The Shell Committee was scrapped as its work began to pay off. At British insistence, a new Imperial Munitions Board (IMB) was formed under the stern control of Toronto’s Joseph Flavelle, millionaire manager of the meat-packing firm of W.G. Davies. Flavelle made the IMB Canada’s biggest business enterprise. By 1917 it produced a fifth of the shells used by the British armies in France. Directly owned IMB companies produced acetone, steel forgings and high explosives. When RFC-Canada sought its help, the IMB used the Curtiss plant to produce 2,400 JN-4s, 600 of them for the U.S. Army Air Corps, and 30 F-5 flying boats for the U.S. Navy. Board contracts ranged from nickel to flax for the linseed oil used to “dope” the wings of fabric-covered aircraft. The IMB even built ocean-going ships at Ashbridge’s Bay in Toronto.

The IMB was not loved. Flavelle broke strikes, shocked opinion by recruiting women for munitions factories, kicked out the crooks who had infested the Shell Committee and took over incompetent suppliers. A mismanaged firm in Renfrew was simply leased and resumed operations under the IMB as “British Explosives.” Western Canada grumbled that 60 percent of the IMB’s output came from Ontario.

Ontario industry thrived. In 1914, 9,287 factories, with 243,805 employees had produced goods valued at $728 million. By 1918 there were 14,381 industrial establishments with 325,635 workers and production worth $1,533 million. For years, International Nickel had exported its Sudbury ore, claiming it could not be refined in Canada. Proof in 1916 that a German U-boat was carrying cargoes of nickel to Germany brought threats of embargo. INCO found it could do the impossible: a refinery at Port Colborne began operations in 1918.

War justified environmental shortcuts. Howard Ferguson, Hearst’s choice to manage Ontario’s resources, handed out 7,000 square miles of Crown land without tender and ignored warnings that even more was being plundered. If the price of making Ontario the biggest paper producer in the world was deregulation and freedom for corporations to make money, so be it. Wartime necessity was a useful argument against protesting conservationists.

The wilderness itself could strike back. In July 1916, “one seething cauldron of flame” wiped out 1,320 square miles of northern forest, devastating seven towns and villages and leaving 224 dead. The Matheson fire led Ferguson to appoint Dr. E.J. Zavitz as provincial forester and to begin Ontario’s system of forest rangers.

With food processing already an established Ontario industry, the province’s farmers were set to profit from wartime markets. The United Farmers of Ontario, formed in March 1914 as a successor to the Dominion Grange, gave farmers a voice. They needed it. Prices and production rose to record levels — from $10.9 million for the 1915 potato crop, for example, to $24.8 million in 1918, and wages for hired men doubled. No wonder farmers needed their sons. Governments pleaded for more production, but city-based editors and patriotic associations attacked farmers as selfish, disloyal profiteers. Ontario farmers had seldom been so rich or so resentful.

“Young Canadians,” warned The Globe in 1914, “must be Canadian in their sympathies but not anti-German.” That was too much to hope. In December the local militia commander mobilized Toronto after rumours of a German attack from Buffalo. In February, lights in Ottawa were doused after reports that enemy airplanes were heading north over Brockville. Hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants were arrested and interned at improvised camps from Fort Henry to the Lakehead. When the Lusitania was sunk, thousands more were interned. Ontario offered Kapuskasing as a lasting camp site; isolated by snow in winter and blackflies in summer, inmates could clear claybelt land for the benefit of returning soldiers.

Anti-German feeling ranged from absurd to malignant. Dachshunds were banned from the CNE dog show. German composers were excluded from concerts. The University of Toronto was forced to fire its German-born professors. The Department of Education commanded that the war and its causes must be part of the curriculum and provided a monthly issue of The Children’s Story of the War to help ensure compliance. A Toronto teacher, Harry Lee, was fired for attempting to give both sides of the story. He promptly enlisted and was killed at the Somme. School children were forbidden to sing “The Moon”, by German, until teachers were assured that Edward German was only the composer's name and not his nationality.

Berlin, Ontario, a prosperous city largely settled by German-Canadians more than a century earlier, became a target for prejudice. Local leaders urged all the patriotic causes and the school board even dropped German from the curriculum. But trouble persisted, much of it fomented by ill-disciplined soldiers who attacked German social clubs, beat a U.S.-born Lutheran minister and provided a rowdy chorus when aldermen were pressured into a referendum on changing the city’s name. On June 25-8, 1916 a narrow plurality accepted the name Kitchener, after the British war minister who had drowned at sea only weeks earlier.

The war made Canada — and certainly Ontario — self-consciously British. Neither Hearst nor Rowell felt that the war was a reason to suspend Regulation 17 or to conciliate Franco-Ontarians. The provincial government suspended the Ottawa Catholic school board, fired 122 recalcitrant teachers and left 4,000 children without school. Quebec allowed municipalities to send “Patriotic Funds” to “les blessés de l’Ontario.” The gesture enraged Ontario. So did a motion in Parliament, backed by Quebec Liberals. Borden’s government easily defeated the move but five Quebec Tories and eleven western Liberals switched sides.

Between them, the Pope and the British cooled the issue. In September 1916, Pope Benedict XV intervened, disavowing Bishop Fallon on bilingualism, supporting “adequate teaching in both languages,” and urging that the goal be pursued with legality and moderation. In November the British Privy Council ruled that Regulation 17 was legal but that displacing the Ottawa board was not. Both sides settled down, but the sense of grievance remained. By dividing Canada in wartime, Ontario had damaged the war effort.

The war encouraged both prejudice and reform. Though the Tories had dragged their feet on the liquor question, wartime regulations made it easier to curtail hours for bars and bottle shops. When King George V banned liquor from Buckingham Palace “for the duration,” loyal Ontario hearts were stirred. Others could be urged to sacrifice pleasure when young men were sacrificing their lives. On March 8, 1916, ten thousand marchers trudged to Queen’s Park in the driving snow with a banner half a mile long and a petition with 825,572 signatures. Among the names were 348,166 male voters, 73 percent of those who had cast ballots in 1914.

Within two weeks, over the backroom protests of government backbenchers, the Legislature began debating a ban on liquor (except in a private home or for “medicinal, mechanical, scientific and sacramental purposes”). When the Ontario Temperance Act passed, members sang “God Save the King.” Evangelist Billy Sunday boasted, “Ontario will be so dry you’ll have to prime a man before he can spit.”

Though women had worked hard to make Ontario dry, they still had no vote. Even after four western provinces had granted women’s suffrage, Premier Hearst resisted. “If every woman had a dozen votes,” he insisted, “she could never equal the influence which a Christian woman exercises in the community.” In February 1917, a Liberal suffrage motion lost. Days later, with the galleries crowded with women bearing daffodils, Hearst astonished friends and foe alike by introducing a suffrage bill and pinning a daffodil on his lapel. The bill passed unanimously. “You think your wives will vote as you do, don’t you?” shouted Mrs. G.A. Brodie of the UFO’s women’s section. “Don’t be too sure of that. We’ve got you where we want you at last.”

Patriotism was an argument for banning the bar and giving women the vote. What if patriotism could not maintain Canada’s army in France? War devoured men — 20,000 per division each year. Whatever the arguments and pressures, only so many young men would volunteer. Ontarians, of course, pointed their fingers at Quebec where the enlistment rate was far lower. Quebeckers were persuaded by nationaliste leaders like Robert Bourassa that their real enemies were “les boches de l’Ontario,” bent on suppressing French-speaking minorities. Recruiting leagues demanded conscription. Like Regulation 17, a defensible policy attracted anti-French bigots. John Godfrey, a leader of the recruiting leagues, launched a “Bonne Entente” movement so that business leaders from Ontario and Quebec could reach a better understanding. His efforts fizzled.

In May, Sir Robert Borden returned from England convinced that the Allied war effort was in crisis and that the Canadian Corps, victorious but bloodied at Vimy Ridge, must have more men or fade away. Officially Ontario backed his commitment. The wartime political truce at Queen’s Park had drawn Rowell closer to the Tories than to Laurier. Laurier’s opposition to Borden’s Military Service Bill split them forever. In October 1917, when Borden announced an election and a Union government was formed from both old parties, the Ontario Liberal leader, Rowell, was at his side. But leaders did not speak for everyone. Organized labour opposed conscription as a threat to any worker’s freedom. Farmers feared for their sons. Critics demanded conscription of wealth as well as manpower. Farmers were won over when Borden promised that their sons would be exempted. Other opponents, on the whole, held their tongues though in Kitchener an anti-conscription crowd shouted down the prime minister for the first time in his career.

On December 17, 1917, the Union government took 70 of Ontario’s 82 federal constituencies. Soldiers’ votes added four more. In January local tribunals began hearing thousands of appeals for exemption. Military police raided the Jesuit Novitiate near Guelph. Far more serious, after a German offensive in March had cracked the Allied lines, the Union government cancelled all exemptions. Farmers felt betrayed. When they protested, the prime minister refused to meet them. Farmers went home in despair.

Despair was common by the fourth winter of the war. Families mourned sons, husbands and friends. The war halved the buying power of a dollar. Prices soared; wages struggled to keep pace. A brutal winter in 1917 led to widespread coal shortages. Bureaucrats tried to allocate limited stocks and penalize hoarding. In 1918, schools and factories closed for lack of coal. Patriotic citizens observed “Heatless Mondays” and gave up Sunday driving.

More serious was the prospect of food shortages. From early 1917, women’s organizations preached thrift. A provincial Organization of Resources Committee persuaded service clubs and Bible classes to plant vegetable gardens. Though farmers warned that amateurs were no substitute for experienced labour, the committee persuaded civil servants, teachers, typists and school children to sacrifice their holidays to become farm labour. Earnest volunteers failed to save the 1917 harvest.

The government rejected rationing in favour of public appeals, advertising and providing farmers with the new-fangled tractors. A year later, the Organization of Resources Committee enlisted 16,700 boys as “Soldiers of the Soil.” Women students harvested fruit and vegetables. Most of the farmers’ sons conscripted in April were released for agricultural work. Food shortages persisted. By autumn Ontario faced “honour rationing” of butter, meat and sugar and “war loaves” with 20 percent wheat substitutes.

In 1918, Ottawa enforced National Registration on men and women. A federal “anti-loafing” law required all males, 16 to 60, to be gainfully employed. Newspapers in enemy languages were first banned and then compelled to print full English translations. Federal police forces hunted for “subversives.” In October, Ottawa banned all strikes.

None of this made the Union government popular. In Ontario, labour and farm organizations– traditional enemies on issues from the tariff to the eight-hour day– found common foes: profiteers, financiers and the old-party politicians who had conscripted sons but not wealth. Branches of an Independent Labour Party, formed in Hamilton in 1917, met with UFO clubs and organized joint picnics. Wartime by-elections had been uncontested; in Manitoulin a farmer challenged the Tory nominee and won. Something was happening in Ontario.

On August 8, 1918, Canadians and Australians broke the German line at Amiens. When the battle ended, Sir Arthur Currie’s men had advanced 14 miles and beaten all or part of 15 German divisions. On September 2, Canadians began smashing through the powerful Hindenberg line. By October 8, they had taken Cambrai. Canadians suffered the heaviest casualties of the war: half the fighting men of the Corps were killed or wounded but, for once, real victories followed.

The good news was offset by the grim official telegrams brought to thousands of doors. More immediate was epidemic influenza. The dread Spanish ‘flu reached Ontario through Niagara-on-the-Lake, where volunteers for a Polish army had gathered from across North America. The disease traversed Ontario, killing young and old. Ten thousand of Ottawa’s 60,000 people were sick. Schools, factories and theatres closed. Women volunteered as “sisters of service” but they were soon needed at home. By November, Ontario’s toll numbered 5,000.

On November 9th, news came from New York that the war was over. Crowds filled the streets, politicians polished speeches and publishers ordered special editions until the rumour died. Two days later, at 5 a.m. Toronto time, the shooting really stopped. Again church bells rang, cheering crowds jammed city streets. The war to end all wars was over.

Within weeks of the armistice, the IMB closed its factories and laid off tens of thousands of workers. Pent-up demand soon made other jobs. In Toronto alone, 1916-17 saw 11,000 new marriages but only 1,551 new homes. Despite the war, men had built a highway from Toronto to Hamilton; and, car factories, many of them Canadian, had raised the province’s motor vehicle owners from 31,724 in 1914 to 144,804 by 1919. The speed limit had risen, in 1918, to 25 miles an hour. Adam Beck’s Hydro empire had grown enormously in the war years: municipalities included in Hydro’s networks had tripled to 181; consumers had more than doubled to 216,086. The war had diverted Ontario’s industrial development but new infrastructure was a foundation for new growth.

For returned soldiers, Ontario had created a Soldiers’ Aid Commission. The first ex-soldier settlers moved to the Kapuskasing colony in 1917. Unimpressed, veterans defended their interests through their new national organization, the Great War Veterans Association. It met in Toronto in August 1918, demanding free land, higher pensions and an end to rank distinctions. A postwar crusade for a billion dollars in war-service gratuities was born in Calgary, but found a focus in the thousands of out-of-work veterans who crowded Toronto in the summer of 1919.

If veterans were turbulent but directionless, organized labour was angry and political. Postwar strikes in Toronto and other cities failed: perhaps votes would have more influence. Ontario farmers, seething from their 1918 experience, moved in the same direction. They could never win, so there was no need to organize a political movement, but there was no stopping local clubs from nominating candidates, sometimes with joint labour backing.

Premier Hearst knew he would pull through. For all the grumbling, Ontario had absorbed its veterans. Farmers had seldom been richer. By late 1919, unemployment was lower than in the war years. The long-promised referendum on the Ontario Temperance Act would coincide with election day, October 20, 1919. Women, exercising their franchise for the first time, would balance the pro-liquor sentiments of misguided young veterans.

It was the miscalculation of a decent, unimaginative man. Across the rural constituencies, farmers’ wives had turned out in their thousands to uphold the OTA. But then they voted for candidates who shared their concern for rural values and a vanishing way of life. Hearst lost his seat. Only 25 Conservatives and 29 Liberals faced 11 Labour members, an Independent and 45 members of the United Farmers of Ontario. Mrs. Brodie’s defiant warning had come true.

The Great War had left nothing unchanged, not even Ontario’s loyalties.