PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:
MacDonaill MacDonaill:
Trudeau's opposition to Canada's entry into WW2 was very much patriotic because A. he didn't believe going to fight the Mother Country's wars for her should have anything to do with being a proud Canadian and B. he was a very ardent French-Canadian nationalist at a time decades before the attempted rapprochement of Canada's two nations, and didn't see any reason why French-Canadians should be fighting for King George VI.
Really?? Cuz last time I checked, it wasn't Britain that was over-run by the Nazis. If I recall my history correctly, and I'm pretty sure I do about this, France was the one under the Nazi jackboot(among others), not Britain. I can even provide volumes of empirical data on that if you'd like.
Oh and ummm when U-boats started sinking ships in the St. Lawrence, you bet yer ASS it became CANADA's war too. And in all places, Quebec territory. The irony is almost sickening.
Did I not take special care to disclaimer that post saying that
those were Trudeau's views and not necessarily my own? (BTW, the fact that you insistently allow your bitterness from another thread to spill into this one is so petty and childish.)
History has proven the anti-conscriptionists to be wrong. But if you put yourself in the shoes of a French-Canadian in the 1930's and 40's, it's not like you had a crystal ball to tell you that sooner or later, if you didn't fight Hitler in Europe, you'd be fighting him on the Plains.
As for the liberation of France coming into play, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but most Quebeckers in my experience really despise French people. They are more insecure towards the French then they've ever been towards the English, so trying to rally up a bunch of French Canucks to go save la République probably wasn't going to work. In fact, much of the Quebec clergy in that time were supporters of Maréchal Pétain's Vichy government because they saw it as conservative and good for French Catholicism.
These people were obviously wrong. We can demonstrate that now with hindsight, but in an age were many people were uneducated, even illiterate, I don't find it very easy to blame them for their ignorance. French-Canadians refused to go to war for the same reason that many English-Canadians went: They were told they should by people they had been taught to respect.
Forum Addict 
