Go North, Young Man: The Great Canada
- Thread starter TheMann
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That's not likely, at least, not without serious compromises in armor, reliability, safety and fuel capacity. Looking at Royal Navy ships of the time period 6-12 6in main battery and 3-8 5.25-4in secondary guns would be more probable and be better able to balance survivability with firepower.
SOURCE: Primarily Rule the Waves.
My design for a Canadian cruiser is closer to American practices, with diesel engines and turbo-electric propulsion and extensive welding to reduce weight, with this ship not needing separate boiler and engine rooms as a result which saves on space and weight. I did up the ship in Shipbucket and came up with a 11,775-ton (normal) design, with the aforementioned guns, 72,000 horsepower from eight diesel engines giving a top speed of 30.4 knots, 7,000 mile range at 17 knots, a 4.25" side belt, 2.75" armor over the magazines and engines and 1.75" everywhere else, 4" armor on the gun faces, 2.75" everywhere else in the turrets and 2.5" armor on the barbettes, comparable in protection and range to the RN's Town class cruisers but with rather more firepower as a result of bigger size. Compared to the Cleveland class of American CLs, it packs a far bigger primary punch at the expensive of weaker protection and far less range, which for a ship meant for the Atlantic is an acceptable (though admittedly not ideal) tradeoff. My cruiser also includes a full hangar and two catapults midships for flying boats, with the floatplane systems designed for the Vought Kingfisher. Canadian doctrine for these cruisers saw them as escorts for larger vessels or convoys, where protection was important but having all kinds of firepower is considered more so.
Part 6 - The 1920s
Part 6 - The 1920s
It wasn't long after Canada's World War I heroics and the creation of the Treaty of Orillia was the start of profound changes at home, a situation made that much more acute by the unwillingness of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to return to pre-War working conditions and wages. Whether Ottawa liked it or not, the world at home had changed, and the rolling series of strikes of 1918-19 made sure that people paid attention, cultimating in the Winnipeg General Strike in June 1919. That strike ultimately ended peacefully, but in more than a few cases authorities and strikers came to blows, and more than a few industrialists' use or attempted use of strikebreakers ended in violence. This problem was most acute in Western Canada, which felt it was alienated from the industrial focus of Central Canada and the conservative leadership, both in the Unions and in politics. The One Big Union of the West formed in 1918 proved to be a break point, as the OBU was explicitly socialist in its views and its support of the Bolsheviks in Russia led to more than a little persecution of them. By 1920, however, it was obvious to many of the industrialists that they needed labour to be on their side if the company was to move onward, and a series of events in the late 1910s and early 1920s set the tone for what was to come.
The first event, and arguably the one with the most significance, was the formation of Canadian National Railways. Formed initially by merging the bankrupt Canadian Northern Railway with the government-owned Intercolonial and National Transcontinental systems and the railways of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island under a single firm. Within a year of its creation in 1919, the Grand Trunk Pacific declared insolvency, the latter struggling to maintain its financial status as a result of the costs of the building of the Transcontinental Railway. The Grand Trunk's perpetual desire to pay dividends to English stockholders while defaulting on its obligations to Ottawa added to its problems. CNR was acutely aware of its initial issues, but once the inclusion of the Grand Trunk into its system was completed in 1923, CNR began the task of building several bankrupt, struggling systems both into a viable enterprise and a way of serving communities and regions that were underserved.
CNR was a sign of what was to come from Canadian Government-owned corporations. It was supported with monumental loans, but loans which were put to good use, with CNR's networks particularly in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes and British Columbia proving more than a match for the CPR, who while initially more than a little angered at having to compete with a firm that was lavishly subsidized by Ottawa, soon began playing the competition game to its utmost. CNR partnered with the newly-formed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1924 to begin the building of nationwide radio networks, and CNR began a long history of technical innovation that would run to this day, developing ever-better passenger services, new types of freight cars and ever-better ways of moving immense loads throughout Canada, as well as finding more and better uses for what infrastructure CN already had. By the 1930s, such was the strength of CNR even in the midst of the Great Depression that when a Royal Commission on Canadian Railways was set up in 1933, CPR's bosses advocated the merger of CPR into CNR, along with the CPR's American subsidiaries. This didn't happen, of course, but it did show what the CPR-CNR rivalry would produce in the future.
The CNR wasn't followed far behind by the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, inspired by the nascent British Broadcasting Corporation - indeed, the two would be allies and in many cases partners for decades - and seeking to compete with the incoming American radio networks. The huge growth of radio broadcasting on both sides of the border in the 1920s and 1930s led to many private radio stations and corporations as rivals to the CBC, and the CBC did not share the BBC's highbrow tendencies and did not have the ability to avoid the American networks' push for audiences, but the CBC did follow the BBC in not having advertising, and the CBC did make waves by being among the first to broadcast sports events, beginning its legendary Hockey Night in Canada program in 1927 and forming the CBC World Service for Canadians abroad in 1932, the latter beating the BBC to the punch by two months. Radio-Quebec, which began broadcasting in 1934, broke the CBC's French-language monopoly, forcing the CBC to have to improve its services, and the creation of the News Service of Canada network in 1935 and Aboriginial People's Broadcasting Network in 1947 added to the competition on canadian airwaves, even before multiple privately-owned radio and television networks exploded onto the scene in the 1940s. Canada's newspapers and radio networks were aligned from the start - indeed, the News Service of Canada was created in large part due to the efforts of the Toronto Star, La Presse, Halifax Chronicle and the Vancouver Sun - and it was no surprise that the CBC not only saw entertainment as its mission, but also information and quality journalism, the journalism part becoming a particular pain in the backside to multiple Prime Ministers and provincial premiers, most famously William Aberhart when he was premier of Alberta, who hated the CBC to such a degree he tried repeatedly to have its Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge stations shut down. But the CBC's journalism quality was easily the match of any newspaper, and it set up a rivalry that the newspapers fought to live up to, in most cases successfully.
The CBC and CNR did much to prove the worth of federal government-owned corporations and the benefits they offered, and Ontario Hydro in Ontario added to that, with Sir Adam Beck's creation becoming one of the world's most renowned operators of electric power services in the 1920s, teaching more than a few lessons to other operators worldwide and becoming a stalwart pusher of ever-greater uses for electricity, including helping to finance the first underground subway line in Canada, the Yonge Street Subway in Toronto, which began operation in 1927. Hydro-Quebec, British Columbia Power and the Western Power System all were formed during this time period, and all having been influenced by the developments of Ontario Hydro, all sought many of the same goals, above all else keeping residential power rates as low as possible. As cheap power rates made life easier for many manufacturing firms (particularly power-hungry heavy industrial firms), Ontario Hydro and the companies they inspired became immensely popular enterprises in the 1920s, and their willingness to work for the benefit of the regions they served added to this reputation in the 1930s. The government-owned entities themselves meshed well with the Welfare Capitalism ideas, raising the spectre of a Canada where no man went hungry, and the economic progress of the time was such that the concerns about racism that were raised by the Treaty of Orillia and the ever-larger presence of Asians in British Columbia (and eventually also Alberta and Ontario) simply fell away, as there was more than a few examples of these groups succeeding on their own - indeed, Japanese and Chinese Canadians by the 1920s had average incomes far above the Canadian average, and particularly in ethnically-diverse Vancouver and Seattle, their greater incomes and hard work contributed to the civic growth of these areas.
Canada's foreign policies were effected by the Great War as well. Having earned a full seat at the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference, Canada set about establishing greater independence from Great Britain, and Prime Minister Borden's retirement in 1921 didn't change that any, as both his successor Arthur Meighen and Liberal Party leader William Lyon Mackenzie King both agreed with the policy, and Borden's plans for a powerful Royal Canadian Navy were followed by his successor, along with the plans for a Canadian capital ship and cruiser force, with modern warships and support units and facilities being developed to replace those which had served in the war.
The capital ship plans soon focused on the newer battleships Britain was developing, but at War's end Britain found itself with four incomplete Admiral-class battlecruisers, of which one - HMS Hood - was eventually completed for the Royal Navy. These ships proved to be the basis of Canada's plans for a capital ship, with the vast Vancouver and Halifax Dockyards built to accomodate them. No sooner had Canada done that then Australia got in on the action, and soon the two governments had proposed that Britain either finish the vessels themselves and then sell them to the two nations or sell them the designs to the vessels along with the incomplete hulls and let the Dominions finish the ships themselves - Australia supported the former option, Canada the latter due to better facilities. Britain initially wasn't keen on the idea at all, but saw the possibility of Canada and Australia owing the huge battlecruisers as a potential benefit in war and a powerful status symbol in peace, and so with both Ottawa and Canberra pushing, Britain authorized the completion of the two vessels on December 5, 1919. By the time of the beginning of Washington Naval Treaty negotiations in November 1921, both ships were all but complete.
The WNT was to shape the future of the colonies' relationship with Britain. Both Canada and Australia pushed for - and got - the approval that their navies were indeed separate from the Royal Navy, and all involved in the treaty allowed for a provision that allowed Canada and Australia to own one capital ship apiece, giving Britain a very good reason to make sure the mighty ships were finished and sold to Canada and Australia. London made an initial offer to both Canada and Australia of an older ship for a much cheaper price, but this was denied by both Ottawa and Canberra - they wanted new vessels. As part of the treaty (and to help Australia), Canada agreed to scrap the former HMAS Australia, and following the treaty's ratification, Australia was sailed across the Pacific via Fiji and Hawaii by RAN personnel in August 1923 and broken up at the Seattle Pacific Shipyards for scrap in 1924. With the approval of the WNT in principle in 1922, Canada and Australia pushed for their vessels to be delivered, and Britain agreed. The new ships, now named HMCS Canada and HMAS Australia, saw their crews sent to Britain for training in the winter of 1921-22, and with the completion of the vessels and training, the first crew of HMCS Canada, led by Captain Charles Taschereau Beard, departed the Fifth of Forth for Canada on June 16, 1922, due to arrive in Canada on Canada Day, July 1. HMCS Canada actually proved faster than expected, making its first visit to Canada in St. John's, Newfoundland, on June 25. The battleship made its ceremonial arrival in Halifax on July 1, but not before meeting American battleship USS Pennsylvania off of Nova Scotia, which rendered honours to the new Canadian battleship. After a stop in Halifax, Canada sailed down the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal, where she docked on July 16 and proudly allowed thousands of visitors before returning to Halifax, then to Saint John, New Brunswick, where two problems with the ship that had become apparent - it was a very wet ship and had poor ventilation, two situations deemed unacceptable to Canada, and the ship spent five months in Saint John getting these deficiencies corrected. That done, HMCS Canada was only too happy to be seen early and often in Canada, and she sailed to Vancouver through the Panama Canal to Vancouver, arriving in Vancouver on April 19, 1923, but not before making stops in New York, Norfolk and San Francisco along the way - indeed, she was pictured sailing next to the USS California (at the time the flagship of the Untied States Navy Pacific Fleet) into San Francisco Bay in an iconic image that would be used as proof that having the big brute would make Canada an equal of nations around the world.
Indeed, the prestige and power that HMCS Canada presented was the catalyst that resulted in Canada building up a new real navy in the 1920s. With economic prosperity helping the task along, Canada in the 1920s developed a modern fleet. Two County-class heavy cruisers were ordered by the RCN in 1925, with the two cruisers, christened HMCS Ontario and HMCS Quebec, being delivered in 1928, and a number of destroyers were built in Canada in the late 1920s, adding to what was rapidly becoming one of the world's better pound-for-pound fleets. Indeed, the lessons learned during the Great War were learned well by Canada, as Canada's armed forces plans in general revolved around a smaller but extremely high quality force. The creation of the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1922 added to the ranks of the forces, though like most air forces the RCAF did not really evolve into a real armed force in its own right until the 1930s. The creation of the RCAF did, however, both end a division between the Army and its pilots and air tacticians over who should control the aircraft of Canada's armed forces, but that did not end the Navy's desire for its own aircraft, a desire they would get with the Navy's seaplane carriers, which would be built in the early 1930s.
Canada's populist reformers of the 1920s were key drivers of more than a few social and political changes to the country. While they saw the most publicity on the prairies, the United Farmers of Ontario government of Ernest Drury was one result of the populist wave. Despite strong beginnings, many of the federal populists quickly shifted alliances to one of the larger parties and Ontario faced a similar situation, though Drury's term as Premier did include the development of the Ontario People's Bank and the creation of the first provincial Department of Welfare and a sizable number of other programs. The federal Progressives, however, directly caused what nearly ended up a constitutional crisis in the King-Byng Affair of 1926. William Lyon Mackenzie King's victory in the 1922 election was followed by the 1926 election being won by Arthur Meighen's Conservatives, but as neither held the balance of power in that election, King attempted to continue as Prime Minister with the support of Thomas Crerar's Progressives. This lasted mere months before a bribery scandal led to a desire by Mackenzie King to call for a new election, but Canada's Governor-General, Lord Byng of Vimy, refused that, instead asking Arthur Meighen to form a government. Meighen's government, thanks to outrage on the parts of both Mackenzie King and Crerar, lasted just days before it lost a confidence vote, forcing new elections - elections with resulted in King being six seats short of a majority government but with Crerar holding a great many of the rest, which resulted in Meighen's resignation and retirement from politics.
Mackenzie King, however, proved no less of a nationalist than Borden or Laurier had been, and the King-Byng Affair had so angered both him and Crerar that they demanded changes to the Governor-General's powers, which the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and eventually the Statute of Westminister in 1931 granted to Canada, with the latter specifically seeing Britain renounce its powers over its independent Dominions unless where the law specifically provided for such responsibility. Both were wins for those among Canada who saw the country as independent of Britain, even if they retained the position of Governor General. Mackenzie King presided over ever-greater growth in Canada's economy, and America's exclusionary immigration laws of the 1920s proved to be a blessing in disguise for Canada's continued desire to expand its population.
Indeed, the 1931 Census showed how far that had come. Toronto and Montreal were almost a dead heat in terms of population, with Montreal boasting 1,476,400 residents (OTL: 1,064,400) and Toronto 1,458,400 (OTL: 857,000), with Vancouver having a population of 916,650 (OTL: 347,700) and Calgary as the fourth largest city with a population of 655,200 (OTL: 83,800), followed by Ottawa with a population of 640,880 (OTL: 174,100) and then Edmonton (525,220), Seattle (501,400), Halifax (450,060), Winnipeg (427,930) and Quebec City (422,750). In addition to these cities, numerous other cities existed - Saint John, Trois-Riveieres, Sherbrooke, Kingston, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Windsor, North Bay, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Brandon, Regina, Saskatoon, Lloydminster, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Prince George, Kamloops, Victoria, Tacoma and St. Helens (OTL's Vancouver, Washington) all had populations of 100,000 or more. (This would be the last census which found Toronto as smaller than Montreal, and the gap would grow considerably after WWII.) The heavy-industry belt of North-Central Ontario (between Mattawa to the East and Sault Ste. Marie to the West, with North Bay, Sudbury, Espanola and Elliot Lake in between) was probably the most urbanized area in the country, but even that was something of a misnomer as the rocky terrain and many lakes of that part of the world lent itself well to many small, interconnected communities. Desires to improve transportation in Canada led to massive expansions of the country's road and railway network, a task that both government authorities and private companies sought to change. The enfranchisement of Native Canadians that had started with the signatories of the Treaty of Orillia led to ever-larger numbers of Native Canadians playing active roles in Canada's public life - the Progressives had elected a Metis and three Native Canadians in the 1922 elections, and the Liberals and Conservatives were not long to follow - and the money granted to them by the treaty was soon put to use on their own desires for economic development. The building of Ontario Highway 102, the "James Bay Highway", from Timmins to Attawapiskat between 1926 and 1930 and the "Great North Road", Ontario Highway 105 (and Manitoba Highway 105) from Vermillion Bay, Ontario to Fort Severn, Ontario and Churchill, Manitoba, between 1927 and 1933 was done primarily to allow better transport to more than a few remote native communities in that part of the country. The Prairies had the greatest number of rural communities - the vast farms of the West were the reason for this, of course - but it wasn't just grain that led to this, as prospectors discovered oil in Alberta in 1920 in Turner Valley and at Leduc in 1927 rapidly saw Canada become of the British Empire's centers for the oil industry. Following lead of Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland, the Wildrose Heritage Fund was set up by the Province of Alberta in 1925 to manage the windfall from oil the province received and manage it for future generations.
With highways came cars. The auto industry of southern Ontario was soon joined at the hip with General Motors thanks to a personal relationship between William Durant, the founder of General Motors, and McLaughlin-Buick builder Robert Samuel "Colonel Sam" McLaughlin, who would be a General Motors board member from 1910 until 1962 as a result. Canada's involvement in the world of automobiles didn't end there, of course, as after being levered out of General Motors in 1920, Durant went on to start his own car company, Durant Motors, in 1921. Durant's company financially failed in the Great Depression, but the Trillium Natural Resources Fund bought many of the company's shares for a tiny fraction of what they were worth a few years prior and hired ambitious Irish-Canadian engineer Cameron Westland and British engineer David Reynard to run it in Canada. Durant Motors became Westland-Reynard in 1931 as a result, and the company bought out the bankrupt Auburn and Pierce-Arrow companies in the late 1930s as well. Both Canadian involvement in GM and the Westland-Reynard empire - the latter would make vast sums producing trucks and heavy machinery during WWII - would go on to be the basis of the Canadian auto industry, which would in the post-war era be a favorite choice of many Canadian investors seeking out stable profits. It wouldn't end there, either, as the Canadian operations of Morris and Austin were to play a sizable role in the future of the British auto industry.
While life was good in 1929, the storm clouds were brewing. Unsustainable levels of personal debt and stock market manipulations were noticed by many astute investors, and the Canadian natural resource funds and many of the best investors saw the writing on the wall by the early summer of 1929 and began bailing out of the stock markets. Most of those who did were rewarded handsomely for their efforts, but Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, was to be the start of a very hard and very difficult time in Canada's history. The Great Depression may well have started in the United States, but it did not stay there at all, and Canada took a hard hit from it....
It wasn't long after Canada's World War I heroics and the creation of the Treaty of Orillia was the start of profound changes at home, a situation made that much more acute by the unwillingness of hundreds of thousands of soldiers to return to pre-War working conditions and wages. Whether Ottawa liked it or not, the world at home had changed, and the rolling series of strikes of 1918-19 made sure that people paid attention, cultimating in the Winnipeg General Strike in June 1919. That strike ultimately ended peacefully, but in more than a few cases authorities and strikers came to blows, and more than a few industrialists' use or attempted use of strikebreakers ended in violence. This problem was most acute in Western Canada, which felt it was alienated from the industrial focus of Central Canada and the conservative leadership, both in the Unions and in politics. The One Big Union of the West formed in 1918 proved to be a break point, as the OBU was explicitly socialist in its views and its support of the Bolsheviks in Russia led to more than a little persecution of them. By 1920, however, it was obvious to many of the industrialists that they needed labour to be on their side if the company was to move onward, and a series of events in the late 1910s and early 1920s set the tone for what was to come.
The first event, and arguably the one with the most significance, was the formation of Canadian National Railways. Formed initially by merging the bankrupt Canadian Northern Railway with the government-owned Intercolonial and National Transcontinental systems and the railways of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island under a single firm. Within a year of its creation in 1919, the Grand Trunk Pacific declared insolvency, the latter struggling to maintain its financial status as a result of the costs of the building of the Transcontinental Railway. The Grand Trunk's perpetual desire to pay dividends to English stockholders while defaulting on its obligations to Ottawa added to its problems. CNR was acutely aware of its initial issues, but once the inclusion of the Grand Trunk into its system was completed in 1923, CNR began the task of building several bankrupt, struggling systems both into a viable enterprise and a way of serving communities and regions that were underserved.
CNR was a sign of what was to come from Canadian Government-owned corporations. It was supported with monumental loans, but loans which were put to good use, with CNR's networks particularly in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes and British Columbia proving more than a match for the CPR, who while initially more than a little angered at having to compete with a firm that was lavishly subsidized by Ottawa, soon began playing the competition game to its utmost. CNR partnered with the newly-formed Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1924 to begin the building of nationwide radio networks, and CNR began a long history of technical innovation that would run to this day, developing ever-better passenger services, new types of freight cars and ever-better ways of moving immense loads throughout Canada, as well as finding more and better uses for what infrastructure CN already had. By the 1930s, such was the strength of CNR even in the midst of the Great Depression that when a Royal Commission on Canadian Railways was set up in 1933, CPR's bosses advocated the merger of CPR into CNR, along with the CPR's American subsidiaries. This didn't happen, of course, but it did show what the CPR-CNR rivalry would produce in the future.
The CNR wasn't followed far behind by the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, inspired by the nascent British Broadcasting Corporation - indeed, the two would be allies and in many cases partners for decades - and seeking to compete with the incoming American radio networks. The huge growth of radio broadcasting on both sides of the border in the 1920s and 1930s led to many private radio stations and corporations as rivals to the CBC, and the CBC did not share the BBC's highbrow tendencies and did not have the ability to avoid the American networks' push for audiences, but the CBC did follow the BBC in not having advertising, and the CBC did make waves by being among the first to broadcast sports events, beginning its legendary Hockey Night in Canada program in 1927 and forming the CBC World Service for Canadians abroad in 1932, the latter beating the BBC to the punch by two months. Radio-Quebec, which began broadcasting in 1934, broke the CBC's French-language monopoly, forcing the CBC to have to improve its services, and the creation of the News Service of Canada network in 1935 and Aboriginial People's Broadcasting Network in 1947 added to the competition on canadian airwaves, even before multiple privately-owned radio and television networks exploded onto the scene in the 1940s. Canada's newspapers and radio networks were aligned from the start - indeed, the News Service of Canada was created in large part due to the efforts of the Toronto Star, La Presse, Halifax Chronicle and the Vancouver Sun - and it was no surprise that the CBC not only saw entertainment as its mission, but also information and quality journalism, the journalism part becoming a particular pain in the backside to multiple Prime Ministers and provincial premiers, most famously William Aberhart when he was premier of Alberta, who hated the CBC to such a degree he tried repeatedly to have its Calgary, Edmonton and Lethbridge stations shut down. But the CBC's journalism quality was easily the match of any newspaper, and it set up a rivalry that the newspapers fought to live up to, in most cases successfully.
The CBC and CNR did much to prove the worth of federal government-owned corporations and the benefits they offered, and Ontario Hydro in Ontario added to that, with Sir Adam Beck's creation becoming one of the world's most renowned operators of electric power services in the 1920s, teaching more than a few lessons to other operators worldwide and becoming a stalwart pusher of ever-greater uses for electricity, including helping to finance the first underground subway line in Canada, the Yonge Street Subway in Toronto, which began operation in 1927. Hydro-Quebec, British Columbia Power and the Western Power System all were formed during this time period, and all having been influenced by the developments of Ontario Hydro, all sought many of the same goals, above all else keeping residential power rates as low as possible. As cheap power rates made life easier for many manufacturing firms (particularly power-hungry heavy industrial firms), Ontario Hydro and the companies they inspired became immensely popular enterprises in the 1920s, and their willingness to work for the benefit of the regions they served added to this reputation in the 1930s. The government-owned entities themselves meshed well with the Welfare Capitalism ideas, raising the spectre of a Canada where no man went hungry, and the economic progress of the time was such that the concerns about racism that were raised by the Treaty of Orillia and the ever-larger presence of Asians in British Columbia (and eventually also Alberta and Ontario) simply fell away, as there was more than a few examples of these groups succeeding on their own - indeed, Japanese and Chinese Canadians by the 1920s had average incomes far above the Canadian average, and particularly in ethnically-diverse Vancouver and Seattle, their greater incomes and hard work contributed to the civic growth of these areas.
Canada's foreign policies were effected by the Great War as well. Having earned a full seat at the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference, Canada set about establishing greater independence from Great Britain, and Prime Minister Borden's retirement in 1921 didn't change that any, as both his successor Arthur Meighen and Liberal Party leader William Lyon Mackenzie King both agreed with the policy, and Borden's plans for a powerful Royal Canadian Navy were followed by his successor, along with the plans for a Canadian capital ship and cruiser force, with modern warships and support units and facilities being developed to replace those which had served in the war.
The capital ship plans soon focused on the newer battleships Britain was developing, but at War's end Britain found itself with four incomplete Admiral-class battlecruisers, of which one - HMS Hood - was eventually completed for the Royal Navy. These ships proved to be the basis of Canada's plans for a capital ship, with the vast Vancouver and Halifax Dockyards built to accomodate them. No sooner had Canada done that then Australia got in on the action, and soon the two governments had proposed that Britain either finish the vessels themselves and then sell them to the two nations or sell them the designs to the vessels along with the incomplete hulls and let the Dominions finish the ships themselves - Australia supported the former option, Canada the latter due to better facilities. Britain initially wasn't keen on the idea at all, but saw the possibility of Canada and Australia owing the huge battlecruisers as a potential benefit in war and a powerful status symbol in peace, and so with both Ottawa and Canberra pushing, Britain authorized the completion of the two vessels on December 5, 1919. By the time of the beginning of Washington Naval Treaty negotiations in November 1921, both ships were all but complete.
The WNT was to shape the future of the colonies' relationship with Britain. Both Canada and Australia pushed for - and got - the approval that their navies were indeed separate from the Royal Navy, and all involved in the treaty allowed for a provision that allowed Canada and Australia to own one capital ship apiece, giving Britain a very good reason to make sure the mighty ships were finished and sold to Canada and Australia. London made an initial offer to both Canada and Australia of an older ship for a much cheaper price, but this was denied by both Ottawa and Canberra - they wanted new vessels. As part of the treaty (and to help Australia), Canada agreed to scrap the former HMAS Australia, and following the treaty's ratification, Australia was sailed across the Pacific via Fiji and Hawaii by RAN personnel in August 1923 and broken up at the Seattle Pacific Shipyards for scrap in 1924. With the approval of the WNT in principle in 1922, Canada and Australia pushed for their vessels to be delivered, and Britain agreed. The new ships, now named HMCS Canada and HMAS Australia, saw their crews sent to Britain for training in the winter of 1921-22, and with the completion of the vessels and training, the first crew of HMCS Canada, led by Captain Charles Taschereau Beard, departed the Fifth of Forth for Canada on June 16, 1922, due to arrive in Canada on Canada Day, July 1. HMCS Canada actually proved faster than expected, making its first visit to Canada in St. John's, Newfoundland, on June 25. The battleship made its ceremonial arrival in Halifax on July 1, but not before meeting American battleship USS Pennsylvania off of Nova Scotia, which rendered honours to the new Canadian battleship. After a stop in Halifax, Canada sailed down the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal, where she docked on July 16 and proudly allowed thousands of visitors before returning to Halifax, then to Saint John, New Brunswick, where two problems with the ship that had become apparent - it was a very wet ship and had poor ventilation, two situations deemed unacceptable to Canada, and the ship spent five months in Saint John getting these deficiencies corrected. That done, HMCS Canada was only too happy to be seen early and often in Canada, and she sailed to Vancouver through the Panama Canal to Vancouver, arriving in Vancouver on April 19, 1923, but not before making stops in New York, Norfolk and San Francisco along the way - indeed, she was pictured sailing next to the USS California (at the time the flagship of the Untied States Navy Pacific Fleet) into San Francisco Bay in an iconic image that would be used as proof that having the big brute would make Canada an equal of nations around the world.
Indeed, the prestige and power that HMCS Canada presented was the catalyst that resulted in Canada building up a new real navy in the 1920s. With economic prosperity helping the task along, Canada in the 1920s developed a modern fleet. Two County-class heavy cruisers were ordered by the RCN in 1925, with the two cruisers, christened HMCS Ontario and HMCS Quebec, being delivered in 1928, and a number of destroyers were built in Canada in the late 1920s, adding to what was rapidly becoming one of the world's better pound-for-pound fleets. Indeed, the lessons learned during the Great War were learned well by Canada, as Canada's armed forces plans in general revolved around a smaller but extremely high quality force. The creation of the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1922 added to the ranks of the forces, though like most air forces the RCAF did not really evolve into a real armed force in its own right until the 1930s. The creation of the RCAF did, however, both end a division between the Army and its pilots and air tacticians over who should control the aircraft of Canada's armed forces, but that did not end the Navy's desire for its own aircraft, a desire they would get with the Navy's seaplane carriers, which would be built in the early 1930s.
Canada's populist reformers of the 1920s were key drivers of more than a few social and political changes to the country. While they saw the most publicity on the prairies, the United Farmers of Ontario government of Ernest Drury was one result of the populist wave. Despite strong beginnings, many of the federal populists quickly shifted alliances to one of the larger parties and Ontario faced a similar situation, though Drury's term as Premier did include the development of the Ontario People's Bank and the creation of the first provincial Department of Welfare and a sizable number of other programs. The federal Progressives, however, directly caused what nearly ended up a constitutional crisis in the King-Byng Affair of 1926. William Lyon Mackenzie King's victory in the 1922 election was followed by the 1926 election being won by Arthur Meighen's Conservatives, but as neither held the balance of power in that election, King attempted to continue as Prime Minister with the support of Thomas Crerar's Progressives. This lasted mere months before a bribery scandal led to a desire by Mackenzie King to call for a new election, but Canada's Governor-General, Lord Byng of Vimy, refused that, instead asking Arthur Meighen to form a government. Meighen's government, thanks to outrage on the parts of both Mackenzie King and Crerar, lasted just days before it lost a confidence vote, forcing new elections - elections with resulted in King being six seats short of a majority government but with Crerar holding a great many of the rest, which resulted in Meighen's resignation and retirement from politics.
Mackenzie King, however, proved no less of a nationalist than Borden or Laurier had been, and the King-Byng Affair had so angered both him and Crerar that they demanded changes to the Governor-General's powers, which the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and eventually the Statute of Westminister in 1931 granted to Canada, with the latter specifically seeing Britain renounce its powers over its independent Dominions unless where the law specifically provided for such responsibility. Both were wins for those among Canada who saw the country as independent of Britain, even if they retained the position of Governor General. Mackenzie King presided over ever-greater growth in Canada's economy, and America's exclusionary immigration laws of the 1920s proved to be a blessing in disguise for Canada's continued desire to expand its population.
Indeed, the 1931 Census showed how far that had come. Toronto and Montreal were almost a dead heat in terms of population, with Montreal boasting 1,476,400 residents (OTL: 1,064,400) and Toronto 1,458,400 (OTL: 857,000), with Vancouver having a population of 916,650 (OTL: 347,700) and Calgary as the fourth largest city with a population of 655,200 (OTL: 83,800), followed by Ottawa with a population of 640,880 (OTL: 174,100) and then Edmonton (525,220), Seattle (501,400), Halifax (450,060), Winnipeg (427,930) and Quebec City (422,750). In addition to these cities, numerous other cities existed - Saint John, Trois-Riveieres, Sherbrooke, Kingston, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Windsor, North Bay, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Brandon, Regina, Saskatoon, Lloydminster, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Prince George, Kamloops, Victoria, Tacoma and St. Helens (OTL's Vancouver, Washington) all had populations of 100,000 or more. (This would be the last census which found Toronto as smaller than Montreal, and the gap would grow considerably after WWII.) The heavy-industry belt of North-Central Ontario (between Mattawa to the East and Sault Ste. Marie to the West, with North Bay, Sudbury, Espanola and Elliot Lake in between) was probably the most urbanized area in the country, but even that was something of a misnomer as the rocky terrain and many lakes of that part of the world lent itself well to many small, interconnected communities. Desires to improve transportation in Canada led to massive expansions of the country's road and railway network, a task that both government authorities and private companies sought to change. The enfranchisement of Native Canadians that had started with the signatories of the Treaty of Orillia led to ever-larger numbers of Native Canadians playing active roles in Canada's public life - the Progressives had elected a Metis and three Native Canadians in the 1922 elections, and the Liberals and Conservatives were not long to follow - and the money granted to them by the treaty was soon put to use on their own desires for economic development. The building of Ontario Highway 102, the "James Bay Highway", from Timmins to Attawapiskat between 1926 and 1930 and the "Great North Road", Ontario Highway 105 (and Manitoba Highway 105) from Vermillion Bay, Ontario to Fort Severn, Ontario and Churchill, Manitoba, between 1927 and 1933 was done primarily to allow better transport to more than a few remote native communities in that part of the country. The Prairies had the greatest number of rural communities - the vast farms of the West were the reason for this, of course - but it wasn't just grain that led to this, as prospectors discovered oil in Alberta in 1920 in Turner Valley and at Leduc in 1927 rapidly saw Canada become of the British Empire's centers for the oil industry. Following lead of Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland, the Wildrose Heritage Fund was set up by the Province of Alberta in 1925 to manage the windfall from oil the province received and manage it for future generations.
With highways came cars. The auto industry of southern Ontario was soon joined at the hip with General Motors thanks to a personal relationship between William Durant, the founder of General Motors, and McLaughlin-Buick builder Robert Samuel "Colonel Sam" McLaughlin, who would be a General Motors board member from 1910 until 1962 as a result. Canada's involvement in the world of automobiles didn't end there, of course, as after being levered out of General Motors in 1920, Durant went on to start his own car company, Durant Motors, in 1921. Durant's company financially failed in the Great Depression, but the Trillium Natural Resources Fund bought many of the company's shares for a tiny fraction of what they were worth a few years prior and hired ambitious Irish-Canadian engineer Cameron Westland and British engineer David Reynard to run it in Canada. Durant Motors became Westland-Reynard in 1931 as a result, and the company bought out the bankrupt Auburn and Pierce-Arrow companies in the late 1930s as well. Both Canadian involvement in GM and the Westland-Reynard empire - the latter would make vast sums producing trucks and heavy machinery during WWII - would go on to be the basis of the Canadian auto industry, which would in the post-war era be a favorite choice of many Canadian investors seeking out stable profits. It wouldn't end there, either, as the Canadian operations of Morris and Austin were to play a sizable role in the future of the British auto industry.
While life was good in 1929, the storm clouds were brewing. Unsustainable levels of personal debt and stock market manipulations were noticed by many astute investors, and the Canadian natural resource funds and many of the best investors saw the writing on the wall by the early summer of 1929 and began bailing out of the stock markets. Most of those who did were rewarded handsomely for their efforts, but Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, was to be the start of a very hard and very difficult time in Canada's history. The Great Depression may well have started in the United States, but it did not stay there at all, and Canada took a hard hit from it....
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It may, but I suspect not so much. Britain was already building the Town class vessels by the time Canada begins building the Montreal class light cruisers, and while I can see them wanting to use some design innovations on later models of light cruisers, I can't see it changing the RN's design philosophy too much. After the war, though, Canadian design innovations will indeed make for changes to RN tactics and vessels.
Not with the Town Class, but maybe some heavy cruisers with 3x3 turrets and decent armour
(from 1936, scrapping the Hawkins class),
less of a compromise on the designs of the Town class's successors.
Maybe with the weight saving a 3x4 KGV design as intended,
All the Illustrious class having an Indomitable style half hangar?
(from 1936, scrapping the Hawkins class),
less of a compromise on the designs of the Town class's successors.
Maybe with the weight saving a 3x4 KGV design as intended,
All the Illustrious class having an Indomitable style half hangar?
Thank you.
A certainty. I anticipate the QF 5.25" mounts on the Canadian ships have bigger gunhouses and better (faster) mounts, which are then backfitted to Bellona-class cruisers and the King George V-class battleships. The Canadian cruisers use similar-design turrets as the late Town-class ships, but with automatic hoists to allow a faster rate of fire.
A very real possibility, perhaps having Ricardo license-built the big Robinson diesels used by the Canadian cruisers. The Hawkins class might also be used to be sold to smaller navies, thinking particularly Brazil, Argentina and South Africa.
Perhaps so, but I was thinking the Canadian design contribution here might be the better mounts for the 5.25" guns for the Dido and Bellona class.
Both of these are maybes, but I'm not sure about the Indominate-style half hangars being a good idea for weight reasons. To be fair, American carriers used less armor in their construction, so I suppose its possible, but I figured it would be better to have the carriers have single, taller hangars.
Wow, Calgary ITTL's 1920s has population equivalent to what it was in the OTL 1980s and with a much larger population for my previous hometown, Lethbridge, the city is probably going to be look a lot different. One thing to consider for Lethbridge is maybe an earlier founding of the University of Lethbridge and an equivalent to Lethbridge College. I bring it up because given the vast irrigation in Southern Alberta, a post-secondary institute might help with the agricultural sector, which is the city's lifeblood. Heck, I remember some of the farming techniques that reversed the effects of the Dust Bowl were developed in the area.
In regards to urban expansion ITTL, what thought will be given to urban planning? One of the biggest problems with Calgary OTL is the urban sprawl and I wonder if some of the problems can be butterflied away. Especially if we are going to see a post-WWII immigration surge and the Baby Boom.
In regards to urban expansion ITTL, what thought will be given to urban planning? One of the biggest problems with Calgary OTL is the urban sprawl and I wonder if some of the problems can be butterflied away. Especially if we are going to see a post-WWII immigration surge and the Baby Boom.
So does BC include the parts of OTL Washington state or is that a different province?
The Indomitable used less armour over all than her half sisters to accomodate her hangar.
If all of them is a non starter, maybe the Formidable,
with her and Indomitable being considered a seperate class.
If all of them is a non starter, maybe the Formidable,
with her and Indomitable being considered a seperate class.
Yes, Canada here includes Washington state West and North of the Columbia River west of where the 49th parallel meets the Columbia, and this region is part of British Columbia. It's a convenient little border adjustment to get a little additional Canada for everyone to enjoy.
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I was wondering, did centre block burn down like in OTL or is the original still there?
Lost Freeway
Banned
Yes, Canada here includes Washington state West and North of the Columbia River west of where the 49th parallel meets the Columbia, and this region is part of British Columbia. It's a convenient little border adjustment to get a little additional Canada for everyone to enjoy.
So Seattle is a Canadian city ITTL?
Donald Reaver
Donor
What are the demographics about the increase in population in Quebec, i.e. is the increase in population due to more immigration and if so where's it from. Basically what is the percentage of first language French speakers compared to out timeline. Looks like B.C. will rival Quebec in population if not surpass it by 2016.
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