"IF YOU WERE AN ordinary person living in Canada in the winter of 1918– 19, you might well have thought that the world was coming down around your ears.
World War I had ended at 11 a.m. on Monday, November 11, 1918. Word of the armistice reached Canada in the early hours of the morning. As people heard of it, they spilled from their houses into the streets, some of them still in their pyjamas and nightgowns, congregating on street corners to toast the peace. After more than four years of war, there was a passion to celebrate. In Toronto, a pre-dawn procession of munitions workers, mainly women, paraded down Yonge Street, beating on pots and pans and blowing whistles. Towns and cities erupted in a noisy jubilee: sirens began wailing, factory whistles blew, church bells rang. Bonfires crackled on street corners and fireworks exploded. In the prairies, haystacks burned brightly in the fields. When daybreak came, work was forgotten as downtown thoroughfares filled with celebrants. Effigies of the German Kaiser were strung up and set ablaze. Civic officials hastily organized victory parades where Canadians expressed their relief that the war was finally over. Churches held special services of thanksgiving. The acting prime minister, William Thomas White (Prime Minister Robert Borden was already in England preparing for peace talks), dashed off a telegram to Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian forces, commending their “courage, endurance, heroism and fortitude.”
But the euphoria did not last for long. Once the hangover of celebration wore off, Canadians woke up to the realization that there was no peace. Instead, everywhere in the world there seemed to be violence and turmoil: revolution in Germany and Hungary; civil war in Russia; uprisings in China and India; war in Afghanistan; general strikes in major cities across the United States. It was the Bolsheviks, people said; they seemed to be everywhere, overturning governments, seizing private property, and imposing their radical ideas. For some, these foreign “Reds” represented hope for a more just society; for others, they were a dangerous evil let loose to prey upon mankind.
If unrest was the rule around the world, why not in Canada? The war had left many Canadians disappointed and anxious about the future. The cost of living had been rising at three times the pace of wages. Working people found themselves poorer off than before the conflict began. As demobilized veterans returned home looking for jobs, a looming unemployment crisis threatened the economy. Returning soldiers were angry to find recent immigrants and people who had not put their lives at risk during the war occupying positions that they thought should belong to themselves.Conscription had opened an ugly division between French and English Canada. Under Borden’s Conservative government, political life seemed to have achieved unprecedented levels of corruption. The government and the press were engaged in a full-blown panic about the threat to the Canadian way of life posed by foreign agitators and labour radicals. Professor O.D. Skelton wrote in the Queen’s Quarterly:
The strain of war has produced a reckless and desperate temper. The world cannot be torn up by the roots for five years without destroying much of the old stability and acquiescence in the established order.
Canadians wondered what the war had been all about if the result was so much uncertainty, so much turmoil. They were proud of their country’s contribution to the conflict, but unsure about how to make it count for something. Surely more than 60,000 young Canadians had not given their lives just to preserve the status quo. The sacrifice seemed to demand a better way of doing things. A thirst for significant change cut across all stratas of society, from factory workers to farmers, from church ministers to returned soldiers to politicians. The federal cabinet minister Newton Rowell summed it up:
We cannot go back to old conditions, if we would, and we ought not to, even if we could.
But there was little agreement about what a new, improved Canada might look like. At a conference on reconstruction organized by the federal government in Ottawa, business leaders revealed their suspicion of even the most basic reforms, preferring instead a return to “normalcy,” by which they meant the way things had always been. That was the conservative, go-slow approach to post-war policy making: change if necessary but not necessarily change. What was the point of winning the war against Kaiserism, they wondered, if it led to Red revolution at home? More assertive voices for change emanated from the Protestant churches, which before the war had organized the Social Service Council to advocate for progressive social reform. The Council threw its support behind “industrial democracy” and a wide-ranging set of social welfare policies, including mothers’ allowances, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions. The Methodists went farther still, calling for “nothing less than a complete social reconstruction” of postwar Canada.
Yet even this clarion call did not go far enough for political activists in the labour movement and the various socialist parties. They adopted the rhetoric of world revolution. Nothing would satisfy these radicals short of an overhaul of the structure of economic ownership in the country. “Are we in favour of a bloody revolution?” asked Calgary labour organizer Jean MacWilliams, appearing before a government commission in the spring of 1919. “Why any kind of revolution would be better than conditions as they are now.” In other words, what was the point of winning the war in Europe if it did not lead to revolution at home?"
- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 9-12.