PEACEFUL CANADA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 March 1940, Page 6

PEACEFUL CANADA

LITTLE INDICATION OF WAR WHY SHE IS FIGHTING HITLER. PROFOUND FEELING FOR BRITAIN. You can travel across Canada today, as I have just done, and see hardly a single sign of war. writes Bruce Hutchison in the “Christian Science Monitor.” The Rockies, as I came through, .‘hern in the roaring cab of a locomotive, have looked down on millions of years of history and regard its present excitements with singular composure. The people along the railway, in the little towns in the larger cities, in the red section houses, seem the same — only a few uniforms here and there, less than you would see in most European countries during peacetime. Ihe prairies, white with too thin a layer of snow to suit the farmers, show no indication of the great part they will play in the war by producing food for the democratic Allies. Even here in Ottawa there is little outward evidence of war and you would never guess that the whole energies of the Government are concentrated on it, I hat this is the only warring nation in the Western Hemisphere. Canada ic a long way, geographically, from this war. It is not like the war this country entered in 1914. for (hen there was hardly a single Canadian family which did not have a relative or friend in the trenches of France. That war, from the start, haunted every” Canadian fireside. Now Canada has only 70,000 men under arms, something over 20.000 overseas, getting ready for France —a token force to show the world that Canada is with Britain. Thus a stranger coming here may well wonder what Canada thinks of the war, whether the average Canadian’s heart is in it. This is not a question to be answered off-hand with a patriotic slogan. The answer can be found only if one goes deep into the race, the history, and the character of the Canadian people. It is a mixed material, highly complicated. When the last war started, the population of Canada was 7,879,000. About a third were French-Canadians and 1 266,951 had been born in the British Isles. In. the Western Provinces half the population came from Britain. To these people Britain, not Canada, was home and they rushed to Britain's defence. Half of the Canadian army overseas were British-born. Today there are 11,200,000 people in Canada —-3,172,000 French-Canadians and only 631,411 British-born. Thus while the total population has increased 50 per cent, the Canadians born in Britain are half of their total in the last war. Not 10 per cent of the men. in Canadian uniform were born in Britain.

Clearly there is not in Canada today, and cannot be. so much of the nostalgic British sentiment, the intimate knowledge and love of Britain as a homeland, as there was in 1914. Yet Canada entered the war automatically at its outbreak and its entry was confirmed by the free vote of Parliament, only one member opposing it.

Today Canada is deeper into this war than it was into the last one. It is a far larger factor in the war and will be a far larger factor in the subseouent peace. On a scale impossible twenty-five years ago the natural resources of this rich young nation are being mobilised as never before to make it what Premier King has called the “arsenal of the British Empire.” Americans often ask why Canada has gone so completely into the war when, obviously, it is becoming more and more with every passing year a North American nation, with interests closer and closer to those of its big neutral neighbour. There are two reasons.

There is, first, the reason of sentiment, the feeling for Britain still held by the small British-born minority and held in lesser degree by the sons and daughters of these people. It is a profound thing, one of the key facts of Canadian life still, despite its growing North Americanism. But in this war there is a second and still larger factor which was hardly present when the last war opened. It is the feeling of Canadians that not only Britain but Canada is endangered by the war, that the existing way of life in Canada could not survive the defeat of the Allies.

Canada went into the last war almost entirely to help Britain. It goes into this war with that purpose, of course, but with the larger purpose or helping itself, of preventing the victory of a political philosophy opposed to everything that a Canadian considers worth while.

That accounts for the unity of Canada today—a far greater unity than was possible even with the larger sentimental pressures of the last war. Quebec was generally hostile to the last war and its hostility finally emerged in riots and arrests. By free vote and overwhelming majority it has endorsed the Government's present war policy. The French-Canadian, with no sentimental attachment whatever for Britain or France, the most American of all North Americans, approves the war because he feels his own way of life and his religion imperiled by fascism and communism. French-Cana-dian regiments are recruited as rapidly as those of other Provinces.

’ Go through this country today and talk to the people and you will find the ideological question of these times answered in the simple terms of French-Canadian lumberjack, maritime fisherman, prairie farmer, British Columbia miner. He says Hitler and Stalin must, be stopped. He does not believe that any enemy immediately menaces Canada, that any foreign fleet will attack his shores as long as the American Navy is afloat. But he does believe that a victory for the dictatorships would create such a world of international brigandage that democracy in government and liberty in private life could not survive. That is why there is little excitement or flag-waving about the war here but. instead, the mobilisation of industry, the raising of more pigs, the shipment of more lumber, the mining of more minerals, the levying of more taxes, the expenditure of twice as much money in one year of this war as in eighteen months of the last one.