadian nationalistic responses to the Great War, the Win the War phenomenon had few parallels, and for that reason alone is deserving of a much more comprehensive analysis than it has hitherto received . The proposal to convene a national, Win the War congress originated in Ontario in late January , 1917, stimulated by the rapidly deteriorating enlistment situation facing Canada at that time, but conceptually the idea may be traced back at least a year to the formulation of the so-called 18 'Hamilton Memorial' and the subsequent establishment of the Canadian National Service League in April, 1916.3 Composed of civilian recruiting associations from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the C.N.S.L., like the Memorial which spawned it, attempted to mobilize popular support for the two policies that its members considered essential for the maintenance of the Canadian war effort, registration of manpower and compulsory military service. In calling for registration, the League was merely echoing what had become obvious to many other elements of the Canadian community by the spring of 1916, that a national census of the country's manpower resources was necessary in order to determine which workers were employed in industries central to the domestic war economy and which could be readily freed for overseas military service.4 In appending the demand for conscription, however, the civilian recruiters were unique, because they were the only persons to reject the voluntary system at this early stage of the war. The reason for the disenchantment of this particular group of Canadians , most of whom were English-speaking, urban, Protestant members of the business and professional middle class, was that their experiences during the winter of 1915-1916 had demonstrated the futility of a registration by itself.5 Then, in many parts of English Canada, civilian recruiting leagues had carried out their own local surveys and had thereby acquired the names of men who, in their view, could be released for military duty without serious disruption to domestic industry.6 Their personal appeals to such men had yielded disappointingly few volunteers , indicating that only registration reinforced by conscription would facilitate the rational allocation of manpower they desired. The men heading the Canadian National Service League, such as Chief Justice T.G. Mathers of the Manitoba Court of King's Bench, John M. Godfrey, a Toronto lawyer, and Lt. Col. Lorne W. Mulloy, the blind veteran of the Boer war and lecturer in military history at Royal Military College, soon found that not only did Prime Minister Borden not sympathize with their advocacy of registration and conscription, but Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 15, No. 4 (Hiver 1980-81 Winter) that his government was even averse to having those policies discussed publicly. 7At the end of April, 1916, the federal Department of the Interior sent a directive to all newspapers in Canada asking that popular agitation in support of compulsory military service not be...