Canadian Propaganda in the World Wars

Canada entered the first World War as part of the British Empire. The war effort from Canada was huge as they contributed quite a large amount of their population to the war. The Canadian troops fought in many important battles during World War 1 earning them respect on the world stage. This war led to Canada achieving a sense of national identity as their own separate nation away from Britain. At the beginning of World War 2 Canada declared war on Germany a week after Britain did, showing their new sense of national identity. Like the first World War Canada supplied many troops and they fought in some of the most important battles like the Battle for Britain and the D-Day landings at Normandy. Canada sent over so much to Britain for their war effort that without Canada’s gifts who knows where the war would have gone. For Canada to be able to supply these munitions and troops a huge part of that was propaganda posters. This essential aspect of Canada's war effort helped them boost the public support for the war effort. They boosted overall enlistment and helped promote a sense of national pride and unity. Propaganda is a way of communicating usually towards a large demographic aimed at influencing the behaviors and beliefs of those individuals. This is often accomplished through the presentation of biased or potentially misleading information. Some of the key ideas of propaganda is to selectively choose the information that is being shown, by only being shown what the people who are spreading the propaganda want the viewer to see allows them to shape perception how they chose. Most importantly for these forms of propaganda is the emotional appeal of them, because this propaganda was in war time the propaganda would be used to make people feel things like national pride, anger, or even fear. Anything to make the citizens become part of the war effort. While this may be seen as manipulative, propaganda played a major role in Canada’s success in defending itself in the World Wars and aiding in the creation of a nation away from the british empire, without these posters it would have been much more difficult to recruit soldiers, to boost morale and most importantly to encourage citizens to contribute to the war efforts.  The purpose of this exhibit is to show the audience that it takes more than soldiers to build an army, more than soldiers to win a war. It takes a nation. This exhibit should leave its readers with a new understanding of how Canada was able to band together both during the war efforts and after.

Bibliography

 

 

  • Mackenzie, Hector. “Transatlantic Generosity: Canada’s ‘Billion Dollar Gift’ to the United Kingdom in the Second World War.” The International History Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 293–314. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23240826. 

 

  • Stacey, C.P.. "Second World War (WWII)." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published July 15, 2013; Last Edited November 30, 2023.