memes

Canada's Hundred Days. Aka the last 100 days of WW1.

Functionally, Canada won WW1 for the allies.

Being under 10% of the WW1 force, in that period they tackled defences everyone else thought impregnable and shattered them, like the Hindenburg Line, and in the process paved the way for the allied advance. They also took out a quarter of the German forces in that time.

While they did arguably use proto-blitzkrieg tactics of using lots of machine guns, and then also using vehicles to move troops even quicker while using said machine guns, one of the biggest factors was a prodigious use of chemical weapons.

To the point that in the interwar period, Canada had the largest capacity and stores of chemical weapons. During WW2, said stockpile is one of the reasons Hitler refused to use chemical weapons on the allies.

Edit: And a lot of the rules on fair treatment of POWs and rules on capturing surrendered soldiers also stems of Canadian soldiers behaviours during WW1.

Genocide of our indigenous population mostly. The worst of it ended in 1996 when the last residential school closed. Basically, the Catholic Church under the authorization of the Canadian Federal Government in the 1800s and onwards, abducted children from indigenous communities, took them to boarding schools where they attempted to assimilate them into Eurocentric culture by punishing them for speaking their own language and practicing their own culture. Beatings, sexual abuse, and neglect were commonplace, with many children dying of illness, exposure, or violence. Many children survived the schools and are still alive today to tell us about it. There are also mass graves at several of these schools where children's corpses were dumped and hidden from public view, until ground x-ray technology came around and we found the graves.

Also, random weird fact: women weren't allowed to have bank accounts in Canada until like 1964.

The Nazi's got the term, and concept, 'final solution' from a Canadian:

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem."

"…the system was open to criticism. Insufficient care was exercised in the admission of children to the schools. The well-known predisposition of Indians to tuberculosis resulted in a very large percentage of deaths among the pupils. They were housed in buildings not carefully designed for school purposes, and these buildings became infected and dangerous to the inmates. It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein."

(This is why there was a fair bit of anger in Canada when Civ 6 added Wilfred Laurier as Canada's leader.

EDIT: I transposed Laurier and MacDonald here, as someone pointed out. The above quotes are from Duncan Campbell Scott, as Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs under MacDonald. Laurier was a key architect of the Residential School system. TLDR; MacDonald started the genocide, Laurier built upon it.)

A lot

"Good" at war : ✅️

Human rights : ❌️

Supporting catholic genocide : ✅️

We have a really weird history that isn't really something to be proud of..

Where'd that article from earlier go... https://www.readthemaple.com/the-trudeau-government-has-opposed-every-peaceful-method-of-palestinian-resistance/

Never ask a woman her age

Never ask a man his salary

Never ask Canada what the “indigenous boarding schools” were for

Never ask Russia, America, Hamas or Israel why they all see the Geneva Convention as a to-do list

There were also jewish refugees that were not allowed into Canada. Afair, the bigger arsehole in that story was the UK, that panicked and decided that everyone who fled Germany during some 193x–194x must certainly be a german spy. They forcefully moved people to camps, and also to foreign territories, but it didn't work terribly well with Canada, too.

I though this to be the article I first heard this story from, but it doesn't seem to address that. Here I found some more details, e.g. on how refugees were in prisoner of war camps along with actual nazis.

Edit: But those are likely not related to the question of what Canada did to become example of how Geneva convention should be, so maybe an unnecessary info ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ignorance aint so bliss anymore lmao

To add to the list: internment of Hungarian and Ukrainian Canadians in WWI in Canada (some other Eastern Europeans too); internment of Japanese Canadians in WWII in Canada.