After the First World War, successive Liberal and Conservative governments saw little need for any immediate use of Canada's armed forces. Although never completely abolished in the years after 1919, they were reduced to a very low level of manpower and expenditure, particularly during the depression. The deteriorating international situation, however, called for some action, however slight. Beginning in 1933-34, the Conservative government slowly began to increase defence spending, a policy which was taken up by the Liberals. Serious rearmament did not begin until 1937. This coastal gun, constructed in the next year for the defence of Esquimalt, B.C., was one of the fruits of government's concern to show that the taxpayers' dollar was being spent to defend Canada, not to prepare for a European holocaust. In 1933, defence expenditure in Canada was $14,145,361; by 1938-39 it had risen to $34,799,192. Even so, as the official historian of the Canadian government's Second World War military policies has written, the programme was "utterly inadequate to the scale of the coming emergency."
