Worth Fighting For: Canada's Tradition of War Resistance from 1812 to the War on Terror ed. by Lara Campbell, Michael Dawson, and Catherine Gidney (review)

The edited collection, Worth Fighting For, is an important addition to historical literature about Canada. The nineteen different contributors provide insight into the politics, activism, institutions, social movements, and individuals that make up a long tradition of Canadian war resistance. The volume contains valuable historical information, engaging and important stories, and thought-provoking commentary. It certainly supports the editors' claims that "military conflict and mobilization in Canada have never gone unchallenged or unquestioned," and that "Canada's war resisters were a complex, active, and multifaceted group." (11)

In addition to the editors' introduction, the book is composed of seventeen chronologically organized chapters, dealing with matters as far back as the Militia Act of 1793 and as recent as public debate about Canada's military mission in Afghanistan. The 20th-century and English Canada receive the bulk of the attention. Jonathan Seiling's discussion of the historic peace churches during the War of 1812 in Chapter 1 provides evidence of the complex reaction to that conflict in Canada, and of the significance of requisitioning and billeting as experiences of the burdens of war. Ross Fair impressively surveys the efforts of pacifist sects to secure exemption from military duty in Upper Canada and Canada West in Chapter 2. But that is where the book's pre-Confederation history ends. Pre-20th-century history ends with the next chapter, in which Amy Shaw offers a welcome new perspective on the Anglo-Boer War by reviewing opposition to Canada's first foreign war.

The first three chapters suggest a relationship between war resistance and the extent of mobilization. The small-scale of mobilization for the war in South Africa must partly explain the "muted anti-war voice in Canada" (48) that Shaw analyzes. In sharp contrast is the War of 1812, which threatened homes and communities, and made demands Canadians could often not ignore. Whereas the War of 1812 transformed social life in parts of British North America, the Anglo-Boer War did not, however important it was politically. The practical and material realities of war played at least a role in determining the level and nature of opposition to war.

The book offers 20th-century comparisons to these 19th-century conflicts in the form of the world wars, in which Canada mobilized on a massive scale, and the Cold War, which shaped Canadian politics and society for forty years, but led to participation in only one war, the Korean War. Two chapters in the book deal with the First World War and three with the Second World War. Seven of the remaining nine chapters look at the postwar period and Cold War issues, and the last two chapters are about the War on Terror. That nearly half of the book is about Cold War Canada means it is hardly even its historical coverage, but since a great deal has been written about conscription and the World Wars there is reason to showcase scholarship on an era currently generating increased interest.

One of the historical trends the chapters suggest is the declining importance of religion for war resistance. Of the eight chapters covering the period 1812–1945, five deal explicitly with religion, whereas the remaining nine chapters on the period after 1945 do not. This periodization proposes a pattern of secularization that is doubtlessly over-simplified, but it at least asks us to consider how moral philosophies and faith traditions have been important for war resistance over time. The book's chapters might lead to the conclusion that the ideological roots of modern Canadian war resistance are in internationalism and humanitarianism, especially their feminist versions. It is possible, however, that the peace activism addressed in several of the post-1945 chapters was partially informed by religion, or shaped to some extent by religious institutions. What is clear is that a moral or...