Canada's Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective Service and the Mobilization of Human Resources During World War II

Description

235 pages
Contains Bibliography, Index
$55.00
ISBN 0-7735-2263-8
DDC 940.53'71

Year

2001

Contributor

Reviewed by Dave Bennett

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Review

Michael D. Stevenson, now a researcher with the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade, has produced an authoritative account
of Canada’s mobilization of military, civilian, and industrial
resources during the Second World War. He gauges the effectiveness of
the central agency responsible, National Selective Service. This is
followed by detailed case studies in eight significant sectors of the
population: Native Canadians, university students, war industry workers,
coal miners, longshoremen, meatpackers, nurses and textile workers. Much
of this is meticulous, original research from primary sources.

The “greatest wartime muddle” was actually the verdict of the
Leader of the Opposition in January 1944, though Stevenson’s own
research shows that the record was uneven and not always the disaster
that the title of the book indicates. There were a number of key factors
in the muddle, the most obvious of which was the mismatch between the
strong central mobilizing authority of the federal government and the
exercise of these powers through voluntary cooperation and an alliance
of the various interests in Canadian society. The result was failure,
both of centralized power and of voluntary cooperation. Added to this is
a familiar Canadian story of conflict among federal agencies and tension
between the centre of government and the regions.

In the end, it is hard to gauge the degree of failure of the
mobilization effort because there is no hint of comparison with other
countries in a predicament similar to Canada’s. For instance, we are
not told much about the degree of military preparedness prior to the
outbreak of war and the relation between this and subsequent efforts at
mobilization. Why was it, for instance, that American mobilization was
so astonishingly successful? In Britain, war was seen as inevitable in
March 1939, with Hitler’s breach of the Munich Agreement of the
previous year. The country’s mobilization was then largely directed by
two politicians of outstanding talent, the Home Secretary Sir John
Anderson and Minister of Labour Ernie Bevin. Without comparisons of this
sort, we are unable to tell whether Canada’s muddle was understandable
or culpable.

Citation

Stevenson, Michael D., “Canada's Greatest Wartime Muddle: National Selective Service and the Mobilization of Human Resources During World War II,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed February 15, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/7672.