Canada at War: No Controversy?

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Even as Prime Minister King spoke, on the seventh floor of Ottawa's Chateau Laurier (see above), his hope of avoiding wartime political controversy went glimmering. Down in a gilded ballroom on the first floor, National Tory Leader John Bracken was addressing a Party convention. Some 500 Tories, banquet-fed on roast beef and raspberry roll, heard Bracken roar a familiar Tory charge: "inadequacy of [Army] reinforcements."

Said Mr. Bracken: "Young Canadians [overseas] told me that they had gone without adequate trained reinforcements [and] they gave me that message to bring back home. ... I challenge the Government here and now ... to appoint a Royal Commission ... to inquire into and report on the whole matter of reinforcements, desertions and discipline. . . . Let us not have the answer that this cannot be done for security reasons or that it will give comfort to the enemy. That is only another way of saying it will not give comfort to the Government."