Conscription Crisis of 1944

The Conscription Crisis of 1944 was a political and military crisis following the introduction of forced military service for men in Canada during World War II. It was similar to the Conscription Crisis of 1917, but not as politically damaging. Military history of Canada during World War II Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had been haunted by the way the Conscription Crisis of 1917 had fractured the Liberal Party between its English-Canadian and French-Canadian members. King, who experienced the split first-hand, was determined to avoid another such split. In 1922, during the Chanak Crisis, when the United Kingdom almost went to war with Turkey, King had first asserted that Canada would not automatically go to war as part of the British Empire if the United Kingdom did, saying he would consult the Canadian Parliament first and presumably declare neutrality if the House of Commons were unwilling to go to war with Turkey. Though there were several reasons for King's reluctance to go to war with Turkey, at least one was the memory of how badly the First World War had strained Canadian domestic unity. During the 1930s, Mackenzie King had displayed what the Canadian historian Colonel John A. English called "an abiding aversion to conscription" and "an apparently unshakable conviction in the efficacy of appeasement", regarding another world war as "the ultimate catastrophe" for which no price was too high to avoid. In 1935, King had been opposed to sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia; in 1936, he stated that Canada would not take part if Britain decided to take military action in response to the German remilitarization of the Rhineland; and in 1938, he had warmly supported the Munich Agreement as the necessary price for peace. King had laid down defence spending priorities in April 1939 that declared the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) was to be the main service, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) the secondary service and the Canadian Militia the last on the list, as he wanted to avoid fighting another land war, which was likely to cause heavy losses.