A major effect of the Canadian conscription crisis of 1917 was the deepening of the rift between francophones and anglophones. The government's imposition of conscription, in spite of francophone opposition, infuriated much of the French Canadian community. The francophone campaign against conscription and evidence of francophone draft evasion and desertion infuriated anglophones, who felt the francophones were not doing their share in the war effort.

One of the givens of military sociology is that unemployed and relatively poor young men are more likely to volunteer for the army than are other individuals from more opulent segments of the population. This is the popular explanation of why blacks were overrepresented among the U.S. volunteers for Vietnam and the Irish among the volunteers for the nineteenth-century British military. In the cases of both U.S. blacks and the British Irish, and in others, the populations were relatively low in income but also victims of discrimination. There were reasons that they might not feel well served by the state for which they were willing to die. Yet they volunteered. The francophone Canadians, on the other hand, were not so willing to give their compliance, at least not in the form of their participation in the national military.

Analyzing the variation in responses to Canadian government proposals for introducing conscription during the First and Second World Wars helps illuminate the conditions under which citizens give or refuse their contingent consent to military service.