OTTAWA — On Sept. 3, 1939, as Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King told Canadians in a radio broadcast that his government would ask Parliament to authorize the country’s own entry into the conflict — a deliberate, week-long delay that let Canada, for the first time in its history, decide for itself when to go to war.
Germany had invaded Poland two days earlier, on Sept. 1, and Britain and France honoured their treaty obligations by declaring war that Sunday morning, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia and CBC Digital Archives. King addressed the nation from Ottawa hours later, borrowing a line from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s January address to Congress: “To save one, we must make up our minds to save all.” He told listeners that Parliament, recalled early from its scheduled Oct. 2 return, would convene the following Thursday to consider “effective co-operation by Canada at the side of Britain,” and that in the meantime the militia, navy and air force had already been placed on active service under the War Measures Act.
What King did not do that day was declare war. That distinction mattered enormously in 1939, in a way it had not in 1914. When Britain went to war in the First World War, Canada — then still constitutionally bound to the Empire’s foreign policy — was automatically at war too, according to a Library of Parliament background paper on the episode. The Statute of Westminster, passed in 1931, had since given Canada full legal authority over its own foreign affairs, and Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe had threatened to resign earlier in 1939 when King suggested, in a January speech, that Canada would automatically follow Britain into any war. Lapointe insisted Parliament, not London, would decide.
So Parliament did. Governor General Lord Tweedsmuir opened a special session on Sept. 7 with a throne speech laying out the case for war, and after two days of debate, both the Commons and the Senate adopted the address in reply on Sept. 9. Only then, on Sept. 10, did the federal cabinet issue an order-in-council declaring a state of war with Germany — a proclamation Canada’s high commissioner in London, Vincent Massey, personally carried to King George VI at Windsor for his signature as King of Canada, a separate legal capacity from his role as Britain’s monarch. As government war recorder Leonard Brockington put it afterward, in a line quoted widely in accounts of the episode, “King George VI of England did not ask us to declare war for him — we asked King George VI of Canada to declare war for us.”
The seven-day gap between Britain’s declaration and Canada’s own was not bureaucratic delay. Historian J.L. Granatstein, writing in Maclean’s, has described it as a deliberate assertion of sovereignty, one other British Dominions later cited as precedent. Not every Canadian voiced support: CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth stood alone in the Commons debate to argue against entering the war at all, a dissent his own party publicly disavowed. Canada’s declaration held until a further royal proclamation formally ended the state of war in 1951, by which point more than one million Canadians had served in uniform.
Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia, CBC Digital Archives, Library and Archives Canada, and Maclean’s magazine.
