1914-1945: Overview / War Years / Interwar Years / World War II / Changing Attitudes

War Years

The popular view of the First World War as a battle between races shaped a debate in Canada about the preferred "racial" composition of Canadian society. Many British, American, and natural-born Canadian observers saw the war as a defence of Anglo-Saxon "civilization" against German and Austrian aggression and militarism. Though discredited now, these racial understandings brought about a sharp re-examination of Canada's immigration policies because they had encouraged the immigration of hundreds of thousands of continental Europeans. Canadians found the presence of enemy alien immigrants in Canada (those immigrants born in nations now at war with Canada) still more distressing.

The war's beginning prompted a backlash against German and Austrian immigrants, even if they had long resided in Canada and were now

Canadian citizens. The 1914 War Measures Act gave the federal government new powers to arrest, detain, exclude, or deport enemy aliens residing in Canada. The legislation, introduced by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Robert Borden, was one of many measures directed against immigrant groups during the war years. Taken together, these measures made immigrant communities bitter towards the Conservative party for many years after the war ended. The act itself prohibited specific enemy aliens from possessing firearms and forced them to register with the federal government and to carry ID cards. It also undermined cultural freedoms by prohibiting the possession and publication of materials in enemy alien languages-it thereby stopped the production of the numerous German-language newspapers in Canada.

Introduction

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