Canadian general election

On 17 December 1917 Canadians elected a new House of Commons. It was a single-issue election: conscription. On one side stood Prime Minister Robert Borden’s coalition Union government, made up of Conservatives and pro-conscription Liberals; on the other the Liberals who had stayed with Wilfrid Laurier. The Canadian historian Michael Bliss called the campaign the most bitter in the country’s history. The result divided Canada almost exactly along the language line.

The campaign

The government went to the polls on a platform of vigorous prosecution of the war. A few weeks earlier the Canadian Corps had taken the ruins of Passchendaele at heavy cost, and there were still too few volunteers to keep the divisions in France up to strength. The first call-ups under the Military Service Act had been a disappointment: most of those called applied for exemption. Laurier opposed compulsory service overseas, and in Quebec the nationalists of Henri Bourassa also campaigned against conscription. In English Canada many government supporters portrayed French Canadians as shirking a common duty, which was received with bitterness in Quebec.

The government had on its side two acts passed in the autumn. The Military Voters Act gave the vote to all soldiers and military nurses, and the Wartime Elections Act took it away from naturalised immigrants from enemy countries and granted it to the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters of soldiers. This was the first federal election in which some Canadian women could vote. Soldiers overseas voted on special ballots on which they chose only between “government” and “opposition”, and they could indicate to which riding their vote should go. If they did not, the vote could be assigned to a riding by the party they had voted for. This made it possible to direct soldiers’ votes where they were most needed.

The result

The Unionists won 153 of the 235 seats and about 57 per cent of the vote, the highest share in the history of Canadian federal elections. Laurier’s Liberals had 82 seats and just under 39 per cent of the vote. Of their seats, as many as 62 came from Quebec, where the Unionists won only three ridings with English-speaking majorities. The remaining Liberal seats went largely to ridings with a high proportion of French speakers in New Brunswick, Ontario and Manitoba. In the western provinces the government won almost every seat. In 33 ridings there was no vote, because only one candidate stood. This was the case, among others, in Halifax, where eleven days earlier the explosion of a munitions ship had destroyed the northern part of the city: only two Unionists were nominated there for the two seats.

The soldiers supported the government overwhelmingly, by between about 80 and more than 90 per cent according to various sources. According to often-cited calculations, their votes decided the Unionist victory in 14 ridings that would otherwise have gone to the opposition. The government’s majority would nevertheless have been clear even without them.

A divided country

The election gave Borden a mandate to enforce conscription, but it deepened the gulf between English and French Canada. At the turn of 1917 and 1918 the Liberal member Joseph-Napoléon Francœur tabled a motion in the Quebec Legislative Assembly stating that the province would be prepared to leave the federation if the rest of the country considered it an obstacle. The provincial premier, Lomer Gouin, persuaded him to withdraw the motion before a vote, but the debate itself showed the depth of the crisis. In the spring of 1918 anti-conscription riots broke out in Quebec City, during which the army opened fire on the crowd. Historians note that the conscription dispute weakened the Conservatives in Quebec for decades and tied the province to the Liberal Party.