The July Crisis was a series of interrelated diplomatic and military escalations among the major powers of Europe in the summer of 1914, which led to the unexpected outbreak of World War I (1914–1918).

The summer of 1914 brought a second year of drought turning wheat fields into parched deserts while the two new transcontinental railways the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern fell further into debt, sending the thousands of men who had helped build them into unemployment.

[1] The war was initially popular even among French Canadians, including Henri Bourassa, who historically looked afoul at the British Empire.

Christopher Cradock's squadron was sunk at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile, claiming four midshipmen who became Canada's first war dead.

With mounting costs at home, Minister of Finance Thomas White introduced the first income tax in Canada as a "temporary" measure.

The Military Service Act was passed in July, but there was fierce opposition, mostly from French Canadians (led not only by Bourassa, but also by Wilfrid Laurier), as well as Quakers, Mennonites, and other pacifists.

The move from a wartime to a peacetime economy, combined with the unwillingness of returned soldiers to accept pre-war working conditions, led to another crisis.

The OBU had some influence on the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which business and political leaders saw as an outbreak of Bolshevism, especially since the Soviet Union had recently been formed.

The history of broadcasting in Canada begins in the early 1920s, as Canadians were swept up in the radio craze and built crystal sets to listen to American stations.

Main themes in the history include the development of the engineering technology; the construction of stations across the country and the building of networks; the widespread purchase and use of radio and television sets by the general public; debates regarding state versus private ownership of stations; financing of the broadcasts media through the government, licence fees, and advertising; the changing content of the programming; the impact of the programming on Canadian identity; the media's influence on shaping audience responses to music, sports and politics; the role of the Québec government; Francophone versus Anglophone cultural tastes; the role of other ethnic groups and First Nations; and fears of American cultural imperialism via the airwaves.

The most notable exceptions were religious radio shows, such as "Back to the Bible Hour," produced by Alberta's premier, William Aberhart, and the increasingly popularity of broadcast hockey games.

[15] Worst hit were areas dependent on primary industries such as farming, mining and logging, as prices fell and there were few alternative jobs.

This was soon followed by a deep recession in manufacturing, first caused by a drop-off in demand in the United States, and then by Canadians also not buying more than bare essentials.

[16] In 1930 in the first stage of the long depression, Prime Minister Mackenzie King believed that the crisis was a temporary swing of the business cycle and that the economy would soon recover without government intervention.

With falling support and the depression only getting worse Bennett attempted to introduce policies based on the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in the United States, but this was largely unsuccessful.

Canadian car owners who could no longer afford gasoline reverted to having their vehicles pulled by horses and dubbed them Bennett Buggies.

In Alberta, a Christian radio broadcaster named William "Bible Bill" Aberhart became interested in politics partly because the Great Depression had been especially harsh on Albertan farmers.

When these efforts failed, Aberhart helped found the Social Credit Party of Alberta, which won the 1935 provincial election by a landslide with over 54% of the popular vote.

But the Borden and King governments made it clear that "Canada lived 'in a fireproof house far from flammable materials' and felt no automatic obligation to the principle of collective security".

Instead, King focused his attention on good relations with the United States and on greater independence from Great Britain, moving into a position of near isolation.

Thus, in 1922 King refused to support the British to enforce a peace settlement during the Chanak Crisis, when revolutionary Turkey attacked and drove out the Greeks in Asia Minor.

Like many other political leaders of the time, King was seduced by Hitler's charm and rehearsed simplicity and he supported the policy of "appeasement" of Germany.

[26] With the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and the growing trickle of refugees arriving in the country, Canada began to actively restrict Jewish immigration by 1938.

Senator Cairine Wilson was one of the country's leading voices against fascism and one of the few non-Jews lobbying for the refugees but she was unable to get Mackenzie King to intervene.

For King himself shared the anti-Semitism of many Canadians; in his diary he wrote: "We must seek to keep this part of the continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood.

"[27] "Through government inaction and Blair's bureaucratic anti-Semitism, Canada emerged from the war with one of the worst records of Jewish refugee resettlement in the world.

[30][31] With over a million Canadians serving in the Armed Forces during the war, enormous new employment opportunities appeared for women in workplaces previously unknown to them.

To encourage women to work in factories, machine shops, and other heavy industries, the Canadian government offered free child-care and tax breaks.

On April 27, 1942, Mackenzie King held a national plebiscite to decide on the issue, having made campaign promises to avoid conscription (and, it is thought, winning the election on that very point).

[citation needed] When Canada declared war on Japan in December 1941, members of the non-Japanese population of British Columbia, including municipal government offices, local newspapers and businesses called for the internment of the Japanese.