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 a man of tremendous energy, charisma and a forceful personality who was also a megalomaniac with a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance and a "stubborn, pompous racist" who did little to disguise his anti-Catholic and anti-French views. As the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, was afraid of Hughes, the militia minister played an oversized role in defence decision-making. In 1912, Hughes forbade militia regiments from marching in Catholic processions as they traditionally done in Quebec since 1867, a move that caused much controversy at the time. Through Hughes justified his move under grounds as upholding secularism, Quebec newspapers blamed it on the prejudices of the Orangemen that the militia minister surrounded himself with. Hughes was able to raise the level of military spending from $7 million in 1911 to $11 million in 1914, but little of the money went to the Permanent Force, which Hughes was openly hostile to, praising the militia as embodiment of the authentic fighting spirit of Canada. Some of the ways in which Hughes allocated the increased military budget such as giving a free Ford Model T car to every militia colonel in Canada and going on an all expenses junket to Europe in 1913 to observe military maneuvers caused much controversy. Hughes wanted to make militia service compulsory, which he justified under moral, not military grounds, saying in a 1913 speech that he wanted "To make the youth of Canada self-controlled, erect, decent and patriotic through military and physical training, instead of growing up as under present conditions of no control, into young ruffians or young gadabouts...to make the military camps and drill throughout Canada clean, wholesome, sober and attractive to boys and young men; to give that final tough to imperial unity, and crown the arch of responsible government by an inter-Imperial Parliament