ARTICLES

BOOK REVIEWS
A SMALL PRICE TO PAY:
Consumer Culture on the Canadian Home
Front, 1939–45
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
BROAD, Graham. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013, softcover, 275 pages,
$95.00, ISBN 978-0-7748-2364-7
Reviewed by Colonel Peter J. Williams, CD, Director Arms Control
Verification on the Strategic Joint Staff.
High school was a bit of a turning point for me. I had
to choose between Economics and French as an
elective. Having studied our other official language for
much of my school years, I opted to go with what I
knew, and to abandon any pretense of trying to
understand numbers and the like. Strange that I
ended up as a gunner! In any case, it was with some
degree of trepidation that I decided to review this
book for the Canadian Army Journal, half fearing that I would be baffled by figures and
other things besides. Not a bit of it, as it turned out. I found this book to be a highly
readable account of life on Canada’s so-called “home front” in the Second World War.
It is part of a series called Studies in Canadian Military History produced by the
University of British Columbia.
The author, a member of the History Department at Western University, sets out to describe
how the key stakeholders in the consumer culture (the buyers, sellers and advertisers)
responded to the various challenges associated with supporting the war effort while ensuring
that their own desires and needs were met. Indeed, the author argues that life on the home
front was actually quite comfortable for Canadian consumers, particularly in comparison
to their American or British counterparts. As the author concludes, consumerism (in Canada
at least) was the ideology whose victory was complete, with Canadians choosing both guns
and butter.
An austere home front life was not anticipated at the outset. The book’s title comes from the
sentiment, much in evidence at the start of the war, that the war itself and the privations which
many Canadians thought they would endure were but “a small price to pay” for the peace and
prosperity which would come with Allied victory—things which had been somewhat elusive
after the last go-around in 1918. Mr. Broad argues that there is some evidence that Canada’s
economic boom started before 1939, and makes the case that it was more of a
“post-Depression” than a “post-war” boom, and he provides the facts and figures to back up
this assertion. In any case it was consumer spending, not government intervention with
financial resources, which accounted for most Canadian economic activity between
1939 and 1945. Women may have had much to do with this, and the author devotes an entire
chapter to the role of women (known as “Mrs. Consumer”) on the home front and the
“patriotic consumerism” in which they were to play a leading role.
WWW.ARMY.FORCES.GC.CA/CAJ 145