In 1942 seven-year-old Mary Murakami lost her family’s farm and home on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, when Ottawa ordered Japanese Canadians removed from the coast. Her father later made wooden sandals for his children so they could save their shoes for winter. The Canadian War Museum keeps the pair worn by her younger brother Richard. It is a family object from a country that also sent tanks, aircraft and more than a million of its people into the Allied war.

Ottawa takes control of prices and coupons

Canada declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, after a debate in its own Parliament, and invoked the War Measures Act, which gave the federal cabinet sweeping powers. Mackenzie King’s government at first hoped for a limited war of supplies and air training. The fall of France in June 1940 ended that hope. Ottawa passed the National Resources Mobilization Act, registered the adult population and began conscription for home defense. In 1941 the Wartime Prices and Trade Board imposed a general ceiling on prices and wages to prevent the inflation that had damaged Canadian households during the First World War.

Rationing followed in 1942. Sugar, tea and coffee came first, then butter and meat, with gasoline rationed for drivers. The Wartime Prices and Trade Board issued the coupon books, and local volunteers helped register households and explain the rules. A price ceiling and a coupon solved two different problems: how much a shop could charge, and how much one customer could buy. How a family used its coupons depended on what it could buy, cook, grow or preserve. City of Toronto archives preserve household records of the period, including coupon books, recipes and pamphlets on making do.

Children were reached through the classroom. Schools collected salvage, sold 25-cent War Savings Stamps and distributed material such as Canadian Schools at War, addressed directly to young readers. Adults bought Victory Bonds in nine national loan campaigns and volunteered for the Red Cross, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire and many local groups. The drives reached the far North. In Igloolik, in present-day Nunavut, twenty-year-old Qapik Attagutsiak joined a 1940 collection of animal bones, which were sent south for industrial use, including in munitions manufacture. In Toronto, the 1941 Aluminum Victory Campaign asked households to give up pots and pans for aircraft production.

Factories from Fort William to Scarborough

Canada’s war production grew from a small base. At Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, Canadian Car and Foundry began building Hawker Hurricane fighters in January 1940 under its chief aeronautical engineer, Elsie MacGill, the first woman in Canada to earn a degree in electrical engineering. She adapted the British design for Canadian production and winter operation, and the Royal Canadian Air Force counts 1,451 Hurricanes built in Canada. In Oshawa, General Motors built about 4,000 heavy utility bodies that could serve as ambulances or command vehicles. Bombardier in Quebec built tracked snow vehicles, and Montreal Locomotive Works made the Sexton self-propelled gun.

Veterans Affairs Canada counts more than 800,000 military transport vehicles and about 16,000 military aircraft built in Canada during the war. The government also ran the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which turned Canadian fields into flying schools for aircrew from across the Commonwealth. Other Allied air forces trained there too. After the German occupation of Norway in 1940, the Royal Norwegian Air Force opened a training camp in Toronto, known as Little Norway, near the island airport, before moving it to Muskoka.

The most vivid records of women’s war work come from the General Engineering Company (Canada), known as GECO, in Scarborough, then on the eastern edge of Toronto. Construction of the plant, designated Project 24, began in January 1941 on about 346 acres of farmland, with 170 buildings and about 2.5 miles of connecting tunnels. Empty shells and fuzes arrived by rail; workers filled them with explosives, and the finished munitions were shipped overseas. Heritage Toronto estimates that about 21,000 people worked there over four years, mainly young women with no factory experience. The plant ran twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, and recorded no fatal accident.

Safety rules governed every movement. Workers changed into uniforms on the “clean” side, removed metal items such as bobby pins, and had their uniforms washed each shift. The company also built a social world to keep a young workforce. It published a newspaper, the GECO Fusilier, ran a recreation club for a dollar a year, held dances, talent shows, softball games and bond drives, operated a cafeteria serving 3,000 meals a day and provided child care for working mothers. Photographs in the Archives of Ontario show all of this: the nursery, knitting circles, beauty contests and the visit of Toronto-born film star Mary Pickford on 5 June 1943.

The Canadian War Museum counts some 439,000 women in the service sectors of the economy in 1943–44 and a further 373,000 in manufacturing, about 261,000 of them directly in munitions. Women made up about 30 percent of the aircraft industry’s workforce. In 1942 Ottawa registered women born between 1918 and 1922 under National Selective Service, and governments in Ontario and Quebec opened day nurseries under a federal-provincial agreement. Wages for women remained below men’s, and most of the day nurseries closed soon after the war.

The face of a war worker

Veronica Foster assembled Bren light machine guns at the John Inglis plant in Toronto. In 1941 the National Film Board photographed her at work and away from it, dancing and playing baseball, and “Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl” became the most famous image of Canadian women’s war work. A recruiting campaign aimed at young women could suggest that factory work and a social life fit together easily. Shift hours, wages and responsibilities at home remained for each worker to manage. The National Film Board also made films for theatre audiences: Churchill’s Island (1941), in the Canada Carries On series, won the first Academy Award for documentary in 1942.

Canada’s posters spoke in two languages. French-language appeals such as “Par ton travail, combats” and posters celebrating the corvette Oakville, whose sailors boarded a German submarine in the Caribbean in 1942, were designed for Quebec, where support for the war was real but opposition to overseas conscription was deep. Official war artists recorded the services and the home front. Pegi Nicol MacLeod was commissioned in 1944 to paint women in the services, and Charles Comfort followed Canadian troops into Italy.

Conscription and conscience

More than 1.1 million Canadian men and women served in the armed forces. The size of the effort left room for a deep argument over compulsion. In 1939 Mackenzie King promised not to impose conscription for overseas service. Conscription for home defense followed in 1940. In a national plebiscite on 27 April 1942, about 64 percent of voters agreed to release the government from its pledge; about 73 percent of voters in Quebec said no. Opposition to overseas compulsion could coexist with voluntary service, and many French Canadians did volunteer. The government delayed until late 1944, when heavy infantry losses in Italy and northwest Europe led it to authorize sending 16,000 home-defense conscripts overseas.

Some Canadians refused military service on religious grounds. Almost 11,000 conscientious objectors, many of them Mennonites, Hutterites and Doukhobors, performed alternative service in forestry camps, on farms and in industry, according to the Canadian War Museum. Montreal’s mayor, Camillien Houde, was interned in 1940 after publicly urging men not to register for national service, and was re-elected after his release. Among new Canadians, communities from enemy countries faced suspicion. Hundreds of Italian Canadians were interned in 1940, and German Canadians were watched.

Indigenous Canadians entered the war on unequal terms. Veterans Affairs Canada records more than 3,000 First Nations members who enlisted, along with an unknown number of Métis and Inuit, at a time when status Indians could not vote in federal elections and many reserves were governed by Indian agents. At home, Indigenous families contributed to salvage drives such as the Igloolik bone collection, sold furs and crafts into a wartime economy, and in some places lost land to airfields and training ranges. After the war, many Indigenous veterans found that the benefits promised to returning servicemen were harder to obtain on a reserve than in a city, a grievance that took decades to address.

The removal of Japanese Canadians

After Pearl Harbor, Ottawa ordered the removal of about 22,000 Japanese Canadians from a 100-mile coastal zone of British Columbia. Most were Canadian-born or naturalized citizens. Men were sent first to road camps; families were moved to hastily built settlements in the interior, such as those in the Slocan Valley, or to sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba, where whole families worked the fields. In 1943 the government authorized the sale of their confiscated homes, farms, fishing boats and businesses, usually far below value, and the proceeds paid for their own detention.

Unlike in the United States, the policy continued after the war. In 1945 Japanese Canadians were pressed to choose between moving east of the Rockies and “repatriation” to Japan, and about 4,000 were deported in 1946, many of them Canadian-born. Mary Murakami Kitagawa recalled repeated uprooting, and the Canadian War Museum traces her family’s experience into 1946. Joy Nakayama, later the novelist Joy Kogawa, was sent with her family from Vancouver to Slocan; her childhood home in Vancouver is now a heritage site. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to return to the coast until 1949. In 1988 the federal government apologized and agreed to compensation.

Ports, airfields and victory

Halifax was the western terminus of the North Atlantic convoys, and its population and wartime workforce swelled while housing, transport and amusements lagged far behind. The danger reached the port’s doorstep: on 16 April 1945 a U-boat sank the minesweeper HMCS Esquimalt near the harbour approaches. When victory in Europe was announced in May 1945, celebrations in Halifax turned into two days of looting and rioting by sailors and civilians. The Royal Canadian Navy’s official history links the disorder both to immediate planning failures and to resentments built up in the crowded city during the war. Canada’s naval war is told in this site’s Battle of the Atlantic collection.

The Canadian army’s fighting was concentrated late in the war, in Italy from 1943 and in northwest Europe from the D-Day landings of June 1944, after the costly raid on Dieppe in August 1942. Canadian soldiers in the Netherlands in 1945 delivered food and were greeted as liberators, a story told in the other home fronts chapter. At home, Ottawa began planning for the peace early, with veterans’ benefits, family allowances introduced in 1945 and a commitment to avoid the unemployment that had followed 1918. The previous chapter describes the parallel American effort; the next chapter turns to Britain, where many Canadian servicemen spent years waiting for battle.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Inside GECO and other Ontario plants

Gallery · 5 photographs · select to enlarge

Campaigns and air training

Sources and further reading

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