Canadaicon, as likely you know, started into World War Two with the SMLE also. These were remaining rifles from WWI stocks, kept in operational condition for the 20 years of "peace".

The SMLE was never manufactured in Canada; our rifles were nearly ALL of Britishicon manufacture. As far as I can tell, they were surplussed immediately after the war.

Beginning in 1941, Canada turned out large numbers of the new Number 4 Rifle at the Small Arms Limited factory at Long Branch (Toronto) Ontario. Some of these went to arming Canadians, many went to Britain..... and enough were dropped and delivered (night flights with Lizzies and Mitchells) into Occupied Europe, so many, in fact, that many Resistance groups referred to the Number 4 Rifle as "the Canadian rifle". Number 4 production continued into the middle 1950s at Long Branch and was revived years later for the EAL rifle under the new name.

But for the first two years of the Second War, what Canadians used were the old SMLEs, P-17s we scrounged from those awful Americans (good neighbours, those guys!) and our remaining stocks of old Ross Rifles, surely the single most-unjustly-maligned Service rifle ever built.

BTW, when BSA began to manufacture those WW2 SMLEs, they had the ONLY fully-operational rifle factory in the U.K.

Britain learned their lessons well during the Second War. The current SA-80 is all-steel construction because Britain can make that rifle even if they are completely cut off from the rest of the world..... as they very nearly were in 1940 - 42.
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