Seven Oaks Magazine.

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the start of the First World War, an event that has seen little commemoration in North America. It also marks the 90th anniversary of a peace movement here in BC, a peace movement that echoes strongly in the prevailing, international, anti-war sentiment of today.

The memory of the Great War for Canadians, at least those born since 1945, has been irrevocably shaded by popular conceptions of the Second World War. World War II has become, through films like The Great Escape and Saving Private Ryan , and through annual Remembrance Day events, a war of justice, which saved the world from a scourge that threatened the very foundations of democratic society. Perhaps because it featured largely the same collection of European combatants, or perhaps because it shares the majority of its name with the Second World War, the First World War is often addressed in popular circles today as a sort of prequel to WWII. When Canada's involvement in the war began, however, with reports of a German invasion of Belgium, the popular perception of the war was far more complex. Probably the majority of Canadians supported what they took to be a righteous war of defense on behalf of the British Empire against German aggressors.

Some, though, recognized it for what it was, a war between a would-be colonial power in Germany and an established Empire in the Commonwealth. These opponents of the war, many of whom resided in Vancouver throughout its duration, immediately joined their voices to an international tide of protest in demanding an end to the conflict. The anti-war movement in Vancouver in 1914 was small, but diverse. It featured prominently the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) and its voice, the Western Clarion. Also involved at the time was the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, along with its parent organization, the fledgling BC Federation of Labour. All three of these organizations, to some extent, argued against the war on the basis of international class solidarity. As one critic, who bore membership cards for all of them, put it, the thieves of Europe, arriving at that point in the history of their development where it became almost impossible for them to carry on trade without trouble, had thrown off the mask, and had launched into bloody conflict thousands of working men, --in order that their respective property holdings, especially in the East, should not be further imperilled (sic).1

This sort of perspective emphasized the role that capitalism played in bringing about the war in Europe. A second strand of protest in Canada applied less analysis to the issue, but appealed instead to a more moralistic, often a very Christian-Progressive, sort of perspective. This was the pacifist resistance, perhaps most famously represented by J. S. Woodsworth, sometime Methodist Preacher, longshore worker during the war, founder of the CCF, and avowed pacifist. He refused to serve in the war, judging it immoral, and joined more notable (at the time) Canadian voices like that of suffragette Nellie McClung in protesting against it on the basis of pacifism.

In Vancouver, these disparate groups united around the issue of conscription. While there was little sympathy for those opposed to the war in the first two years, as the war dragged on interest in fighting decreased rapidly. By 1916, enlistment had slowed to a trickle, both in Canada and in other allied countries. Robert Borden, Prime Minister at the time, indulged a strong anti-Quebecois streak, and declared his continued support for the British Empire's struggles, when he instituted the Compulsory Military Service Act in 1917. The act began the process of conscripting young men who, to that point, had refused to volunteer. The dawning of the act was met in BC with a considerable surge in anti-war rhetoric, and a unification of sorts for the anti-war movement under the banner of the SPC. When some other major left wing organizations were made illegal in the fall of 1917, the SPC became the only widely available voice of protest against the war, especially as the labour movement had largely swallowed its earlier complaints. Under the SPC banner people like Ginger Goodwin and Helena Gutteridge ran for office on an openly anti-conscription platform. When Goodwin himself was conscripted in 1918, the SPC led the BC Left in denouncing the government's tyranny. When he was killed, they joined the reinvigorated BC Federation of Labour in calling for a one-day general strike to protest his murder, and to demand a rapid end to the war and fair treaty conditions for Germany.

Ultimately, while the SPC would crumble after the war, the immediate post-war period was filled with radical challenges to governmental and capitalistic power. The Communist Party of Canada was founded, the Industrial Workers of the World had their highest membership numbers, the One Big Union, a Canadian industrial union that looked something like the CIO, began recruiting thousands of members, the Winnipeg General Strike and its sympathy strikes all over Canada occurred, and left-wing candidates won elections all over the province. Just as the Great War had forever changed society in the West, so had the corresponding peace movements fundamentally altered the Left all over the world. The anti-war movement in BC deserves as much commemoration, from a certain perspective, as the war itself. Both had an enormous effect on the lives of Canadians. While conservative historians like Pierre Berton and Jack Granatstein have argued that Canada's nationhood began with the victory at Vimy Ridge in 1917, it is perhaps just as reasonable to claim that the foundation for the civil society most Canadians treasure today was laid by anti-war activists beginning in 1914. They promoted a view of the world that held all human life as more valuable than profits, and believed that working people suffered for the excesses of their employers. In short, the anti-war movement in BC and around the country, ineffective and small as it was, invented the post-war radical Left that would ultimately earn Canadians such treasured concessions as health care, the Canada Pension Plan, and the forty-hour work week.

In a week in which Stopwar.ca -- the broad-based anti-war coalition in Vancouver originally organized in the fall of 2002 to protest the looming war on Iraq -- held an educational event addressing Chavez's Bolivarian revolution, and an emergency rally against the siege of Najaf, Iraq, it appears that ninety years later a similar process is underway albeit, with a more anti-racist and anti-imperial agenda. It is important, and perhaps exciting, to think this month of the provenance of the BC anti-war movement, and consider its lasting significance. Perhaps, with energy and dedication, the anti-war movement that has seemed so promising over the past few years can channel its momentum in broader ways, and restart the faltering Canadian Left.

1 William A Pritchard, speaking at the Avenue Theatre, Vancouver, BC, June 6, 1917, as reported in The Western Clarion , No. 794, July, 1917, p. 2.