When munitions manufacturers complained about their shrinking profits in late 1916, an angry Flavelle told them to “send profits to the hell where they belong.” Canada’s Hundred Day march to victory in the First World Warįlavelle’s factories, spread across the country but concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, employed 250,000 men and 30,000 women. The Imperial Munitions Board, founded in November 1915 with financial magnate Joseph Flavelle in command, soon had more than 600 factories churning out vast quantities of artillery shells, fuses and explosives, and building aircraft and naval vessels. The need for uniforms and soldiers’ equipment was huge, and initially patronage and shoddy work determined almost everything. As the war went on, munitions and other war-related factories sprang up across the country. In economic terms, the impact of the war was more measurable.
Did Canada lose a soldier who might have been a great prime minister? One who would find a cure for cancer? Or one who would have written the great Canadian novel? One mother in Winnipeg had seven sons in the army and two were killed countless families lost fathers, sons, brothers and uncles. The Canadian Patriotic Fund raised money to help families whose breadwinner was overseas, but nothing could compensate for the war’s losses. The war’s impact on the relatives of those serving at the front was incalculable. Some 22,000 men served in the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force, and the navy patrolled Canadian waters with some effectiveness. The army had a corps of four divisions and 100,000 men fighting in France and Flanders and winning laurels, while the casualty toll over four years approached almost a quarter-million killed and wounded. By the end of the war, 620,000 men and women had put on a uniform, an extraordinary effort from a population of just eight million.
In 1914, Canada had a tiny standing army, a two-ship navy and no air force. The war changed everything.įirst, there was the military aspect. In the hothouse atmosphere created by the conflict, attitudes changed faster, tensions festered more quickly and events forced governments and groups to take new positions at an unheard-of pace. The Great War, lasting from August 1914 to November 1918, had a huge effect on Canada.
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