After the First World War, the Great War, Canada was reluctant to rearm. A significant contract for weapons production was awarded before the outbreak of the Second World War to the John Inglis Company for the Bren light machine-gun. However, it did not begin to produce Bren guns until the spring of 1940. Switching from the production of appliances to machine-guns involved certain difficulties. According to the president of John Inglis:
The complexity of the undertaking is best illustrated when I reveal that the crates which we unpacked in Toronto disgorged nearly twenty-five thousand blueprints for the Bren gun. These were necessary to build the nearly twenty thousand fixtures, tools and gauges, and to provide the layout sheets for the twenty-six hundred manufacturing operations required to produce the one hundred and fifty individual components of the gun. One part alone of the Bren gun required the unusually long sequence of two hundred and fifty-two operations before it was completed.
One step in the production of a Bren gun is shown here. The welder wears the typical bandana and overalls of the female war worker. Over half of the fifteen thousand workers in the John Inglis plant in Toronto were women. To meet wartime production needs, the government actively encouraged the employment of women in industry in order to offset the labour shortages resulting from the enlistment of men in the military.
The armed forces of Britain, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries used the 186,000 Bren guns made in Canada.
