The Imperial Munitions Board (IMB) was a national agency, set up in Canada under the chairmanship of Joseph Wesley Flavelle by the British War Cabinet

War Cabinet

A War Cabinet is a committee formed by a government in a time of war. It is usually a subset of the full executive cabinet of ministers. It is also quite common for a War Cabinet to have senior military officers and opposition politicians as members....

 to alleviate the Shell Crisis of 1915

Shell Crisis of 1915

The Shell Crisis of 1915 was a shortage of artillery shells on the front lines of World War I, which largely contributed to weakening public appreciation of government of the United Kingdom because it was widely perceived that the production of artillery shells for use by the British Army was...

 during the First World War. The Board was mandated to sign contracts on behalf of the British government for the manufacture of war materials in Canada.

It established state-owned factories to produce munitions and materials that could not be produced by the private sector including railroad workshops and small factories to produce heavy artillery

Artillery

Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...

 shells for the Western Front

Western Front (World War I)

Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by first invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The tide of the advance was dramatically turned with the Battle of the Marne...

. The Board also oversaw the production of ships and aircraft. The IMB was dissolved in 1919.