Conscription In Ww1 Research Paper

For the first few years of World War I, the CEF relied solely on volunteers. (Valiante, “The Legacy of Canada's WWI Conscription Crisis”). However, the longer the war progressed, the more casualties increased, and the less men volunteered. The Prime Minister at that time, Robert Borden, had seen the decline in volunteers, and once he had returned from a trip to the trenches he became convinced that conscription was the only way to do soldiers justice (Jones, “Conscription”). The Military Service Act of 1917 was issued on August 29, 1917 and became law (“War on the Homefront”). The majority of French-Canadians and pacifists who have implored the government to not enforce conscription were infuriated. The results of the Conscription act culminated in riots and protests that required soldiers to bring order to chaos, and many searched for ways to be exempted from conscription (Canadian War Museum, “Recruitment and Conscription.”).
This created divide between French and English Canadians as the French Canadians were not motivated, nor sometimes even able to serve.
To make matters worse, the Canadian Army made no attempt to integrate the French soldiers into the English battalions, with no separate French battalions being created, nor any instructional manuals being written in French. (“War on the Homefront”) The soldiers that were conscripted were also a waste as only half of the 48,000 conscripted soldiers that successfully made it to Europe actually served at the front (Canadian War Museum, “Recruitment and Conscription”). With much loss and little gain, the Conscription Crisis of 1917 should be looked upon forever as one Canada’s largest mistakes in history. Canadians had ignored the needs of the French-Canadians and pacifist populations, a far cry from our multiculturalism and compassion that we take pride of
today.