Robert Borden
Robert Borden took Canada into the First World War as a colony and brought it out with its own signature on the treaty. He was a Nova Scotia lawyer who had left school at fourteen and taught himself, and he won in 1911 on opposition to free trade with the United States. The war three years later reorganised everything he did. Canada sent more than six hundred thousand men out of a population of eight million, and sixty thousand of them died. At the second battle of Ypres in April 1915 the Canadian division held the line after the first large chlorine attack in the war, urinating into handkerchiefs to breathe through them, and lost six thousand men in four days. Vimy Ridge two years later was taken by all four Canadian divisions fighting together for the first time. Borden used the casualties as an argument in London: an army of that size bought a voice, and he got one in the Imperial War Cabinet and a separate Canadian signature at Versailles. The cost at home was the deepest split in Canadian history. Volunteering collapsed and he brought in conscription in 1917. Quebec, which had never supported the war in the same numbers, resisted it, and troops fired on a crowd in Quebec City at Easter 1918, killing four. He fought the 1917 election on the issue, having first given the vote to soldiers' female relatives and taken it from citizens born in enemy countries, and won. He introduced income tax as a temporary wartime measure, nationalised the bankrupt railways into Canadian National, and put down the Winnipeg general strike in 1919 with the mounted police. He resigned in 1920 in poor health and represented Canada at the League of Nations, which existed partly because he had insisted the dominions be members of it.
- Lived: 1854 CE – 1937 CE
- Nationality: Canadian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
