111
J.L. Granatstein
Before the war ... it was certainly said in official quarters that a
menace was threatening the world, and that it was necessary to
meet that menace by increasing our military expenditures, and
it was largely in anticipation of a great international disturbance
that this country voted for military and naval purposes the sums
of money which were appropriated at that time. But conditions
are wholly different today. There is no world menace. Where
does the minister expect invasion to come from? The minister
says that this expenditure is needed for the defence of Canada—
defence against whom? There is no answer; there is no answer
to be made.
20
There was no answer. Moreover, there were very few men willing to
join the militia. The Militia Department’s
Report
for 1919–20 said
that “The recruiting of the rank and file has ... been slow, as the
majority of men with overseas service are not prepared at once to
assume further obligations and make the necessary sacrifice of time
for training, while men who have not served in the war are at present
slow in coming forward.”
21
The military simply was not popular, and
Mackenzie King could get good mileage during the election of 1921 by
claiming that the government was wasting large sums for
ammunition.
22
King should not then have been surprised when members of his
own party, led by Chubby Power, the wartime major who had won Que-
bec South for the party in 1917 and 1921, began to press for reduc-
tions in the defence budget almost from the beginning days of the first
postwar Liberal administration. “Not only Quebec but all Canada was
war weary,” Power recalled. “The ex-soldiers themselves were violently
anti-brass-hat ... [and] many thousands of voters regarded the Liberals
as an anti-militaristic party. I felt that to continue to support defence
expenditure on the same level ... and for such outmoded and futile
purposes as the thoroughly discredited militia training camps, which
had largely been a pretext for an orgy of petty graft and alcoholic festiv-
ity, was not keeping faith with Liberal thinking. ...”
23
A blunt-speaking,
forthright, and able man, Power and his fellow Quebec M.P.s won their
point and the defence appropriations were reduced by $700,000. It
would be a long time before expenditures rose much, and until 1935
Canada existed for all practical purposes with only the barest rudi-
ments of a military force.*
24
That, after all, was more than enough.
*Small as it was, the army was still an English-Canadian preserve, almost as much as it had
been before 1914. French was used only in King’s Regulations, pay and dress regulations, and
Cadet regulations. Orders, decorations, and regimental names were not ordinarily translated. The
militia in Quebec had only 14 French-language units in 1930 with a strength of 2,292 officers
and men out of a total militia of some 30,000 officers and men. In the permanent force, the
breakdown of officers by rank and language was asfollows:
