V-E Day 80 – Courage & Conviction: World War II’s lessons for Canada by J.L. Granatstein – Part Three

May 8, 2025

Despite the horrible casualties and losses, Canada’s Second World War today is seen as the last “good war,” noble in its aims, positive in its overall results.

If the First World War marked Canada’s emergence as a more independent nation, the Second World War showcased its ability to exceed expectations on the global stage. Canadian fighter aces and air crews defended the UK during the Blitz, while our sailors and merchant navy helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic. Canadian troops drove the Nazis from Italy, stormed Juno beach during D-Day, and slogged through muddy, flooded fields to liberate the Netherlands. By V-E Day – Victory in Europe – our allies saw us as equals.

But that was eight decades ago. Today, as authoritarian regimes challenge Western democracies, the echoes of past conflicts resonate. Decades of neglect have left Canada’s military a shadow of its former self. This special three-part series delves into Canada’s pivotal role in the V-E Day victory and examines the current state of our armed forces, offering insights on how Canada can reclaim its stature in national security and defence. Parts 1 and 2 set the scene, while Part 3 brings the conflict into focus for Canadians today.

Part 3: A call to arms – Restoring Canada’s global influence

By J.L. Granatstein, May 8, 2025

A women gather in celebration in Toronto on V-E Day, May 8, 1945. Source: City of Toronto Archives/Public domain.

Victory in Europe in May 1945 had finally proven to the free world that that Axis powers could be defeated. Japan remained in the fight, but with Nazi Germany’s defeat, an Allied triumph seemed inevitable.

In June 1945, Canadian voters re-elected Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King – his sixth federal election victory. Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the saviour of the world, lost his election in July. (American President Franklin Roosevelt had died in April 1945, less than a month before V-E day).

King, who had orchestrated the massive Canadian war effort, ordered his bureaucracy to prepare stimulative plans for a return to the Depression after wartime factories ceased production – but happily, they were not needed.

Canadian troops had fought bravely in the air and on sea, at the beaches of Normandy and in the hills of Italy and beyond. After the war, Canada created the Veterans Charter to care for their needs.
Source: Public domain.

The men and women who had fought and won the war against the Nazis returned to Canada in late 1945 and early 1946; some had volunteered to serve in the ongoing war against Japan but the atomic bombs ended that conflict before many Canadians went to the Pacific theatre. Upon returning home, all veterans had access to the Veterans Charter, a very generous scheme that included access to university, land for farming, support to start a business, unlimited medical care, and more. The Charter was as good or better than that offered by any of the Allied nations. Postwar Canada was to be a very different nation.

One of the beneficiaries was Major Harry Jolley. He returned to Toronto in early 1946, one of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women repatriated. He quickly began his dental practice again, found a girlfriend, became very successful, and worked into his 80s. He had worried on V-E Day whether he would “ever recapture great depths of feeling about important events” and knew his sense of balance had been “a little out of kilter.” But Jolley recovered and like most of his comrades in the armed forces he put the war behind him, not forgetting the bad times, but focusing more on the positive memories of serving a just cause.

Major Jolley is now dead and so are almost all his comrades and those who worked in the factories and fields, in the mines and shipyards at home. He and the 1.1 million Canadian men and women who served and all those who laboured at home had helped save freedom. In the process, they had turned Canada from a poor nation into a prosperous, growing power.

Despite the horrible casualties and losses, Canada’s Second World War today is seen as the last “good war,” noble in its aims, positive in its overall results.

Canada emerged from the Second World War a very different nation from the one that joined the conflict only six years before – a rich middle power, a founding member of the United Nations, and a country respected for its massive contribution of men and materiel to victory. Canada mattered, and it would do so for the next quarter-century and more.

The peace that all had hoped for in 1945, however, did not last very long – replaced by a long Cold War against an expansionist, aggressive Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites, and China, which embraced communism in 1949. Canada, firmly on the side of the democracies led by the United States, became a founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and sent troops overseas to fight in Korea. By 1951, Canadian soldiers helped to protect West Germany, and an air division of our pilots flew Sabre jets based in France. Meanwhile, our naval vessels patrolled the North Atlantic, all under NATO auspices.

Canada trained many pilots from European NATO members. In this 1960 photo, aircrew from six allied nations form the alliance’s initials.
Source: Canadian War Museum

By the mid-to-late 1950s, Canada was spending more than 7 percent of GDP on defence and the armed forces numbered 120,000 professional and well-trained troops. When the Suez crisis erupted in 1956, Foreign Minister (and eventual Prime Minister) Lester Pearson improvised a UN peacekeeping force that froze the crisis and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. Instantly, it seemed, Canada came to believe that peacekeeping was its special talent and that every UN force required Canadian troops. Governments liked this because peacekeepers didn’t need big guns and heavy tanks and cost much less. The Canadians in NATO watched their equipment grow obsolescent, and by the early 1970s, the federal government had cut Canada’s overseas contribution in half, and frozen the defence budget. The Americans and our European allies were not happy.

Canadian peacekeepers on a United Nations mission in Cyprus circa1965–67.
Source: Public domain.

Canadians increasingly indicated their desire for a welfare state – Unemployment Insurance, the baby bonus, Medicare, Old Age Security, and pensions – and governments provided all these and more. “Guns and butter” seemed possible for a time, but not forever, and the Canadian Armed Forces shrank from 120,000 to 80,000 and to 63,000 by the turn of the century. And with the decline of hard power and the rise of Western Europe to prosperity, Canada’s influence in the world began to shrink. We were a moral superpower, some said, pointing to the United States that was a military superpower that fought wars while Canadians kept the peace. But somehow, Canada’s relevance on the world stage had dissipated. Put simply, we just didn’t matter anymore.

Is it possible once again to become a country that can give a good life to its citizens and still play a credible and important role in world affairs? Is it realistic to believe that we can live  next door to a hegemon that doesn’t always play by the rules and still retain our independence? These challenges are not easy ones, and the way ahead is not clear. What path should Canada take?

First, Canadians should realize that we must know more about our past if we wish to shape the present and the future. Previous generations made grievous mistakes in their treatment of First Nations and racial and religious minorities, and there should be no doubt about that. But there were great successes in their settling a vast land, in building a political system that was democratic, and creating the infrastructure for a transcontinental nation. There were prime ministers of talent like John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, King, and Louis St. Laurent, leaders with a vision for what Canada could become. Sometimes that vision was blinkered, but most often it was correct. Whatever their direction, it was not to make Canada the world’s “first post-national state” with “no core identity” and a history that was not much more than a collection of past injustices. Canada was always God’s country, a most favoured land. Our history matters and so too does our leadership.

Canada’s geography matters too. To be located in North America is a blessing with protection provided by two vast oceans, fertile land, and vast mineral resources. For most of Canada’s history, we were fortunate to live alongside the United States, the world’s great democracy and military and cultural power. Often that presence could be overwhelming, and there was always the danger that Canada, with a tenth the population, might be swamped. Sometimes, as today, the Americans lose their way and seem interested in pushing too hard against their weaker neighbour. But Canadians have always fought to remain independent, or as someone once wryly told the CBC’s Peter Gzowski on his radio show, as independent as possible in the circumstances. There is no doubt that today’s circumstances are difficult, but Canada will survive because our independence matters greatly to each of us.

And there is a world beyond our continent. With Britain and France still seen as our mother countries, Europe is important to us. We want to keep NATO alive and to seek closer ties and more trade and investment from our friends in the European Community. It is the same with Australia and New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and even China, although wariness of the threats posed by the communist PRC is warranted. We are linked with Mexico on trade and want to interact more closely with Latin and South America. Some of these ties are fragile and need work to be maintained or rebuilt, but they are worth the effort.

Canadian and Polish troops train together as part of the multinational NATO taskforce to protect Latvia, July 2018.
Source: eFP BG ROTO 10 LATVIA

For example, today in Europe we have troops serving in Latvia and leading a multinational NATO force to protect a small ally from Russian attack. We have ships of the Royal Canadian Navy making freedom of navigation sailings between China and Taiwan, and we have aircraft flying daily under the joint Canada-US North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) to keep watch over our North and the vast Arctic Ocean, now a contested space.

As this suggests, the world is not at peace, and the new economic and political Cold War is dangerous. To do our part, Canada’s leaders and citizens must remake our domestic economic policies, develop our untapped natural resources and take steps to get them to market. We must reshape our foreign policies to firm up our links with friendly nations. And we must rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces and give the men and women who serve the best equipment available: new naval vessels, state of the art aircraft and drones, and armoured vehicles that can survive on the battlefields of the future. We need a larger professional military and a much bigger reserve force. This will cost Canadians more today and tomorrow, but national defence has always been like an insurance policy. We either pay in dollars now or we pay later with the lives of our sons and daughters and possibly the loss of our nation.

Canada must heed the lessons of the Second World War when it come to dealing with authoritarian foreign leaders. We need to realize that today’s powerful autocrats, men like US President Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping, will not be the leaders of the coming decade. The next few years will be difficult while they remain and we cannot know the policies of their successors, but we can survive and prosper if we dig in and persevere. The Canada that Major Harry Jolley and his comrades fought to preserve eighty years ago will always be a Canada worth saving.

About the author

Historian J.L. Granatstein is a member of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Research Advisory Board. He taught history at the postsecondary level for 30 years. A bestselling author, Granatstein was the director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum. He writes on Canadian military history, foreign and defence policy, and politics. Among his publications are Canada’s War, The Generals, Canada’s Army, and Who Killed the Canadian Military? He is an officer in the Order of Canada.

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