History of the Canadian Army out of Canada and the responsibility for defending the naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt was assigned to the militia. The fact the Royal Military College in Kingston only offered instruction in English and English was the sole language of command ensured that French-Canadians were under-represented in the officer corps as English was generally not taught in Quebec's Catholic schools. Sir Samuel Hughes, who became the minister of defence and militia in 1911 after the Conservatives won the general election that year, become the dominating force in Canadian defence policy. Hughes was described by the Canadian historian René Chartrand as
History of the Canadian Army by under-funding by Ottawa in peace-time did not exist. Unlike the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force, whose personnel were overwhelmingly English-Canadians and where English was the sole language of command, the Canadian Army was the only service that made some allowance for French-Canadians. In 1952, the Army opened the Collège Militaire Royal de Saint-Jean to train French-Canadian officer candidates in French (previously all officer candidates had been trained in English at the Royal Military College). However, the Canadian Army was still a mostly English-speaking institution in the 1950s with the Royal 22 Régiment and the 8th