6 - ‘Making soldiers of them rapidly’: Reforming the Canadian militia, 1898–99

Summary

Canada in 1898 was in the midst of a period of industrialisation, economic growth, immigration and optimism concerning the nation's potential. Many aspects of Canadian society were transforming, from market structures to lifestyles, with literacy levels and media access rising rapidly as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Sir John Macdonald's forty-year public career had ended with his death in 1891, bringing on a period of difficulty for Conservatives, culminating in electoral defeat in 1896. From this point Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a French Canadian with a political power base in Quebec, led a new Liberal government that, despite its rhetoric, did not change existing policy directions in any significant way. Laurier did, however, recognise the wave of confidence buoying the country, declaring that while the eighteenth century belonged to Britain and the nineteenth to the United States, the twentieth was Canada's. Such sentiment marked an important sense of emergent national consciousness. This was not so much the assertion of Canadian nationalism – if this meant a self-identity that stood outside the Empire – but rather a newfound self-belief and willingness to emphasise Canadian domestic prerogatives and preferences in both the political and public spheres. Growing Canadian power came with a growing assertion of Canada's aspirations, desires and its rightful place within the Empire, not in place of it.

In fact, despite Canada's rising sense of self as a nation, fashionable imperialism, or rather Empire nationalism, remained a powerful social and intellectual force. Canadians dined on the same diet of Kipling, Henty and Ballantyne as their cousins in South Africa and Australasia. Similar social, church and educational structures, for example, promoted the idea of Empire, and the same range of patriotic and imperially oriented organisations such as the Navy League, the Empire Loyalist Associations and even the Boys' Brigades drove the message home in Canada, as they did in all of the self-governing colonies.