10 - Hanging On, 1914–1945

Summary

This chapters analyzes Canada’s struggles during two world wars, a global depression, and the onset of mass consumer society. The Great War claimed the lives of 65,000 soldiers and exacerbated cultural and regional cleavages. In the 1920s mass consumer society, secularism, and youth culture began to challenge the Victorian values that had hitherto served as a basis for social cohesion. As a nation dependent on the export of primary resources, Canada suffered deeply from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the economic crisis lifted with the outbreak of the Second World War, social divisions persisted. The turmoil resulting from wars and depression encouraged new political parties and movements (Progressive, Farmer, Labour, Communist, Maritime Rights, Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Social Credit, Union Nationale, and Reconstruction) that undermined the two-party system. Women struggled to translate the franchise, which they won federally in 1918, into political power. In 1929 the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada’s highest court of appeal until 1947) declared women “persons” under the law but discrimination against women remained rampant. Dominions in the British Empire were accorded full autonomy by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but internal differences blunted its practical applications in Canada until after the Second World War.