The country’s shipyards had built some small Industrial effort had generated a billion dollars worth of munitions, aįigure then seen as huge. Scandals and many production failures, eventually resolved. Proved difficult enough and one which had generated a succession of The Dominion had produced mainly artillery shells, an effort that had Own procurement in Canada through the Imperial Munitions Board, and The British government then had arranged its Nor was there much of a legacy from the industrial war effort of the Perhaps the Bren Gun fiasco had something to do with the cancellation of the order placed by the United Kingdom in Canada for one hundred Bren Gun tracked carriers, an order extraordinarily ended by London just after the outbreak of war. In Toronto, the John Inglis Company in March 1938 had won a contract to build seven thousand Bren light machine guns for the Canadian military and five thousand for Britain- through a contracting process that produced cries of scandal and resulted in a Royal Commission to investigate. There were a few tiny aircraft manufacturers that produced airplanes on an almost piecework basis (in 1933, no aircraft were produced in Canada in 1938, 282 worth $4 million). The British government just before the war started had placed a small contract with Marine Industries Limited of Sorel, Quebec, to make one hundred 25-pounder artillery field guns. There was only a small federally-owned arsenal in Quebec City (that primarily made limited quantities of small arms ammunition) and a subsidiary plant in Lindsay, Ontario, reopened in 1937. Moreover, there were almost no munitions plants in that last year of peace. The nation’s mines produced metals and minerals-gold, copper, zinc-and the factories produced automobiles, trucks, steel, durable goods and clothing most heavy industrial goods were imported, and even the auto sector relied heavily on American motors.
1 There were still hundreds of thousands on relief and men who continued to “ride the rods” across the country, seeking work at a time when jobs were few. Unemployment remained very high, though down from the worst years of the Great Depression. The federal government’s expenditures in 1939 were only $680 million, and Canadian corporations paid only $115 million in taxes while income taxes generated only an additional $112 million. The Gross National Product, the sum total of all the goods and services created by the population of 11.2 million Canadians, was only $5.6 billion. Canadians won the economic war, and their efforts from 1939 to 1945 also ensured that the postwar years would be very different than the bleak decade that had preceded the war.Ĭanada was a small and weak country in 1939. This was an astonishing feat of production and organization, a massive effort by every sector of the Canadian economy and by Canadian workers and business leaders. The nation created and produced more than Canada’s million men and women in uniform needed to fight and win, so arms, equipment, food, minerals and metals were sold or, if our Allies did not have the money to pay, given away for the cause of victory. In the course of the Second World War, Canada’s factories, mines, and fields produced billions and billions of dollars worth of goods and foods to support the war effort.
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