Mike, lets be blunt about it. The Canadian military during the Second World War and earlier was almost entirely an English institution. This is covered in the book “Canada’s Navy: The First Century” by Marc Milner. Here are some excerpts from his book:
“The spirit of a limitless future was shared by two important and dominant groups in Canada before 1914. One was the wave of English (not Britons, but people from England proper) immigrants who arrived in Canada starting in the 1880s. The old Canada was largely a collection of French, American Loyalists, and settlers from the Celtic fringe of Britain - Scots, Welsh, and Irish. English was the common language of the latter groups, but only a smattering of Englishmen proper arrived before 1867. Subsequent immigration changed the character of the country and, to some considerable extent, polarized its politics. The waves of English who arrived starting in the 1880s transformed much of Canada outside Quebec, especially southern Ontario and British Columbia, making the country much more English, and much more enthusiastic about the empire, than it had ever been.
“This anglicization of Canada affected politics and the press, and extended into military reforms as well. The Canadian militia, pushed at the end of the nineteenth century into serious reform and driven towards professional standards of training, looked more and more like English county regiments. There was no room in this reform to accommodate the long and venerable traditions of the French-Canadian militia: they simply had to learn English. The push from English Canadians for a real navy, designed and operated to Royal Navy standards, owed a great deal to this same impetus. The same could be said for the ardent support for direct aid to the imperial fleet.
“It is tempting to dismiss these English-Canadian zealots as mere toadies of British imperialism, but the truth is more complex. By the end of the nineteenth century, many anglophone Canadians believed that in the twentieth century, Canada, with its enormous expanse, limitless resources, and potential for a huge population, would take over leadership of the empire itself. Men such as Sir Sam Hughes, who by 1914 was minister of the militia, believed strongly in the empire for that reason, yet considered themselves Canadian nationalists as well. Imperial federation was, in the long term, simply a way of securing Canadian control of the British empire itself.
“The second reason for developing a navy in the first decade of the twentieth century had to do with a maturing belief in the importance of influencing the larger, collective security organization to which Canada belonged. It is easy now to forget that, before 1914, the British empire was a remarkably powerful and important world institution. Indeed, Britain was the only world power. Thus, quite apart from the constitutional obligation on the part of the dominion to work inside the framework of the empire, the empire was a pretty good club to belong to. Most anglophone Canadians, and many francophones as well, took pride in being part of the greatest empire the world had seen.” (p. 31-32)
“Finally, attempts by Laurier and his Cabinet to secure a place in the new service for unilingual francophones were scuppered by Kingsmill's staff. It was 'not desirable that candidates should be permitted to take the [entrance] examination in French,' they concluded. Moreover, any attempt to combine the two languages would be detrimental to the service. The exclusion of French as a working language in the new navy must have been a bitter blow to the key French Canadians who had laboured so long and hard to establish the service. It was, moreover, a policy they could not challenge openly, since to do so would simply have confirmed the worst fears of Bourassa and the Quebec nationalists. The exclusion of the French language as a matter of policy seems to have been quietly accepted in early 1911. Perhaps the government anticipated reopening the issue as Quebec shipyards began building the fleet. Given the tenor of the national debate and the weight of British naval influence, however, such a capitulation in 1910-11 was understandable. But as Brodeur observed, it did mean a loss of whatever popular support the navy enjoyed in French Canada, and it also meant that the navy was much less a national institution than it ought to have been. And so it would remain for the next sixty years.” (p.22-23)
“It is a moot point whether French-Canadian resistance to the navy would have been overcome had the fleet been built in Quebec or the RCN been open to the enlistment of unilingual francophones from the outset. Certainly Brodeur and Laurier hoped so. However, no fleet was built, and their failure to insist vigorously on the establishment of a bilingual national service stands in mute but powerful testimony to the forces against it. Indeed, it proved extremely difficult to enlist even anglophone Canadians in the navy before 1914, but until well after the Second World War the navy remained essentially an ethnically English (perhaps not even British) Canadian institution.” (p.33)
The same type of forces had affected the rising of the Canadian Army in 1914. The minister of the militia Sir Sam Hughes, who was of Northern Irish decent, had opposed the rising of French units. French Canadian militia units that had mobilized in 1914 were broken up and forced to serve in English battalions. It took the intervention of the PM to get a French Canadian battalion established. This was the 22nd battalion.
In the Second World War there were only four French Canadian Infantry Battalions in the First Canadian Army. I am not aware of any French units in the other arms such as the Artillery, Armour, Engineers or support services.
In John Gilbert’s book “Bloody Buron! Canada’s D-Day + 1” it has the following concerning the formation of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, a Quebec based unit:
“The regiment was mobilized in July 1940 and when it reached full strength, with first line reinforcements, it was comprised of half French-speaking Canadians and half English-speaking. It served on coastal duty in Newfoundland from August 1941 until the end of February 1942. On its return to the mainland it was stationed at Debert, Nova Scotia whereupon it was immediately and very successfully converted into an armoured regiment. The result was extremely rewarding because in September of the following year, it was awarded the highest merit marks of the entire Canadian 3rd Army Tank Brigades. Then, for combat reasons, it was decided that the two languages were incompatible and as a result the French-speaking Fusiliers were reduced to approximately fifteen percent. All would require a sound education and a good working knowledge of spoken and written English.” (p.29)
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