The Veterans Charter and Post-World War II Canada

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University,
where he taught Canadian political history and the history of Canada’s
external relations.

This collection of 11 essays celebrates one of the great achievements of
20th-century Canada: the reintegration into civilian life of the one
million Canadians who served in World War II. It is a remarkable story
and it is effectively told in these pages. The essays are derived from a
conference held at the University of Western Ontario in 1995.

The Veterans Charter is an attractive production. Tables and figures
are easy to read, and seven pages of illustrations show us some of the
key actors in post–1945 veterans affairs as well as glimpses of the
training aspects of the reintegration process. There are full reference
notes for each essay and appendixes reproducing public-opinion polls
taken during the war on veterans questions. A 1946 booklet, Back to
Civil Life, informing the veterans about steps in the rehabilitation
progress, is reprinted. Inevitably there is some repetition in the
accounts, not surprising in the light of the interrelationships between
the subjects of the essays.

In a book so competently put together and telling such a story of
success, it is hard to pick out highlights. Desmond Morton is
characteristically forthright in describing the inadequate
rehabilitation efforts of the Canadian government after World War I and
the social disorder that followed. Sometimes governments learn from past
mistakes; certainly the Mackenzie King government did so in its package
of legislation, the Veterans Charter, enacted between 1944 and 1946.
Aspects of the package are clearly described by a knowledgeable group of
younger historians and an official in the Department of Veterans
Affairs. The program of access to university education, which enabled
thousands of veterans to enter professional, academic, and business
life, is the topic dealt with by Peter Neary, who shows how the influx
of veterans made Canadian universities more varied and more competent.
His essay raises intriguing questions: why did Quebec universities not
participate in the university program as fully as those in English
Canada? Did this experience turn Quebec against a federal role in higher
education?

Other essays deal with casualty rehabilitation and the treatment of
disabilities, both physical and psychiatric. The veterans program was
put in place at the same time as family allowances and the provision of
old-age security. It is thus an initial expression of the Canadian
welfare state, born in the heady postwar period when all things seemed
possible. Doug Owram contributes a provocative chapter on the changes on
the home front after the veterans returned. They wanted to fit back into
a stable society based on traditional family values. They had fought for
“home,” not for abstract ideas such as human rights or democracy. A
buoyant economy, contrasted with the economic difficulties after 1918,
made the transition to an idealized domesticity easier.

The most moving essay in the collection is a short personal reflection
by J.L. Granatstein, sharply comparing Holland’s remembrance of World
War II, 50 years after, with present Canadian attitudes. Granatstein
believes we have been largely ignorant and even indifferent to the
multitudinous human enterprise represented by Canada’s participation
in World War II. Now that he has become director of Canada’s War
Museum we can be sure that Canadians will hear more of their country’s
war story.