Canadian Home Front - WWI

THE WHO, WHAT, WHY, AND HOW OF IT!

The Home Front

Canadians began producing our own munitions, or weapons of war.

Many other wartime goods, such as blankets, could be produced in Canada with safety.

However, with many men fighting overseas it was the women of Canada who performed the duties at hand in the factories.

What women did

Many women enlisted to become ambulance drivers, nurses and aircraft workers overseas.

Others stayed in Canada and worked on farms, sewed uniforms for Canadian soldiers and worked for the Canadian Red Cross.

Women also started to work in the munitions factories all over Canada.

Working Conditions

The conditions in which the women worked were also unfavorable - the buildings were very cold and often home to rats.

Women were not paid the same wages as men but did a more than acceptable job in replacing them.

Women in the Factory

Victory Gardens

During the war Europe had serious problems getting producing enough food.

All the farmers in Europe had gone off to war during the summer of 1914, leaving their crops ripening in the fields, some never to be harvested.

The burden fell to North America to provide food for the 120,000,000 people in the countries of the Allied Forces. 

Victory Gardens

The burden fell to North America to provide food for the 120.000.000 people in the countries of the Allied Forces. 

Prices increased for foods such as butter, eggs, and coffee.  There were meatless and wheatless days to try to cut consumption of highly valued food products.  As a response to the cuts in consumption, community gardens began to spring up everywhere.

Victory Garden

The Farm Service Corps"Farmerettes" “Farmerettes” were women who

worked on the Home Front. They assisted in all aspects of farm

work, replacing the labour of men lost to military service.

In 1918, for example, 2,400 women picked fruit in the Niagara region.

Rationing

At the start of the war people went around panic buying food and hoarding it at home.

Some shops sold out of food in days in August 1914.

Canadians had to send food and supplies to Britain during the war and therefore had to limit what they were eating.

Rationing With the German’s introducing Submarines

(a new weapon in WWI) they were sinking our ships on the way to England.

This caused further rationing. What was rationed:

Weekly, each Canadian adult was entitled to have 1.8 kg of meat and 220g of sugar.

Gas and metal was also rationed.

Home Front Propaganda

Anti-German Sentiment During the war Canadians feared and

harassed Germans. In Canada, the Ontario city of Berlin

changed its name to Kitchener, after Lord Kitchener, famously pictured on the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" recruiting posters.

Several streets in Toronto that had previously been named for Liszt, Humboldt, Schiller, Bismark, etc., were changed to names with strong British associations, such as Balmoral.

Wars Measures Act (1914)

The Canadian Parliament within days of entering the war passed the War Measures Act with little debate (August 2914).

The Government was granted the authority to undertake

any action seen as necessary "for the security, defence, peace, order and welfare of Canada."

The Government was given control over transportation, trade and commerce, and property; censorship of the means of communication, which at the time primarily meant newspapers; and the right to arrest and deport suspected enemies.

War Measures Act

Using the War Measures Act the Canadian Gov’t took lands from all people in Canada to grow crops and farm beef.

For example, the First Nations people who lived in OKA had their lands taken and were promised it back after the war. This never happened.

War Measures Act

This act allowed the Gov’t to also have curfews put in place.

Citizens of Canada had no rights and freedoms that they have today under this Act.