Canada

It has been the fate of Canada to be at the periphery of North America. Under the French regime, the territories that now comprise Canada were primarily exploited by France as a barrier against the expansion of the British colonies into the North American interior. By removing the main threat to colonial expansion into the interior, Britain's acquisition of the thinly-populated French colony precipitated the secession of the future United States from the British Empire. Cautious attempts to increase the strength of the remaining British colonies of North America -- Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland -- by promoting British and American settlement of Upper Canada and the Atlantic Provinces and reconciling the overwhelmingly French Canadian population of Lower Canada to British rule were destroyed in 1805, when the United States joined the French Empire in its war against Britain.

The Anglo-American War saw a considerable amount of land and naval warfare between Britain and the United States, particularly in the area of Upper Canada, which was populated for the most part by American settlers. Though both countries were able repel the largest offensives against their territories for most of the war, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 allowed Britain to focus its attention to the Anglo-American War. After a series of crushing attacks, and the expulsion of the sixty thousand Upper Canadians who refused to take an oath of loyalty to Britain, the United States sued for peace, ceding northern Maine to Britain. Much later, in 1838, some Upper Canadians -- supported by the Canadian exile community in the United States -- rebelled against British authority and very nearly started an Anglo-American war.

Although Upper Canada 's history of war and rebellion discouraged English or Scottish emigrants from settling in either Upper or Lower Canada, a quarter-million Irish Catholics did settle in Lower Canada, where they enjoyed full freedom from the religious disabilities imposed on Catholics elsewhere in the British Empire.  In the Atlantic colonies -- particularly in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island -- large numbers of Scottish and Irish settlers overwhelmed the small American Loyalist, Acadien, and Mi'kMaq populations. By the middle of the 19th century, the settlement of eastern and central Canada begun under the French regime was essentially complete. British North America's economic modernization took rather longer -- neither Upper nor Lower Canada progressed much beyond extensive agriculture, although tiny Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia did develop world-class shipbuilding industries.

The unification of Upper Canada, Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada in 1873 was brought about less by a general desire for Canadian unification than by British desires to make Britain's colonies of settlement more responsible for their defense. A series of conferences held under British auspices led to the formation of a decentralized federation, with a central government and parliament based in the city of Ottawa with control over such matters as the Canadian currency, foreign relations, and national defense, leaving the provincial governments with control over almost every other field of government. This loose confederal structure was probably the only structure that the Canadian provinces would have accepted. Still, its acceptance might have played an important role in ensuring Canada's decline throughout the 20th century, as gridlock at the federal level caused immense economic and political problems.

The Rupert's Land territory of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the colony of British Columbia, remained outside the Dominion of Canada for a considerable amount of time. Rupert's Land, populated for the most part by Francophone Catholic Métis in the Red River Colony and by various Native American ethnicities, was quite reluctant to merge with a mostly Anglophone and Protestant Canadian state. Though the Dominion purchased Rupert's Land in 1874, it was careful not to engage in any aggressive colonization and to try to convince Rupertslanders of the benefit of closer integration with Canada. Only in 1887 was Manitoba -- the Red River Colony and homeland of the Métis -- absorbed into the Dominion as a full-fledged province, bilingual and with guarantees for Métis land holdings. Elsewhere in Rupert's Land, the territories of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Assiniboia, and Keewatin were constituted and opened to settlement from elsewhere in Canada, though the Territory of Keewatin, with an overwhelmingly Cree population, was never truly settled.

Although the British government wanted to consolidate their British North American colonies, British Columbia tried to remain independent of the Dominion of Canada. British Columbians seriously considered the option of formalizing their status as an independent Dominion under the British Empire; some few radicals even considered the possibility of joining the United State. In the long term, though, British Columbian independence was implausible: The Anglo population of British Columbia remained largely confined to Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, and without further immigration or union with a larger British-controlled population, British Columbia would either stagnate or it would join the United States. A financial crisis in the late 1880's finally made British Columbians change their attitude towards the Dominion of Canada, and in 1891, British Columbia became Canada's sixth province.

Up until the last quarter of the 19th century, Canada was a relatively loyal and conformist member of the British Empire. The growth of nationalism -- both among English Canadians and among French Canadians -- changed that. Encouraged by economic competition with the British Empire that exacerbated the Great Depression of the 1880's, a conservative coalition of French Canadian clericals and English Canadian protectionists came to constitute a majority government in the course of the 1888 national elections. The Conservative Party government immediately enacted sweeping protectionist measures and strictly limited all immigration, even from the British Isles, on the principle of preserving as many jobs as possible for native-born Canadians. Despite these and other manifestations of nationalism, English Canadians generally remained loyal to the idea of a wider British Empire for a generation after the fateful 1888 national elections.

At first, Canada was an enthusiastic participant in the First World War. Despite considerable reluctance among French Canadians to get involved in a European conflict, English Canadians enthusiastically entered the ranks of the British Army to fight in what they thought would be a quick and glorious military conflict. To the shock of English Canadians, the reality of western European trench warfare was far different from what the recruitment posters promised. As casualty lists expanded at alarming rates, many English Canadians sought to compensate for their manpower losses by turning to conscription. French Canadians, however, were almost unanimously imposed to the drafting of Canadian men to die in a horrible European contact. Partly as a result of the political battles over conscription, ethnic relations between English and French Canadian deteriorated sharply. By the time of the 1917 armistice, nationalists of both sides were up in arms. In the early 1920's, Canada came perilously close to dissolution along ethnic lines. Despite this, the most visible signs of ethnic conflict were soon repaired as English Canadians and French Canadians united behind a platform of republicanism. In a burst of common xenophobia, two-thirds of the Canadian electorate in 1924 voted in favour of completely severing the links of the Dominion -- now Republic -- of Canada with the British Crown and Empire. Even though Canada remained a member state of the League of Nations, Canada was essentially isolationist.

By the 1920's, the predominance of Québec province within the Canadian federation had become secure. Even though the territory that would one day be known as Québec had a southern frontier stretching along the 45th parallel west across the St. Lawrence River to Lake Huron, Ontario's dense settlement and productive agriculture and industry had allowed Ontario to surpass Québec in overall importance. By the 1920's, though, Canadian industry had increasingly begun to take advantage of the rapidly-growing French Canadian population of Québec and that province's low wages to begin the industrialization of greater Montréal and the exploitation of mineral and agricultural resources in the newly-colonized northern and western portions of the province. During this period,  for instance, the fabulously rich nickle mines of Sainte-Anne-des-Pins, north of Lake Huron, were opened, while the Saint-Eustache car factories were established. The increasing predominance of French (and Belgian) capital in international investments led to a natural concentration of foreign investment in the Francophone areas of Canada, particularly greater Montréal. By comparison, Ontario -- shut off from trade with the United States by high tariffs and far from other trading partners -- lagged.

Québec's growing industrial lead over Ontario was reinforced by different demographic patterns. By the 1920's, the four million inhabitants of the province of Ontario had achieved the same minimal natural increase that had prevailed in England for several generations, and was now beginning to prevail in parts of northern Europe and the United States. French Canadians, by contrast, retained one of the highest birth rates in the industrialized world, with an annual natural increase in the vicinity of 2% per annum. Many of the new generation of French Canadians were settled elsewhere by government colonization programs, for instance in the clay belt of northern Québec and the mining districts of western Québec, or in subdivided farms in Manitoba, or even in marginal agricultural land in New Brunswick. It is in the 1920's that New Brunswick province acquired its French Canadian majority of population, while one-third of Manitoba's population claimed French as their main language by the end of the decade, as did three-quarters of the Québec population.

The 1930's saw Canada suffer from a peculiarly harsh national manifestation of the Great Depression. Other industrialized member states of the League, in western and northern Europe and in South America, made use of Keynesian economics to pull themselves out of economic doldrums. The fiscally conservative Canadian government refused to make use of Keynesianism, and relied on free-market policies. Partly as a result of this, Canada's economic recovery was still incomplete by the beginning of the 1940's. Even though the demand for war matériel in the Second World War and the Pacific War led to the final recovery of the Canadian economy, as Canadian natural resource exports met eager markets, the experience of the 1930's began Canada's relative economic decline. By the 1950's, Canadian standards of living were at par with those of Italy or Colombia; by the 1970's, Canada had sunk to the upper tiers of the Second World.

Despite occasional bursts of energy, mishandled financial policies under the Social Credit government of the 1950's ensured that the Canadian government and economy languished in the middle of the quarante glorieuses. Québec, New Brunswick, and the Prairie Provinces remained Second World regions, with high birth rates, high unemployment, low levels of education, and high levels of poverty. Even Ontario and British Columbia, each with such promise, had per capita outputs and standards of living more reminiscent of the poorer parts of the Iberian peninsula than northern Europe. Only the province of Nova Scotia remained largely immune to this phenomenon, in part because of its fiscal autonomy acquired as part of Canadian Confederation, but mainly because of its status as a world trader. The neighbouring Dominion of Prince Edward Island likely could be ranked as the wealthiest independent state of North America, thanks to its customs union with Canada and its full membership in AGTI.

Throughout this period, major political changes occurred, most in Montréal. In the 1950's, one Pierre Elliott Trudeau became politically active in the emerging Montréalais Nouveau-Démocrate movement, forming the journal Cité libre and working pro bono in court cases throughout Québec on behalf of political supporters, winning national attention with his defense of the right of the Jehovah Witnesses to sue the Québec government for persecuting them before the Supreme Court in 1958. In 1963, Trudeau, along with Réné Lévesque and other Nouveau-Démocrates, founded the New Democratic Party. Over the course of the 1960's, the New Democrats went from strength to strength, until in the 1968 federal election the New Democrats won an outright majority in the national parliament, while in Québec the provincial branch displaced the Union nationale as the largest party in the Assemblée nationale. For 12 years -- from 1968 until 1980 -- Trudeau served as the federal Minister of Justice in the Lévesque and Lalonde Cabinets. His tenure was notable for the enfranchisement of the Charter of Rights in the Canadian Constitution. In 1980, Trudeau became Prime Minister in the Government of National Unity formed by the New Democratic, Conservative, and Liberal parties in response to the impending civil war in the United States.

By 1982, there were 18 million Canadians. Of these, nine million were French Canadian while eight million of these lived in Québec province. Of the roughly eight million English Canadians, five million lived in Ontario while one million lived in British Columbia and another million in Québec. English Canadians remained far more urbanized than their French Canadian counterparts, while French Canadians retained one of the highest birth rates in the First and Second World countries of the League. The remaining one million Canadians belonged to the various First Nations of Canada. Some native peoples, such as the Déné in Yellowknife territory, the Cree in Keewatin territory, and the Inuit in the vast Nunavut territory -- stretching from the Ungava peninsula and northern Labrador to the Inuvialuit delta of the Mackenzie River -- enjoyed formally autonomous homelands. Others, like many of the coastal peoples of British Columbia, enjoyed de facto self-government. Despite this confusing degree of ethnic heterogeneity, and despite Canada's continuing severe political and economic problems, Canada remained a functioning, hopeful, democracy. Few Canadians suspected the tragedies that would befall their country.

Although Canada was neutral in the Third World War, its proximity to the United States led to its limited targeting by Siberian missile crews. The province of British Columbia was largely depopulated in the course of a nuclear bombardment of the major cities of the mainland, supposedly to deprive the United States of any alternative Pacific ports. The simple depopulation of most of Nova Scotia was entirely lacking in explanation, but regardless, the vast majority of the provincial population had died in missile-borne fogs of chemical depopulants. Although southern Ontario itself was not targeted, much of the region was contaminated with dangerous levels of fallout. Further, even before the harsh winter of 1982-3 began, Canada had barely enough food to sustain its citizens; unavoidable breakdowns in transportation and waste caused the death by the starvation of almost a million Canadians, and a series of epidemics in spring of 1983 that killed several hundred thousand Canadians. Eventually, more than a third of Canada's pre-War population had perished.

For the remainder of the 1980's, and most of the 1990's, Canada was occupied by the task of reconstruction. Following a series of Changist incursions into Ontario, in 1984 Prime Minister Trudeau authorized Opération Épinette, a limited invasion of Changist territories that led to the expulsion of Changist agents from New England and the Midwest and the military occupation of most of the northern tier of the United States, from Minnesota to New England and including most of the Great Lakes states and New York.

Many French Canadians settled in the habitable areas of this zone, which soon were administered as Canadian provinces despite the opposition of their surviving inhabitants. In southern New England, for instance, New England nationalists agitated peacefully for the independence of a New England confederation under the League. The chaos of British Columbia led to the suspension of that area's provincial status, and the creation of an Unorganized Territory of the Pacific that included the newly-annexed Olympic Peninsula and eastern Alaska with its capital in Victoria. As mass unemployment spread throughout the industrial centres of Québec and Ontario, the federal and provincial government desperately sought to prevent an outbreak of revolutionary fervour.

By the mid-1990's, the Canadian situation had stabilized. In 1996, Canadian industry had regained pre-War levels of production; given that Canada's population was still a tenth smaller than its 1982 peak, this meant substantially higher standards of living. At the same time, the gradual destruction of the Presidentialist regime by the Congressional coalition made Canada more attractive destinations for European and Southern Hemisphere capital than ever before since the beginning of the Nixon Administration in 1977. The country's rapidly growing populations of French Canadians and the Maritime Provinces' Acadians -- respectively, 8.8 million and 750 thousand in 1991 -- provided more than enough colonists to establish agricultural colonies in the former United States, or to construct the bidonvilles that soon surrounded such cities as Moncton, Québec, Montréal, Ottawa, Sainte-Anne-des-Pins, and Saint-Boniface, or to provide Ontario with a hard-working class of industrial workers. In the Prairie Provinces and in the Unorganized Territory of the Pacific, rapidly-growing Native American populations joined with the French Canadians of Manitoba, the Métis of Saskatchewan, and the assorted Chinese and Japanese communities of the Territory's Vancouver Island to create a decisive non-Anglo majority. A new separatist movement, the Ontario Freedom League, sought to secure Ontario's independence from an increasingly Francophone Canada; in its 1992 referendum, though, it failed to secure the support of a majority of the Ontarian electorate.

Canada was peculiarly influenced by first contact with the ITA, as it seemed that Canada might lose many of its new territories to a Marketplace-allied state. In the intervening fourteen-year period, many of these territories had acquired Canadian-born majorities of population, while only in a few regions -- in New England and in southern Wisconsin -- did separatist sentiments persist. Following the exodus to Rattus Prime, these problems were resolved. More than a million Canadians -- almost all English Canadians, and mainly from Ontario -- joined the Americans in their exodus, substantially altering the ethnic balance between English Canadians and French Canadians in Ontario.

As 2000 began, Canada saw further revolutionary changes. The defeat of the Ontarian separatists in a referendum the previous year made the maintenance of Canadian unity more likely than ever before. In French Canada, a new spirit of liberalism, borne from elsewhere in the francophonie via the influx of pop culture and trade from the rest of the world -- and increasingly, the ITA -- has taken hold. At the same time, most of the seized United States territories were formally annexed, and plans begun to incorporate them into the Canadian federation as provinces. In a referendum, southern New England was the only region to vote in favour of independence; in the months following the referendum, Canada has succeeded in establishing friendly relations between itself and the New England Confederacy. Elsewhere on the North American front, Canada has begun to play a leading role in the Confederation of North America; with the second-largest population and economy of any likely member state, its prominence in said confederation is but a matter of time. The recolonization of British Columbia and mainland Nova Scotia are proceeding apace, and it appears that all Canadians are increasingly becoming used to their country's pluriethnicity.

The death of Trudeau in November of 2000 symbolized the end of the old political arrangements in Canada, as in that month the eight years of Liberal government under Canadian President Lucien Bouchard came to an end, and voters elected a Conservative Party majority government under Conservative leader Hajime Nakayama. The so-called vague bleu swept the western provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, along with the western and northern territories of Yukon, Assiniboia, Keewatin, Denevit, and Nunavut, in addition to winning a large minority of seats in Ontario province and Montréal city. The first Japanese-Canadian president of Canada in history, Nakayama and his party were elected on a platform of finally making Canada a modern and officially multinational state, with devolution of substantial powers to the Native American-majority territories in the north and west of Canada and to Asian-majority Vancouver Island. Under Nakayama and his successors, there is every reason to hope that the 21st century will be the century of Canada.