Canada’s autonomy took more than Vimy Ridge

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2017 (3076 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as is his style, waxed eloquently about the terrible sacrifice of the soldiers who fought there and the battle’s larger meaning for Canadian history. But he went a bit overboard attributing to Vimy something that is not so: that Canada “was born” on that battlefield.

It is true that at Vimy, for the first time in the war, “the four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together and drove the Germans off a ridge that dominated the terrain in the area of Arras in northern France,” as historian Jack Granatstein explains. Yet as he also adds, despite the 3,598 Canadians killed in the fighting, Vimy did not end the war, nor did Canada achieve autonomy within the British Empire.

This nation-building narrative was somewhat promoted in 1917 and then in 1936 when the Vimy memorial was opened, but it did not truly take hold for another generation. In 1967, on the 50th anniversary of the Vimy Ridge battle that coincided with Canada’s centennial, then-prime minister Lester Pearson reimagined Vimy as “the birth of a nation.”

The fact was that several months after the fighting at Vimy, Canada’s soldiers found themselves knee-deep in the mud in the area around the village of Passchendaele, near Ypres in Belgium. That battle had started at the end of July 1917, because the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, had insisted stubbornly that the key to victory on the Western Front was capturing the Passchendaele ridge.

Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian Corps commander, had objected, but he was forced to follow Haig’s orders. By the time the fighting had ended in November, the British had lost 275,000 men, the Germans 220,000 and the Canadians 4,028 with a total of 15,600 casualties. Among those killed or wounded were members of the 27th Battalion, recruited from Winnipeg. Symbolizing the utter futility and tragedy of Passchendaele was the fact that less than 12 months later, the precious ground taken in the battle was vacated.

Then-prime minister Robert Borden, who was visiting Europe in 1917, returned home under tremendous pressure from the Brits to send even more young men into battle. The only answer, in his view, was instituting conscription (the draft), which English Canadians generally accepted, but French Canadians did not. This contentious issue soon bitterly divided the country and led to an English-French split in the federal election of December 1917.

As for Canada becoming an autonomous nation as a result of its sacrifices at Vimy, Passchendaele and other First World War battles, that, too, would take time. In 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, formally ending the conflict, the best Borden was offered was for Canada to sign under the signatures of the British delegation.

Though Canada did obtain a separate seat in the League of Nations, the international (and weak) organization that resulted from the treaty, true autonomy within the British Commonwealth, as the Empire came to be known, was to take another decade.

During the 1920s, British politicians still expected Canada and the other dominions to salute smartly and shout, “ready, aye, ready,” as had been the case in 1914 when the war had started. Canada’s leader after 1921, William Lyon Mackenzie King, did not want to sever the British connection; he merely wanted the Brits to stop treating the dominions “as adolescent nations.”

It required two Imperial conferences in London, in 1923 and 1926, for a consensus to be reached. At the behest of Winnipeg Free Press owner Sir Clifford Sifton, the newspaper sent its editor, John Dafoe, to cover King at the 1923 conference. Dafoe, who had also accompanied Borden to Europe in 1919, was not enthusiastic about King or his political abilities, but he did influence the novice prime minister and return to Winnipeg with a more positive impression of him.

Lord Curzon, the pretentious British foreign secretary, lost patience with King at the 1923 gathering, yet the Canadian prime minister fought hard against a centralized British Empire foreign policy. Three years later, by the time the 1926 meeting had ended, it was agreed to that Great Britain and the dominions “are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” In essence, the declaration reaffirmed that “every self-governing member of the Empire is now master of its destiny.” Everyone but King George V was pleased; he complained that his government had given away his empire.

In 1931, this agreement was formalized in the Statute of Westminster and Canada really did become an autonomous nation. On Sept. 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, it was a given that Canada would fight by its side. However, as a sign of the colonial realignment, the Canadian Parliament first debated and voted on the issue before the country issued its own official declaration a week later.

Now and Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.