Go North, Young Man: The Great Canada

TheMann · Aug 28, 2016

PROLOGUE

July 1, 2017

Canada at 150: The Century That Was
Steve Paikin for The Canadian

Canada, our home and native land. A way of simply describing the land mass that most of those who read this newspaper live on, but also a portion of our national anthem and a way of expressing the love of that vast landscape. A landscape that the eighty-three million people that today inhabit Canada have adopted and prospered upon, turning a nation of many different landscapes and many far more different peoples into a single cohesive nation, a nation that we proudly speak of, that we all hold up high as a shining beacon of the greatest of advancement of the human species. We look back at our successes as things to be proud of and our failures as things to learn from, learning and speaking of a history most proud.

The "Century of Canada". Welfare Capitalism and the Asian Arrivals. Komagata Maru. The Somme, Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele. The Six Nations Brigades and the Treaty of Orillia. The Women's Suffrage and Social Credit Movements. The "Men of Honour" and the "Voyages of the Damned". The Battle of the Atlantic. The Royal British Columbia Regiment and the HMCS Vancouver. Operations Husky, Overlord and Iceberg. The Battle of Kapyong. Peacekeeping. The Avro Arrow. The Islands Referendums. Expo 67. The 1972 Constitution. Cyprus. Boat People. The Ottawa Treaty and Jerusalem. The Cape Town Mission. Operation Messiah. The 9/11 attacks, Operation Yellow Ribbon and Operation Apollo. The "Life Flights". All examples of times in our shared history where Canada and its people stood up and showed the world what we stood for, looked at ourselves in the mirror and realized what we were doing wrong or achieved something others thought couldn't be done, all because it was the right thing to do.

The right thing to do. An easy phrase to say but one which has been fraught with peril, if for no other reason than the machinations of men and nations who see red where we see green. What the 'right thing to do' is is always a matter of debate, and so it has been throughout our history, as peoples from practically everywhere on Earth have shouted and squabbled what they feel the best way forward is. But in the end, a number of shared beliefs have always prevailed - individual freedom and liberty, partnerships of those who sought to create a world within Canada, a strong desire towards the advancements of both science and the humanities and support and defense of those less fortunate imperiled by the flaws of man. No matter our differences, these things have become as much a part of our identity as the shared portions of our identities, from the flag and the symbols to our beloved national pasttimes.

We look at those who seek to be one of us and ask "What is the chapter of history you seek to write?" To answer that question for the benefit of Canadians of Tomorrow, perhaps we need to seek out what our past was and what it means to us....

TheMann · Aug 29, 2016

Part 1 - Pre-Confederation

Canada began as the result of a desire of Britain to avoid the problems that had resulted in the American revolution, well aware that the Quebec Act had been considered by many of the American Revolutionaries alongside the four 'Intolerable Acts' that had been a primary catalyst to the Revolution. Well aware of the actions of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau and seeking to assimilate the French-Canadian population of Quebec, Britain's attempt at first establishing control of Canada in the Union Act of 1840 had indeed had the opposite effect, as it became obvious that both complete anglicization of the French-Canadian population was unlikely and ultimately resisting integration into the United States was dependent on a form of political independence.

But what started Canada's evolution even beyond the need to find accommodations between English and French speaking peoples in Canada was the problems that Canada's native population, who had been supporters of the British during the War of 1812 and had fought alongside those who had sought to repulse the Americans. While America was defeated in the war, it was obvious almost immediately after the War that the Americans had absolutely no intention of treating Native Americans with respect, and it showed in their movements, particularly after the war - thus forcing the British to either accept what amounted to cultural genocide or allow the Natives to establish themselves in Canada. By the time of the Rebellions of 1837 Native Canadians had moved into Canada in numbers, and the knowledge of the problems that Washington had inflicted on the Six Nations Confederacy and the Shawnee in particular resulted in huge numbers of the Native Canadians migrating into Canada, forming nearly an outright majority in portions of southern and eastern Upper Canada. The Six Nations, wedged between a rock and a hard place with the British (many of whom had open disdain for them) and the Americans (widely seen as far worse than the British), found themselves becoming adamant supporters of the reform efforts, seeking to peacefully carve themselves out a place among the groups of Canadians, and doing so in many cases by both trading with European colonists and also through their own systems of collective defense. The Indian Removal policy of the United States, passed in 1830, accelerated this trend, somewhat to the disdain of some but the support of the reformers and those opposed to the Americans, well aware of the efforts of Tecumseh and his efforts to rouse the tribes to the defense of their land during the War of 1812. The knowledge of the very poor relationship between America and the native tribes led to more than a little bit of gamesmanship by the British. While eventually relations between London and its colony grew to be fairly cordial, America's past wasn't forgotten and in more than a cases forgiven, particularly with the Fenian Raids. The Native Canadian influence would be seen in the Oregon Treaty, which became a problem to the Americans as news of the actions of the Americans further east would ultimately cause the 1846 Oregon Treaty to come apart as Native tribes, in no small part agitated by British colonial authorities, would not accept American authority over the territory north of the Columbia River. Facing upheaval and the difficulty in controlling territory, the British and Washington ratified the new Oregon Treaty, which established the boundary as the Columbia River west of the crossing of the Columbia River and the 49th parallel, thus giving the entire Salish Sea region to the British. The discovery of gold on the banks of the Thompson River in 1858 forced a major change in the way the region was governed, and the colony of British Columbia was formed in 1858 as a result. Recognizing that the United States was likely to push for complete ownership of the Pacific Coast, both British colonists and Natives pushed for entry into the new Canadian federation, and British Columbia's representatives were among those who were the signatories of the Seventy-Two Resolutions.

By the 1850s, movement towards confederation was seen as inevitably, as men like John A. MacDonald sought to unite factions behind the idea of Canada as a federation, seeking the support of the likes of George Brown and Georges-Etienne Cartier - and to the initial surprise of MacDonald, both Cartier and Brown were publicly supportive of the Six Nations' involvement in Canadian affairs. While the relationship here would remain rocky for many years to come, the tactics of negotiation honed by those seeking to establish Canada as a federation were indeed assisted by the involvement of Native Canadians, and while racism against them would not by any means sink away, in the aftermath of the Indian Removal policies Canada came to be seen as something of a haven for some tribes of North American Indians, an image which would prove to be a massive benefit to Canada's future expansion. Indeed British Columbia's entry into Canada would come to pass in large part because of the Natives of the West Coast, who while plenty suspicious of the British had even less love for the United States. Confederation of the British North American colonies was seen by London as a way of allowing Canada to defend itself against the Americans, while the British in North America saw it as a way of forever establishing a loyal to Britain nation on the North American continent, the French saw it as a way of increasing their own political power and resisting creeping Anglicization of their culture and for Native Canadians of providing themselves a real safe haven from the Americans. Entry into Confederation for British Columbia came with the promise of safety, but their isolation was such that their primary stipulation was that they be connected to the rest of Canada by rail by 1877 - a tall order, but noting the rapid construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, Victoria felt it was a stipulation that they could make, particularly with their desire to give the British Ocean a connection to the Pacific Ocean.

The American Civil War added to the impetus for Confederation. Britain had not officially supported the Confederacy in America's brutal civil war, but American politicians in the aftermath of the war were more than willing to call for America to expel the British from North America, and problems with everything from population pressures (an increasingly-acute problem in the St. Lawrence River Valley and parts of the Maritime Provinces) to desires to exploit the resources that many felt existed in the Rupert's Land territories controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company pushed confederation along. The American purchase of Alaska in 1867 added to it, even though Confederation had been agreed to before the purchase was completed, it was seen by the Fathers of Confederation (and indeed Queen Victoria, who was more than happy to give assent to the move) as a way of heading off America's expansionism. The entry of British Columbia into the constitutional delegation was followed by those of Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, but while the former would join Confederation, the latter chose not to. (This decision would change later on.) On March 29, 1867, the British North America Act was given assent by Queen Victoria, with the Federation of Canada (the 'Dominion' name was rejected out of consideration for the many diverse populations of the country and a desire to seem in control of its own affairs) becoming a reality on July 1, with John A. MacDonald as the first Prime Minister of Canada, with six provinces as part of Canada - Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and British Columbia.

The original plan of building Canada in the minds of many of its founders was that Confederation, which while granting Canada a wide degree of autonomy was far from complete independence from the United Kingdom, would allow Canada to both satisfy demands for more local control of its own affairs while at the same time remaining a devout member of the British Empire. Within a generation, however, new minds and ideas would arise which would change everything about Canada and its future as a nation....

EDIT: I had Alaska go both ways. Whoops.

TheMann · Aug 30, 2016

Part 2 - The Birth of the Nation

When Canada was granted responsible self-government in 1867, few saw it as the beginnings of a world power, but it was seen as a positive by many and a negative by a few. Those in Washington who remained committed to Manifest Destiny saw it as a real loss - many of these same people had been less than impressed by Canada's relationship with its native populations and the rewriting of the Oregon Treaty that had resulted from their actions - but Washington at that point had their hands full with Reconstruction, which was rapidly spiraling into a mess as the South stubbornly resisted attempts at integrating men of color into their societies as anything near equals. The American Civil War had had its effect on Canada as well, both in terms of economics and social policies, which particularly with regards to Native Canadians softened substantially in the years after Confederation. It had also enormously reduced support for the idea of a complete break from the crown, raising the 'peace, order and good government' ideals up to a prominent position among the country's national leaders. The new federation would, however, face it's first serious test of its problem-solving ability within a few years of its creation.

The fraction of Canada was shortly followed by demands to annex the land owned by the Hudson's Bay Company. Far from being troubled by this, the Company (who had been struggling to make money for decades because of the cost in maintaining such a vast landscape) cordially negotiated with Ottawa and Ottawa annexed the land in 1869, which then resulted in the appointed governor, William McDougall, to make clear that the territory was low subject to Canadian laws. This did not go over well with the local Metis inhabitants, however, leading to Louis Riel's negotiations with Ottawa to establish Manitoba as a province. During this process, however, trouble brewed. While Riel had made a very good call in having an equal number of English and Metis representatives, the Thomas Scott Affair, where the pro-Canadian Orangeman was accused, tried and convicted of plotting to kill Riel and subsequently hanged, caused a political storm. While the Metis felt they had been justified in their actions, in Ontario in particular Scott's death caused a massive uproar. Facing calls for his resignation, sporadic conflicts between some Protestants and Native communities and calls for punitive retaliation against the "half-blooded bastards", MacDonald sent a force to Winnipeg to 'restore order' but with explicit calls to not start trouble. This, however, did not go over well with other Native communities or many French, who saw the move a jackbooted attempt to fix a problem that didn't really exist in the first place. Regardless, the negotiations to make Manitoba a province were successful, and before the troops ever got there the objective of the federal troops had been changed to enforcing federal laws and regulations in the new province. Riel and his forces withdrew from Fort Garry without a shot being fired, and many of the objectives he had sought in negotiations (namely a separate French school system and respect for Catholicism) were indeed created as part of the creation of the province. MacDonald did, however, rapidly discover just how deep the divisions within the country were - while the Protestants of Ontario and many parts of the Maritimes demanded Riel's head for the death of Thomas Scott, both the French Canadian and Native Communities largely sided with the Metis, causing the first of what would be a number of deep divisions within the new country. The Metis had not only created Manitoba, but they soon made it clear that their demands for land ownership and involvement in the new province's politics were to be taken seriously, and the Native tribes of the region heavily sided with the Metis over the English settlers, which made the early governance of the province difficult. While Riel fled Canada for the United States, in the interests of not antagonizing French Canadian or Native Canadian interests any further, MacDonald and the Canadian government largely let the issue lie. They had bigger issues to deal with in any case.

MacDonald and his allies quickly came to a realization - while English-descent Canadians were a majority in Canada, they were not a massive majority and the interests of French-speaking Quebec, to say nothing of Native Canadians, were proving to be at odds. Canada needed a bigger population and a bigger economy, and the way to do that was to expand its boundaries and seek out immigrants, even those not of English-speaking nations. The 'National Policy' was developed as a result, but the implementation of said policy ended up being put on hold on account of the Pacific Scandal, where one of the chief bidders of the Transcontinental Railway project, Sir Hugh Allan, used what amounted to bribery of over 150 Conservative Party officials in an attempt to get the contract, which resulted in MacDonald's defeat in the 1874 elections. His successor, Alexander MacKenzie, quickly got to work having the government build the railroad themselves. Allan's Canadian Pacific Railway nevertheless began its own efforts at building a railway, primarily going north from Toronto and the Ottawa Valley. While the 1877 timeline for the building of the Canadian transcontinental railroad was not reached, Alexander's willingness to expand rail service from both directions proved helpful for support in British Columbia, as contractors not only began building west out of Ontario (the primary bases being the mining town of Sudbury and the Lake Huron port town of Sault Ste. Marie) but also east out of British Columbia. MacDonald's return to power in 1878 meant a return to the building of railroads, but by this time Mackenzie, who had happily supported immigration growth, had convinced investors both in Canada and abroad that there was money to be made settling the Prairies, and Canada's fantastic population growth in the 1870s and 1880s (Canada's population grew from 3,826,500 in 1861 to 5,542,300 in 1881) bore the truth of this - and with that came the reality that Canada really needed to get its new arrivals settled on the Prairies and get its connection to the Pacific built. The long-dominant Grand Trunk Railroad in Ontario quickly joined the CPR in building across the West from Northern Ontario, and while the building across the Muskeg of the north shore of Lake Superior proved arduous, both lines were operating to Winnipeg by 1880. Under the guidance of CPR manager William Van Horne, the CPR stayed closer to the US border, rejecting Sir Sanford Fleming's original transcontinental route proposal, which was promptly picked up by the Grand Trunk Pacific. The CPR was able to locate a route across the Rockies through the Kicking Horse and Rogers Passes, allowing trains to shave as much as a whole day off of transit times to the Pacific Coast. By 1883, both lines were building into the Rockies, and it was a race to see who would finish first - but despite that, both companies were by 1884 approaching insolvency, hammered by massive costs (in some cases in the Rockies, as much as $300,000 a mile) and slow growth of both traffic and settlers. But as that happened, luck turned for both of them in the form of the North-West Rebellion.

While the Red River Rebellion had largely achieved its goals with little violence, the North-West Rebellion was not so. Angered by the belief (more than a little justified) that the treaties signed by the Canadian government hadn't been worth the paper they were printed on, open rebellion broke out in Saskatchewan, led by Louis Riel, who came up from the United States to do so. Having turned the Rebellion into a fight about the place of Native Canadians within Canada, his rebellion soon rapidly grew to encompass Native Canadian tribes in Manitoba, Northern Ontario and British Columbia as well, while support for them in Native-populated locations in Ontario and Quebec was also loud and noticeable. Ottawa quickly dispatched a sizable portion of troops to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, along with detachments sent to Fort William, Kenora and Fort Frances as well as locations across Northern Ontario. This lowered the problems from the Lake Superior tribes and allowed for efficient movement of troops to the North-West territories, but it cemented plenty of problems between these tribes and Ottawa. The North-West Rebellion ended up lasting through the spring, summer and fall of 1885, with sizable portions of the Cree tribes of the Prairies siding with the Metis after the outbreak of violence. Riel's claims of God having sent him back to Canada as a prophet were widely considered to be heresy and made a major impact in the decision by many tribes to stay out of the mess. Local English-descent settlers stayed completely out of the situation on either side (fearing Metis or Native retaliation more than anything else), but the moves of the Metis turned out entirely differently than in 1869 and 1870.

The Rebellion's end in November 1885 led to the arrests of almost all of the leaders involved - and a major, major problem for MacDonald. By this point, while Ottawa and the Anglophones had carried the day in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the realities hadn't changed much. Many Cree and almost all of the Blackfoot tribes had stayed out of it, and impassioned pleas by the likes of Poundmaker and Big Bear that they had only sought better conditions for their people caught major traction among French-Canadian and Native communities, to the point that tensions grew dramatically in Quebec and southern Ontario, with many French canadians believing that Riel and the Metis were being unfairly singled out. Regardless of that, Riel, Metis allies Gabriel Dumont and Honore Jackson along with ten Native leaders (including Poundmaker and Big Bear) were all tried for treason. MacDonald ended up making a monumental mistake here - at Riel's trial in Regina, all of his jurors were English or Scottish Protestants, and his conviction was pretty much a formality. Despite months of appeals, Riel and Cree ally Wandering Spirit were hanged on November 16, 1885, sparking a firestorm - the Orangemen orders openly and proudly spoke of the action, claiming it was revenge for Thomas Scott. On November 21, an Orange Order parade in Toronto ran headlong into a collection of Natives who were none too impressed with this. Its not known who fired first, but it was known that Toronto's police forces openly sided with the Orangemen. Thirty people were killed and over a hundred and sixty injured, and the event caused multiple rounds of violence between Native communities in southern and eastern Ontario in November and December, resulting in over 150 people killed and widespread problems, particularly as it became obvious that French-Canadians weren't on Ottawa's side.

Recognizing this and fearing civil war, MacDonald commuted the death sentences of all others so sentenced for involvement in the North-West Rebellion and ordered that the Metis be treated the same as any other citizen in the Prairie Provinces. MacDonald also faced down the massive mistrust of the Catholic Quebecers that largely resulted from this, but the decision to hang Riel politically pretty much finished the Conservatives in Quebec for decades to come - a situation made worse by the Liberals, whose mistrust of Edward Blake saw him replaced during the fall of 1885. Angry Quebecers, it seemed, could be the way of the Liberal Party once again breaking the Conservatives, and in the 1887 elections, that's exactly what happened, with MacDonald soundly defeated by Wilfrid Laurier in the 1887 elections. MacDonald accepted the decision and made it clear to his more than a little irate supporters that the ideals of Canada must be upheld, even at the cost of compromises with those different from them. His statement would be a harbinger of what was to come.

The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in November 1885, followed by the Grand Trunk Pacific in August 1886, caused a vast swath of the prairies to be able to be inhabited, and MacDonald's National Policy was supported by Laurier, despite the Liberal Party's initial desires to seek north-south reciprocity that seemed more logical to many. The problem here was that Ottawa's ability to push for a national identity was seen by supporters of reciprocity in the United States as being merely a prelude of what many in America still felt as the inevitable political union between Canada and the United States. The Liberals, faced with a seething French-Canadian community, angered Native communities and the enormous investments made in the CPR and GTPR, was forced to rapidly change course, which Laurier approved of wholeheartedly. The CPR moving its terminus from inland Port Moody to coastal Vancouver in 1887 was quickly followed by the GTPR, and to the surprise of many the local Chinese populations, many of whom had been brought to Canada for the express purpose of building the railroads, stayed behind to form a nexus of people of color in Vancouver, which remained despite the racism that was often pushed in their direction. Further south along Puget Sound, the cities of Seattle and Tacoma that had been established by the Americans before the renegotiation of the Oregon Treaty also sought railroad service, and the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Portland in 1883 had almost immediately led to calls for lines into Canada. Ottawa had no issue with this, and the Northern Pacific began operations to Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver by 1889. Accepting the obvious limitations of Portland's port compared with those of Puget Sound, the ports of Vancouver, Seattle and Tacoma became important, and both CPR and GTPR quickly moved right along with the NP. Thus was created the "Four Rail Barons of Canada" - James J. Hill, Donald Smith, George Stephen, Richard Angus, Duncan McIntyre and William Van Horne - who both quickly gained control of not only the CPR but also a vast railroad system in the United States.

Indeed, Laurier's election and policies would define Canada. Seeking openly to reject the divisions among populations, Laurier called for an English-French partnership for Canada that was done with the support of Canada's native tribes, and their inclusion if they sought to be part of Canadian society, accepting that many still felt their treaties were nation-to-nation agreements that should be treated as such. Laurier was an adamant supporter of individual freedom, religious tolerance and decentralized federalism, effectively creating many different communities that still pledged allegiance to Canada, which would become an autonomous country within the British Empire. He firmly believed that Canada was a superpower waiting to exist, and his first speech to Parliament in 1887 - the famed "Century of Canada" speech - reinforced this view, and the policies of the Liberal government were tuned to make that happen. Canada's vast new landscapes seemingly beckoned new immigrants from everywhere, and both the CPR and GTPR were soon slugging it over freight rates, with the two companies rapidly becoming bitter competitors for a market. The massive profitability of the railroads led to a third railroad, the Canadian Northern, beginning construction across the prairies in the 1890s. What had mere villages became real towns and eventually cities - Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle and Tacoma were already there, and the massive population growth in the prairies soon did the same for Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Battleford, Prince George, Thunder Bay, Lloydminster and Brandon. Massive population growth onto the prairies did indeed establish Anglophone dominance of the prairie provinces, but the Native populations and the Metis did not go quietly, and over the years more than a few of them would migrate into major cities, where they steadfastly refused to give up their identities, among other factors leading to the creation of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1892, a forerunner of the Native Brotherhood of Canada that proved to be an influential voice of Native Canadians by the 1910s. More than a few migrants also moved into the mineral-rich (if very poor farmland) regions of Northern Ontario along the National Transcontinental railroad route and the Canadian Pacific. Such was population growth that Alberta and Saskatchewan became Canada's eighth and ninth provinces in 1894.

Laurier and his decisions had opened up a new world, and even with Canada's monumental population growth after confederation, economic growth outstripped even that, and by 1900 Canada was already one of the most prosperous nations on Earth, and Canadian governments and many of its great industrialists were already hard at work turning the country's enormous resource wealth and fertile soil into a vast system of industrial companies and economic projects, sowing the seeds of truly immense growth and influence to come....

TheMann · Sep 3, 2016

Part 3 - Northern Industry, Newfoundland, Welfare Capitalism and the Canadian Identity

By the time of the completion of the CPR and GTPR in 1885-86, Canada's boundaries were more or less settled, even as some provincial premiers pushed for greater autonomy for provinces - Ontario's legendary premier Oliver Mowat, the "implacable enemy" of Prime Minister MacDonald, being the most prominent of these - and disputes over borders at times flared. Despite these tensions, Canada's provinces rather quickly both figured out relationships with each other as well as with Ottawa, with Ontario and Alberta fighting over the borders of Ontario and Alberta and Saskatchewan fighting over the status of the city of Lloydminster which straddled the initial border. (Ultimately Alberta ceded the city in its entirety to Saskatchewan, but later suburbs and satellite communities would spread over the border into Alberta.) Helping things along was the National Policy, which was actively and aggressively pushing for immigration, and economic growth and opportunity, both proving to be important as the Prairies were settled. The immense mineral wealth of Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec led to initial exports of iron (primarily to Britain and the United States), but after the development of coal reserves in Alberta and Saskatchewan and some of the world's best nickel resources near Sudbury, Ontario, Canadian industrial firms rapidly switched to the home-grown production of steel, with the first Dofasco Steel mill in Hamilton, Ontario, beginning operations in 1891, Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie in 1893 and Steel Company of Canada in North Bay in 1895. Exploration by geologists quickly discovered what had been guessed for quite a long time - the Canadian Shield was a mineral treasure house, and the steel companies were quick to begin exploiting it. The development of iron ore mines in Ontario and Quebec in the early 20th Century resulted in Canada being able to be far more than self-sufficient in the material, to the point of the government specifically developing industries that could use this new steel. What also went with this in Ontario was the development of the Trillium Natural Resources Fund in 1906, established by Premier James Whitney to take the province's proceeds from natural resource development and invest it in ways that would generate income for the province. The Trillium Fund would prove a precursor of the future of Canada's management of its natural resources.

Canada's population grew extraordinarily rapidly during the time period, swelling from 5,542,300 in 1881 to 8,326,600 in 1901 to 11,228,900 in 1911, namely fueled by immigration from Europe, some from America and North American Natives, who also during this period were known for an extraordinarily high birth rate. (This was also hugely pronounced among the Metis.) The lines drawn by French-speaking Quebec and English-speaking Ontario got blurred rapidly during this time period, as French speakers in Ontario began to challenge the troubles raised by the Orange Order (helped along by Toronto Irish, who liked the Orangemen even less than the Quebecers did) and English-speaking Quebecers fought to establish more influence within Quebec's Church-dominated wider society. The provincial Native Brotherhoods, united into the single Native Brotherhood of Canada in 1907, and through the years to come became increasingly-active in policy decisions towards Canada in general - by 1910, the debates about trying to deal with Canada by nation-to-nation negotiations and deals as opposed to trying to carve out a place within Canada had been largely settled in favor of the latter, particularly when looking at the results that the Metis and French Canadians had achieved in getting their own way when dealing with Ottawa.

The Manitoba Schools question of the 1890s was one of the watershed moments in Canadian history, namely because of Laurier's dogged pushing of the idea that Canada had to accept all of its people as partners and the constitutionality of decisions surrounding the schools. The Manitoba Schools Question, like the circumstances surrounding Louis Riel a decade before, became a hammer for the Liberals to beat the Conservatives with, though it did result in a sizable rise of French-Canadian nationalism, something that neither Laurier did little to discourage while Conservative rivals Charles Tupper and John David Thompson were both forced by influences within the Conservative Party to try to seek out ways of expanding Protestant influence. (Thompson did less of this than Tupper for a variety of reasons.) Laurier's insistence that Canada's place within a British Empire shouldn't prevent the country from seeking out a Canadian identity didn't go over well with the Orange Order and harder-line elements of society, but such was the power of the French Canadian vote and Catholic Canadians that the fury of the harder-line Conservatives did little to hurt Laurier, though it caused havoc for his political rivals.

One of Laurier's first massive victories was the entry into Confederation of Newfoundland as the country's tenth province. This came in 1895 after four years or negotiations, and with the increasing realization that Newfoundland's small population simply couldn't prosper on its own to nearly the same degree as it could within Canada. Nevertheless, Newfoundland's government, ably led by Sir Robert Bond, was able to wring out concessions out of the Canadian government, the most important ones being the creation of a naval patrol force to protect Canada's coasts and Canada footing the bill for the Newfoundland Railway. The latter proved a formality (though an expensive one as Canada would soon find out), but the former caused a major issue among Conservatives, who still looked to the Royal Navy for maritime protection - but with Royal Navy increasingly aware of the growth of naval threats aorund the world (and would become far more aware with the ascension of the High Seas Fleet early in the 20th Century), they had little objection to a Canadian naval force provided it would be placed under command of the Admiralty in the event of war. The issue became a defining one of the 1896 election, with John David Thompson arguing for the Royal Navy to handle the job while Laurier fought for an all-Canadian Navy. Laurier won the election and got his way, with the 1897 Naval Act being passed into law on April 15, 1897, with Canada buying three protected cruisers from the Royal Navy, with the cruisers first entering service as Canadian vessels in 1899.

The growth of Canadian industries in the late 19th Century and into the 20th Century was largely the results of the ambition of their creators. The railroad barons had been first, but the creation of several industries - from steel to lumber to mining to grain to textiles - allowed a number of Canadian businessmen to become extraordinarily rich, and many of these turned around and sought to expand their empires. While Ottawa was lukewarm at best towards such men and their efforts - neither Laurier nor Thompson particularly trusted the barons - they found able allies in many provinces, which would prove to something of a headache to Laurier later on. Despite this, the multiple rounds of financial panics in the 1890s in the United States and the better investments of the CPR and GTR barons were such that they came out of the maneuvers way ahead, and in the process introduced legendary American investor J.P. Morgan into Canada. Morgan was known for aggressive business consolidations, but he rapidly found out that Canada's best businessmen could battle with the best of them, and the Panic of 1901 (which was started in large part by Union Pacific Railroad boss Edward Henry Harriman trying to corner Chicago rail markets) ended with hundreds of investors investing in Canadian businesses and with the CPR outright owning the Northern Pacific, Great Northern and Burlington Route railways. (This didn't effect CPR much at the time, but would in the future.) The Canadian businessmen took their lessons as experience, but would find out that their efforts didn't always work for them, and the 'Welfare Capitalism' theories would soon prove it.

'Welfare Capitalism' was an idea that began in Vancouver in the 1890s, a result of the city's rapid population growth, anger over the dominance of big buisness and tensions between whites and the cfity's Chinese and Native populations all leading to a rather difficult environment. Anger over living and economic conditions led to multiple rounds of strikes in the late 1890s, but both the Native Brotherhood, Chinese residents' groups and many local businessmen keen on breaking the CPR's hold on much of the city created and developed the 'Welfare Capitalism' idea as a way of expanding local business as a way of counteracting big business influence and providing the people working for the businesses with a chance to own portions of the business they owned. Vancouver's Chinese residents, faced with abominable racism early on in this process, ran with the idea in fine fashion, starting with small business but not staying there for long, despite opposition to their efforts from local whites - but the city of Vancouver's setting of a minimum wage law in 1897 that applied to all residents (the first in Canada) actually helped with the process, as it made the use of Chinese or Native laborer to undercut whites was made explicitly illegal, and Vancouver's unions and police were more than willing to fight for this. By the early 1900s, Vancouver was Canada's most prosperous cities as a result of this action, and the idea spread across the nation rapidly, starting in the West (where the CPR and GTR held massive influence) but not taking very long to get across the country. For their part, Vancouver's Asian-Canadian population adopted many elements of Canadian identities, fought back against those who attacked them and proudly supported those who supported them, particularly Native communities - the Native Brotherhood felt that if the Whites could suppress the power of Asian Canadians that they would be the next ones the bigots went after.

Welfare Capitalism would end up being both a source of enormous economic growth (Canada's GDP per capita grew an average of 4.4% a year between 1895 and 1914, despite the massive population growth) and a powerful check on the influence of the wealthiest of interests, and Laurier adeptly was more than willing to support it in attempts to reduce the power of the great barons, particularly as many local politicians faced charges of influence peddling and unfair dealings. It would also be the final force that would push Canada's Native Communities into complete working with Ottawa and the provinces, as the Six Nations Council was one of the first tribal organizations to gather their resources into a Welfare Capitalism company, incorporating the Haudenosaunee Advancement Corporation in 1898 with the express goal of expanding the prosperity of its members, with more than a little success. (The HAC in 2016 controls over $27 Billion in assets and provides income and employment to more than 25,000 people, the majority of them Native Canadians.) The Barons would at first not be threatened by them, but that would change by the early portions of the 20th Century, particularly as civil servants like Sir Adam Beck would begin pushing for greater public ownership of essential services, even as the political fights between the Barons and their supporters and those among the public and in politics who opposed them reached a fewer pitch in the years after the First World War.

The Boer War in 1899 showed what Laurier's problems were with regards to Canada's greater desire for a national identity when it clashed with the Empire. London had immediately assumed that Canada would join the war effort with the Canadian Army, but rapidly found out that Laurier and the French and Native communities were not keen on sending the Canadian Army to fight England's battles, even if there was immense support for the idea in English Canada. Henri Bourassa was a particularly loud voice against Canadian involvement in South Africa and was equally vocal about the Royal Canadian Navy, even as Laurier saw it as an effective compromise between simply relying on the Royal Navy (which English Canada, especially the hard-line Orange Order, sought) and a completely independent Canadian Navy (which the French Canadian and Native Canadian communities desired). Ultimately Canada did allow for the sending of a volunteer force, again a compromise but which which didn't cause too many ruffles in English Canada, as it still allowed them to fight for the Empire.

The Canadian volunteers in South Africa proved more than a little effective, however, and even the hard-shelled Orange Order began to call for an all-Canadian Army, loyal to the Empire but created to serve Canada. The Canadian Volunteer Force, however, ran into a massive amount of domestic trouble when Emily Hobhouse's research came to light and Lord Kitchener (commander of British forces in South Africa, including the Canadian volunteers) was forced to admit that the concentration camps in South Africa had claimed far more lives when the fighting had. This was very grudgingly accepted by English Canada, but to French and Native Canadians it was an abomination, and while it made for tons of political trouble in Britain (contributing to the landslide loss for the Conservatives in London in 1906) it was a large and ugly mark against the British Empire's reputation in Canada and left a sizable dent in the trust in London's armies by the Canadian public. (This was shared in Britain, too.) Despite this, Canadian public opinion was that the volunteers had done exceptionally well under the circumstances (the actions of Canadian soldiers at Paardeberg and Leilefontein proved how true this was) and Canada, while proud of its soldiers, was more than willing to accept the failures in South Africa and demand better, and Canada's opinions were shown when Emily Hobhouse visited Canada in 1904, where she received and extraordinarily warm welcome and was invited to audiences with Laurier, Thompson and Ontario Premier George William Ross. (Toronto and Quebec City named streets after her - both still have their names to this day.)

By 1910, immense population growth and increasing relationships among the various peoples of Canada was having an effect. Montreal was seeing ever more dealings and relationships between its powerful English business community. Toronto, the hometown in Canada of the Orange Order, was seeing vast growth in the political power of both Native Canadians and Catholics (Irish most of all) break the stranglehold on the city's (and province's) politics by the militant Protestants, the former using unity and influence of their own and the latter through extensive social support systems. (Intermarriage was also becoming common between all three groups as well.) The Japanese and Chinese communities of the West Coast had carved out their own place in Vancouver and weren't gonna let anybody push them around, even as their own hard work was improving their lot both in terms of economics and social status. Native Canadians, who made up an outright majority in many parts of Eastern and Northern Ontario and several places in the West, were increasingly seeing their future as members of their tribe within Canada. Growing wealth, improving living conditions and stable, effective order (By 1910, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were already well-known and increasingly respected both for their effectiveness and ability to be even handed) was helping everyone in Canada. The creation of the Canadian Identity just needed a catalyst to unify all of the various groups in Canada.

And World War One gave it to them.

TheMann · Sep 5, 2016

Part 4 - World War I

World War I was to become a major undertaking for Canada, far greater than its settlement efforts before in terms of finances and absolutely monstrous in terms of financial commitment, but it would also become one of the great struggles Canada would undertake that would forge it as a nation. It would create new problems for Canadian unity, but it would also massively develop the nation's industrial base, advance its technology, change its politics forever and turn its society into one that would shape not only itself but also much of the world, and set up a way of working through differences that would become known worldwide.

The Royal Newfoundland Artillery was the first new unit of Canada in the war. Developed by the Newfoundlanders along with a smaller Royal Newfoundland Regiment infantry unit, Newfoundlanders were justifiably proud of their work early in the war even if the painful losses of it proved problematic later on. Newfoundlander artilleryman Colonel Bill Russell and Royal Canadian Artillery officer Major Kenneth Benson are credited with the development of the first time-on-target system for aiming artillery, and their units in Newfoundland conducted intensive training to teach plotters and aimers the ability to more accurately use their guns. In addition to that, Canadian artillery units developed ways of more rapidly reloading large-caliber guns and fought for - and got - approval for their artillery units to have more teeth than those of other allied armies. On top of that, the Canadian Expeditionary Force was very well armed - the initial desire to use the Ross Rifle by Canada's minister of militia and defense was rejected owing to many problems in training and testing with the rifles, and Canadian soldiers went overseas with Lee-Enfield rifles aside from sniper units, which used their own large-caliber bolt-action rifles. After the first battle of Ypres, the Canadian Army also sent gas masks to the front to all soldiers, and went to considerable lengths to develop better supply and logistics trains for their troops, needed for the heavy artillery. The Canadians were also armed with large numbers of Lewis and Vickers machine guns, and used the latter on aircraft, as well as thousands of Ross rifles being rebuilt as Huot-Ross automatic rifles. But where Canada first got a big note was tanks.

By the outbreak of war Canada was easily the second-largest industrial power in the Empire, and so when British Army officers couldn't get tanks underway, they brought the idea to Canada. The Canadian Army, raised as it was heavily from farm and industrial interests (where caterpillar tracks had been in use for some time) were able to develop tank plans. While the Royal Navy and French Army both also developed tanks, the Canadian "Kicking Horse" and "Selkirk" tank designs, developed and built in time to be sent to Europe for the assault on Vimy Ridge, were indeed among the first tanks, and the big Selkirk, a 58-ton design with twin diesel engines mounted at the back and a crew cabin (and rotating turret) up front and armed with a 4-inch gun, proved to be one of the scariest vehicles for the Germans to face in the war. The Kicking Horse was similar in many ways to the Renault FT (though rather larger in size) and armed with a 2-pounder in a rotating turret. Slow and unwieldy as they were, the Canadian tanks proved invaluable at the Somme (where the Kicking Horse first showed itself) and at Vimy Ridge. The Canadians also used the tanks as breakthrough weapons, leading infantry movements ahead of them in an attempt to draw fire instead of the infantry.

Even better still, one of the greatest arrivals of the war was the Native Canadians. The Iroquois in particular were willing to sign up (in some cases even eager to do so) and there were sufficient numbers of them that they were soon being organized into their own companies, then eventually whole battalions. Western Native Canadians proved even better still, as many of them had grown up hunting and were crack shots, and the best of these were sent to Canada's 'Advanced Marksmanship Academy' at the Royal Military College in Kingston and at the Valcartier army base. The Iroquois in particular insisted on bringing along their Tomahawks, and both British and Canadian officers, remembering the fear these weapons had struck into the Americans during the War of 1812, had few problems with the Natives bringing them along - they even began using the knowledge of them in propaganda broadcasts to the Germans, hoping to strike fear into them. (Many Native soldiers didn't mind this, as the image of a warrior tended to get them a little more respect from white colleagues on the same side as well.) By early 1916, the first nearly all-Native unit, the Royal Six Nations Regiment, was ready to go and was sent to Europe in time for the Battle of the Somme.

While the Somme was to prove to be one of the bloodiest battles in human history - a million men were killed or injured in an area of just over sixty square miles - the Canadian Corps achieved objectives that the British hadn't been able to, and the Six Nations Regiment was perhaps the most feared of all, and while the Royal Newfoundland Regiment did well the Newfie artillery did better, able in more than one case to engage in counter-battery fire against German field guns. The tanks involved - Canadian Kicking Horses, French Renault FTs and British Vickers Mark Vs - all performed well, and while the Canadians took a large number of casualties, the image of them as terrifying shock troops was very much born, giving the reputation to the Germans that any time the Canadian Corps was in the area you'd better be ready for all hell to come down on you and if you knew Native Canadians were in the area to keep your head down in case of them was aiming at you. The result was such that the British High Command tasked all of the Canadian units - under Canadian command, too - to go take Vimy Ridge.

Vimy Ridge was to be the battle that established Canada. Canadian troops under Canadian command, armed with Canadian weapons, using Canadian-developed tactics and with heavy involvement by Native Canadian units as snipers and observers, with Canada's monstrous Selkirk tanks riding with their forces, went to get Vimy Ridge from the Germans. Canadian units of the Royal Flying Corps also were involved, in the form of Sopwith Pup and Nieuport 17 fighters armed with multiple Vickers machine guns in a ground-attack role. The battle began with huge explosions under the ridge set by Canadian sappers ably assisted by the Royal Engineers, and monumental quantities of artillery fire. The fire was astoundingly accurate - Canadian artillery fire usually was - and between that and the arrival of tanks on the Ridge forced the Germans off of the ridge. After the Canadians got to the top of the ridge snipers came into play, and the mighty Selkirks were deployed to assist the 4th Canadian Division which ran into addition difficulties in achieving its objectives - and that division, which included the Six Nations regiment, got its first big surprise when the battle got close enough that melee weapons played a role - at least a few Germans including at least two officers are known to have been killed by Tomahawks - and the big tanks were all but invulnerable to German small arms. The Canadians achieved all of their objectives by mid-day on April 11, having inflicted massive casualties on the Germans and being firmly in control of the ridge.

Vimy Ridge showed that a Canadian fighting force could, and in this case had, taken on the best of European power and stomped on them. The Canadian Corps wasn't done there, of course, but Vimy Ridge, being it was the first time a complete Canadian Army had fought, was seen as critically important to the nation and its future. Canadian newspapers were only too happy to point out how well they'd done, and the performance of the Six Nations Division was noted by many newspapers, including the Montreal Gazette and the Mail and Empire, as a sign that these Natives were indeed Canadians. The Canadians would also see more than a little action at Passchendaele and in the last hundred days of the war (most famously routing the Germans and punching through the Hindenberg line at Cambrai), continuing their reputation as dangerous shock troops.

While the war had been a success at home, the casualty count was such that Borden had little option but to seek to use consciption - which caused a spectacular meltdown in Quebec, including full-blown riots in Quebec City in March 1918. The Conscription Crisis of 1917 would end up being a key reason why the Conservatives would have a hard time becoming a government in the future, and it caused legitimate thoughts in Canada about whether Quebec should remain as part of predominantly English-speaking Canada. It was a constitutional problem that ultimately was settled by the end of the war, and as a result fewer than 100,000 men were conscripted and of those less than 20,000 went overseas. Regardless, the damage was done, and after War's end, Borden found himself with little choice but to get something out of it for Canada and to try and find a way of unifying peoples within in Canada, knowing of the French-Canadian alienation and the massive growth in influence of Native Canadians.

Facing that, at the end of the War Borden fought for (and got) a seat for Canada at the Paris Peace Conference - indeed, at the insistence of Borden and Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, the British Dominions were given seats of their own at the conference, despite both British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and American President Woodrow Wilson being opposed to the idea, the objection of Wilson being angrily responded by Borden with a statement that Canada had seen more of their people killed in the war than America had, and what right did Wilson have to stop Canada from being at the Conference. Such was the level of anger by Canada and Australia on this one that Lloyd George and Wilson relented - it turned out to be for their benefit, ass both Borden and Hughes were more inclined towards favorable terms to Germany at the Conference. Indeed, Borden's only real point of division was on Japan's racial equality proposal - Borden, aware of the actions of Native Canadians in the war, the Komagata Maru incident at home and French-Canadian anger towards his government, backed the proposal, to the surprise of the British and Americans. Ultimately Wilson's desire to be easy on Germany was for nought as Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, got his way at the conference and got the terms on Germany made more than a little harsh. Though no one knew it yet, this was to prove a major problem for the world in the future.

TheMann · Sep 6, 2016

Part 5 - Birth of a Nation, Advancement of Peoples and The Home Front

Canada's creation of its own Navy and the dispute over deploying troops to South Africa against the Boers showed both Canadians and those abroad just how different Canada was playing compared to the British Empire's established foreign policy, but these differences were of little concern to London, who understood better than most that with America to the south and with three large groups of non-British descent Canadians to take into account that differences were going to exist. It also didn't escape London's notice that Canada was by the 1910s easily the most prosperous of its colonies and was rapidly becoming one of its most advanced in many scientific fields. Canada's major cities were electrified by 1911, and rural electrification was becoming a major project in Ontario and Quebec by this point, as immense hydroelectric power potential in Ontario and British Columbia was coming to be used to light cities, and Canada was producing more automobiles than all but five nations on Earth (Britain unsurprisingly was one of these). Prosperity was coming to many groups of people not just whites, and racial tensions that had simmered for a generation were dying away some as minority communities battled for what was theirs when necessary and supported others when it wasn't. Washington was also acutely aware of Canada's development and had little disapproval, particularly as it made border concerns to the north non-existent.

Inside Canada, the old order was changing itself as Canadians saw themselves less and less as British or French of one of numerous Native tribes but as Canadians, even as the divisions remained. Native nationalism and French nationalism most certainly had not gone away, but there was few difficulties involved here as the idea of a nation-within-Canada identity shoved so hard by Laurier had over 20-plus years of Liberal government had taken firm roots, though ultimately those divisions also sowed the seeds of Laurier's own downfall in 1911.

The Royal Canadian Navy, created in 1896, had been born with three protected cruisers and two scout cruisers had been added by 1900, followed by four Tribal class destroyers in 1905-1906, and had proven more than capable of defending Canada's coastline on both coasts and hed become something of a source of pride for its members and their many supporters - but the announcement of Australia's buying of Indefigatible-class battlecruiser HMAS Australia in 1910 caused something of an unroar in Canada, with many Canadian newpapers (primarily the Toronto-based Mail and Empire) asking whether Canada should acquire a capital ship for the RCN. This became one of several issues that were hashed out in the 1911 election - Laurier and the Liberals considered the idea of a Canadian battleship to be an extravagance where the money would be better spent on more cruisers, destroyers or torpedo boats, while the Conservatives, led by Robert Borden, openly approved of the idea of a Canadian capital ship. The biggest issue, however, was the reduction of tariffs on American imports which did, however, see a huge furor when American Congressmen Champ Clark and William Bennett loudly proclaimed that they could use such agreements as a springboard for the United States to negotiate with Britain on how to annex Canada into the United States. Neither President Roosevelt, much of Congress or the British took the idea seriously - London even pointed out that Canada was a much more independent nation than either of the Congressmen figured and thus Canada would have to decide if they wanted to join in any case - but it definitely had the effect of causing a massive turn towards the pro-British Conservatives, even as more than a few of America's business elite (including J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie, both of who openly expressed support both Laurier's efforts and the Welfare Capitalism idea) sided with Laurier publicly and sought to provide funds in less-public ways. Despite Laurier's staunch Quebec base and plenty of support in western Canada, Borden was decisively victorious in Ontario, British Columbia and the Maritimes and became Canada's first Conservative Prime Minister since John A. MacDonald.

Borden found himself as the Prime Minister of a very different country than MacDonald, because in large part of Laurier's efforts. While the Conservatives still found themselves seeking a more centralized federation, it was clear from the start that Oliver Mowat's attempts at carving out provincial power had been more than a little effective. Canada's provinces were powerful, but the prosperity of the time had resulted in Ottawa being able to (in most cases) deal with the provinces where mutual interests were involved, and Borden was more than able to work within this. Canada's industrial interests that had supported him in the election also played in his favor, but Laurier's Canadian nationalism and Borden's long-held view of equality under the Empire would be tested by the Komagata Maru.

Canada's exclusion laws, first passed in 1908, had been under fire for years, most notably in Vancouver and Seattle from those who lived there who were opposed to exclusionary residency laws. The Native Brotherhood of British Columbia and Chinese and Japanese businessmen's associations were also opposed to it, as were many local residents who saw those arriving from the British Empire and being able to speak English as worthy of at least having a chance to make a life for themselves in Canada. Both cities had seen multiple rounds of unrest against minority groups, but with the Komagata Maru the local groups took a stand. When Richard McBride loudly said that none of the Hindu, Muslim or Sikh arrivals on the Komagata Maru would be allowed in, Native Brotherhood of Canada members loudly stated that McBride had no authority to say so and that the ship should at least be allowed to dock to ensure no lives were lost on board. Vancouver MP Henry Herbert Stevens organized rallies to stop the ship from even docking and demanding its immediate departure, saying "We cannot hope to preserve the national type if we allow Asiatics to enter Canada in any numbers." That comment drew Yoshihiro Hidashi, the head of the Council of Vancouver Japanese, to angrily comment "I am only too happy to remind Mr. Stevens that the people he calls 'Asiatics' are already in Vancouver, and have been since other white men like him brought the first of us here thirty years ago to build the railway he travels to Ottawa on. Who is he to decide who preserves the national type?" John Simeon, one of the Chapter heads of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, was just as blunt "If it were up to men like Stevens and [immigration officer] Malcolm Reid we here wouldn't be living in Vancouver. Racism is not acceptable. It is against the ways and means of both God and Man." The crisis drew Borden into it rapidly, and out interests to make sure there was no starvation on board, he personally ordered the ship be allowed to dock. There, Stevens, Reid and Canadian Navy officers Walter Hose and Bill Miller met with the arrivals, discovering to their surprise that most spoke English and were more articulate than the norm, and as all were British subjects, Hose and Miller were forced to argue to Ottawa that they should have the right at least have their case heard. Borden allowed that, and on June 18, the Komagata Maru docked in Vancouver. The next day, however, local whites rioted in the region, attacking the ship and its passengers in full view of the Vancouver Police, who stood aside and let it all happen. Fourty-two of the passengers died and sixty-eight were injured, but photos shot of it by local news photographers didn't take long to reach other newspapers, a similar story with accounts of the incident.

Borden was enraged by the attacks, as were locals, and the next night after that army units were stationed to stop a repeat. Despite British Columbia Premier Richard McBride's loud call for Canada to expel those on the Komagata Maru for 'inciting rebellion', Borden was effectively forced by events to let them stay. All of those on the ship not killed in the riot were allowed into Canada on Borden's direct order on June 23, causing Stevens to resign in disgust. The newspapers hadn't been particularly supportive of the new arrivals, but after the riot public opinion swung their way, as violence against the innocent to most was considered totally unacceptable. The Komagata Maru's arrivals, however, were not angry at Canada for the riot, pointing out that while they should have done more to protect the arrivals, it did have to be said that many other Canadians had fought for them, and they only sought to be part of Canada. While the involvement of the Ghadar Party was pervasive in the initial sailing, the Party's attempt to turn the Komagata Maru into a cause celebre among Indians while doing little to help the passengers was not appreciated by them, with one of the most prominent members of the ship's supporters on shore, Sohan Lal Pathak, commented "they gambled with hundreds of lives to make a statement about the politics of two nations not involved in the dispute, while doing absolutely nothing besides make people angrier. They can claim no credit because they accomplished nothing." While the Komagata Maru incident would be a watershed for Canada's relations with other nations, its news was completely overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I.

World War I, which officially began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, was the largest conflict in human history up to that point, despite the fact that all parties involved expected the war to be a short one. It didn't end up being short at all, and Borden confidently said that he would contribute half a million men to Canada's war effort. He came to regret that later on, as while there were many genuine volunteers early on in the war effort those volunteers dried up later on owing to the conditions in the trenches and the losses involved. Canada also decided its own armed forces equipment - they had more than sufficient industrial capacity to do this by 1914 - and the Canadians had more than a few surprises in store for both sides.

Canada's involvement in World War I was, when proportional to the country's population, quite enormous. A nation of 13.4 million people sent off nearly 480,000 men to fight in the war, and this despite widespread dissatisfaction with Canada's involvement in the war by the French Canadian population. Canada's industrial strength was also dedicated towards the war, as numerous industries - particularly steel, shipbuilding and heavy manufacturing, along with food production - were turned towards making weapons, ammunition and supplies for war, both for Canada and for Britain, the latter unable to entirely feed its population on its own and thus susceptible to starve-out attempts, which is exactly what Germany attempted to do with its U-boat submarine fleet. The Royal Canadian Navy's plans for a capital ship were put on hold by the war, but shipbuilders and boatbuilders in the Atlantic provinces were put to work making a number of anti-submarine vessels, with Canada being among the early users of depth charges in an attempt to sink submarines. The Royal Canadian Navy lost protected cruiser HMCS Atlantis to U-43 off of the Grand Banks on February 19, 1917 (U-43, however, was sunk with all hands by the RCN two days later) and destroyer HMCS Defender was damaged beyond repair by the Halifax Explosion on December 6, 1917, but overall the RCN came out of the war having earned respect and taken less losses than many had feared. Much of this, it does have to be said, was owing to Germany's logistical issues - they could not maintain many U-boats at such distance from home, and getting to the zone of operations wasn't easy owing to the Royal Navy's blockade of the North Sea.

The Halifax Explosion, which to this day is the biggest single peacetime loss of life in Canadian history, was another matter entirely. The result of a collision between French ammunition ship SS Mont-Blanc and Norwegian cargo ship SS Imo in the Harbour Straits which caused the French ship's cargo of TNT, picric acid, guncotton and aviation fuel to explode in an enormous explosion that leveled most of central Halifax, damaging or destroying every building for a 2.5-kilometre radius and killing nearly 2,000 people, while injuring better than 10,000 others. The blast made a mess of the Royal Canadian Navy's Halifax Dockyards in addition to everything else, and while the rebuilding and aid response was swift and substantial, the loss of nearly 2000 lives had an effect, as the disaster was responded to from not only Canada but also Britain and the United States.

The departure of so many men to the front in war meant that a great many women entered Canada's workforce, in most cases for the first time, and not just in fields that had seen plenty of women involved in them in the past, either - particularly after Conscription was introduced in 1917, women took on many new jobs where they had not been seen before - factory workers, transportation fields, office workers in banks, insurance companies and law firms. One woman, Madeline Connor-Evans, joined the CPR in Edmonton in April 1916 as part of a workers drive and trained as a railroad brakeman. Having done remarkably well at it, before the end of the war she was driving trains - she would ultimately retire from the CPR at age 64 in 1960 as a division boss, with her resume including being an engineer on the train that carried King George VI across Canada in 1939. Another well-known notable case was at Northland Steel in Sudbury, Ontario, where sixteen women joined the company but wound up working in the plant itself, finding it difficult but possible and earning great respect from their employer, as Northland Steel's general manager, Alexander Stevens, commented to the Daily Globe in 1918: "They did everything I could have asked them to do and more besides. They did everything the men did, and in some cases they did it better." Beyond the home front, better than 6,000 Canadian nurses followed the troops overseas, facing most of the same hardships as the troops and being able to handle it, while creating their own reputation for competency at their work. Such was the results of Canadian women that the suffrage movement was able to go from an afterthought to an accepted reality in a matter of just a few short years - all provinces except Quebec enfranchised women to vote between 1915 and 1920 (Quebec held out until 1933) and Ottawa extended the right to women in 1917.

The economic cost of the war was tremendous, but it did result in a vast sum of money pouring from Ottawa into the hands of both Canadian companies and Canadians themselves. Despite wartime demands, construction in Canada in most cases barely even slacked off until the enactment of conscription - the nation produced way more than it needed in lumber, steel, concrete and bricks, and had for years before the war - and the newfound wealth was important. There were, however, some problems, primarily in transport fields - by the end of the war, the Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern railways were both nearly bankrupt and in desperate need of modernization - and the income from government contracts and war efforts masked the financial problems at many firms, problems which would become brutally apparent after the war. Despite that, Canada's surging economy pre-war and huge natural resources made sure Canada did not face the same fates that many Europeans powers found themselves after the war facing economic chaos. This would be a factor that would be of great advantage to Canada (and America, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and others) after the war.

After the Paris Peace Conference's close on June 28, 1919, Borden returned home to Canada, having instructed his cabinet before departing to make sure Canada's natives were formally recognized. But what Borden found his cabinet had developed was a vast event in its own right - they were proposing a final settlement treaty between Native Canadians and Canada itself, giving Canadian tribes who signed the treaty full rights as Canadian citizens in every single way and equality with whites under the law, as well as legal ownership to their reserves and substantial payments for their land being bought by Canadians in the past for resale, as well as the right for their bands to maintain their own tribal justice systems, though they could be appealed to higher Canadian courts, and a right for their representatives to address parliament and make concerns over the treatment of their lands by others publicly heard. They were massive concessions to be sure, but Borden and his cabinet were unable to avoid the fact that Native Canadians had developed significant political power in their regions and that over 40,000 of them had served Canada during the war, three of them earning the Victoria Cross in the process. Borden and his cabinet were unsure whether the tribes themselves would accept it, but figured it was in Canada's interest to try in any case.

Publicly announced on July 15, 1919, the proposed Treaty on the Status of Native Canadians caused an uproar in Ontario and the Maritimes, was debated hotly in Quebec and loudly supported in the West. Quebec's primary issue was whether it would reduce the political power of French Canadians, but former PM Laurier argued that if anything the ability for Native Canadians to get concessions would help the Quebecers get theirs, both by reducing the political issues and by showing that giving the Natives what they desired most would not be the end of the World. For the Natives, the Six Nations and other Ontario Native Canadians were loudly in favor, as it recognized their status and position permanently and made them equals in Canadian society, and would allow them to become equals in Canadian politics. Borden's primary problem with the passage of the treaty was his own party, many of whom were not in favor of Natives being considered as equals - though others considered it almost a responsibility owing to their fighting in the war, and others justified it pointing out the difficulties that the Natives had given Canada in the Prairies in past times. Still more remembered Tecumseh and his warriors' sacrifices. No matter how one looked at it, Native Canadians were proving themselves worthy in the eyes of most to be considered as equals within Canada.

Having seen the drafts of the proposed Treaty and approving of it - and finding their bands overwhelmingly in favor also - representatives of the Six Nations Iroquois as well as representatives from the Mi'kmaq Grand Council and several Anishinaabe tribal councils met with Borden's cabinet at the plush Bala Bay Hotel on Lake Muskoka to hash out the details, starting on August 28, 1919. While there were disagreements, both sides rapidly knew the other side was negotiating in good faith, and differences were smoothed over remarkably quickly. The Six Nations representatives and several Mi'kmaq negotiatiors insisted that the Treaty, as it would be very much a final settlement between Canada and its natives, be ratified in its final form by Ottawa and supported in plebescites by the Native nations - to which Ottawa had no objection, and put into the Treaty a stipulation that it would only enter into force if Ottawa and at least three-quarters of the native bands ratified it by August 1, 1920. That last detail done, and with Prime Minister Borden openly pleased at the progress (and more than a little surprised at the good faith and class of many of the tribal leaders), Ottawa and the tribes signed the treaty in Orillia, Ontario, on September 25, 1919. The plan had been for the next ten months to spent with debates, but for the tribes it wasn't much of one - every single signatory band ratified the Treaty of Orillia - but that was different in Ottawa and with the provinces.

Perhaps to no-one's surprise, the loudest voices in favor were French Canadians and the Asians of the West Coast. All of them had wanted to see the idea of Canada as a multi-cultural nation enshrined and felt that the Treaty of Orillia's passage would make exclusionary attempts towards others impossible. The Protestants of Ontario and the West were the hardest to sell, but particularly in highly-populated Ontario the Native tribes mounted a charm offensive to ensure the passage of the Treaty in Ottawa would not cause problems, and they had little difficulty achieving this in most cases. The Orange Order enragedly called for Borden's removal from cabinet, but as their pushing of Regulation 17 had combined with the Conscription Crisis to nearly break up the country, few even among the Conservatives gave a damn what they thought, and in addition to that many of Ontario's most prominent men, including Ontario Hydro creator Sir Adam Beck and his old nemesis Sir Henry Pellatt, openly advocated for the Treaty. (Pellatt is known to have said "No matter who they are, if they serve Canada, if they are willing to fight and die for Canada, they have earned the right to be part of Canada.") In addition to that, more than a few veterans of the war advocated for Treaty acceptance as well, mostly along the same lines as Pellatt's reasoning. In the end, the Treaty cleared Ottawa easily, and the Treaty of Orillia entered into force on August 1, 1920, enfranchising 102,500 Iroquois, 19,000 Mi'kmaq and 65,600 Anishinaabe Native Canadians as full citizens with equal rights to all, and in the majority of cases tribal councils soon had Canadian flags flying over them.

The Treaty of Orillia had an impact many figured would happen with French-Canadians on the Native peoples - the Treaty was an explicit recognition of their place in Canada and their different society, proud members of both their tribes and the nation they lived in. The Tribes themselves in almost all cases took the money granted to them by the government as part of the Treaty and invested it into development of their lands, growing it to give dividends to band members or both, and in most cases successfully. Their laws wouldn't always mix perfectly with Canada - the fight by the Kahnawake Iroquois band outside Montreal to keep their land exclusively for Natives would ultimately be ruled illegal in 1948, causing several bitter rounds of disputes, for example - but it did establish Canada as being far better to Native peoples than the Americans, and it showed in the near-total movement of displaced members of any Iroquois and Anishinaabe tribes to Canada in the 1920s through the 1950s. The Native Brotherhood of Canada would ultimately create the term "First Nations" to describe Native North Americans, and use their newfound status within Canada to not only shift sentiment towards them but also towards ethnic and racial supremacy in general. Where the Asians of British Columbia had started the Native Canadians would now go, and by the 1920s Canada was seeing a new world with regards to different peoples, showing it possible that different groups could share a nation if there was enough there for them to share - and in a vast, resource-rich nation like Canada, that was no difficulty. With the Treaty, which numerous Western Tribes, the Metis and Innu would ultimately also sign themselves between the 1920s and 1964, Native Canadians took their place as the third group of Canadians, right alongside the English and the French.

And it wouldn't end there, either.

TheMann · Sep 13, 2016

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....

TheMann · Sep 14, 2016

Part 7 - The Depression and The 'Canada of Tomorrow'

The outbreak of the Great Depression proved to be monumentally destructive to Canada, with its industrial output tumbling by over 30% between 1929 and 1932, its overall GDP by nearly 25% and prices for primary resources industries such as mining, forestry and farm crops dropping dramatically, with the Dust Bowl making things worse still. As with the devastated prairies in the South-Central United States, soil conditions in the Western Provinces made the situation worse, and the fear of the unknown resulting in the loss of business confidence made the problems worse. By late 1930, some sections of Canada had over half the population living on government assistance, and the situation in the West and some other areas (particularly Northern Ontario) wasn't much better. The sudden and massive drop in demand for pretty much everything left more than a few smaller communities with no economic lifeblood, forcing many to move to seek better lives someplace else. The images of people moving to seek better lives in any way they could, including whole families riding freight trains together (which by mid-1930 neither CNR or CPR were even trying to stop) and vehicles driving across the Prairies, particularly to the big cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Vancouver seeking anything better than what they had left was a powerful pusher, but such was the scale of the mess that even the most public-spirited of entrepreneurs couldn't fix it. This didn't stop valiant efforts by more than a few, but even a lot of who had been Canada's elite were ruined by the Depression, and the only response seemed to be available from governments.

The response to the problems was made rather worse by the reaction of Canada's government views of the day, with Prime Minister King being one of those who claimed that the depression was not really as bad as it seemed (in large part owing to his belief that Conservative Premiers, who led eight provinces at that point, were making it look worse to try and hurt him politically), leading him to make his infamous "One Red Cent" comment about relief. King's beliefs by late 1930 were clearly not accurate, and this tactical screwup made the Conservatives to almost be giddy with the possibility of Mackenzie King's arrogcane causing a mess for the Liberals in the expected elections in 1931. Led in that election by Richard Bedford Bennett, they proposed measures to try and end the Depression, including a long list of tarriff measures meant to restore Canada's industry and "blast" Canada's way into world markets, proved popular measures. Despite this, the Liberals continued to have sufficient support that the Conservatives were forced to have the confidence of Thomas Crerar's Progressives to maintain power, which in the 1931 elections he had little trouble getting. The combined party wasn't short of a mandate at all, and Bennett swept into power with his party and their allies ready to fight back.

Bennett, however, would be little short of a disaster as Prime Minister. Facing calls for expansive relief efforts, Bennett's government's attempt at Imperial Preference trade policies fell flat on its face, and they simply didn't have a plan B. Making things worse was the Bennett government's harsh stance on Communism - Communist ideology was not believed on any wide scale in Canada, but Bennett's persecution of it under Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada ended up a public embarassment when Communist leader Tim Buck was arrested and, during a prison riot, numerous shots were fired into his cell. Worse still, the lassiez-faire economic inclinations of the Conservative Party not only failed to end the suffering, but the harsh conditions of relief camps in some cases made the problem worse.

The seriousness of the situation first came to a head on November 25, 1931, in Toronto. An agit-prop play put on at the Standard Theatre was shut down by police during the performance, to the anger of the crowd, who openly argued with the police and then started fighting them. That situation petered out quickly with no lives lost (though dozens of injuries), but the police arrested the writers of the play, charging them with Sedition. The trial, however, turned into an public embarassment when Buck was allowed to testify at the trial and relate what exactly had happened in open court. The writers of the play were acquitted, but the day after they were released on June 10, 1932, one of them was struck and killed by a truck on Yonge Street in Toronto, the truck then racing away from the scene. Assuming it had been an assassination, over 75,000 protestors took to the streets of Toronto on a hot June 16, 1932, and were met by police and army reserve officers. The attempt to break up the strike ended with RCMP officers firing into the crowd of protesters, killing 17 and wounding over 100. That action caused multiple rounds of animosity between the RCMP and unemployed Toronto residents, leading to multiple other incidents of trouble in Toronto and areas around it in the Summer of 1932. On July 27, 1932, the second mess of the Great Depression broke out in Calgary with a similar situation, with police raiding a large rally of Socialist Party of Canada supporters at the Stampede Grounds. That heavy-handed police action turned an already-angry group of people into a full-blown riot which took five days to get under control, a riot which officially killed 55 people (many say the number was far higher than that) and did over twenty million dollars in property damage. The battles in Toronto and the Calgary Riots blew clear into the open just how ugly the mood in the nation was, and as if that was not bad enough, the On-To-Ottawa trek by workers in the relief camps ended in the Regina Riot on September 20, 1932, where the RCMP and the Trekkers ended up battling in the streets.

The Riots did in the Bennett Government. While being unsympathetic to the Communists, Bennett's response to the On-To-Ottawa Trek was the last straw for the Progressives, and party leader Crerar led the party out of government, calling a no-confidence vote on December 11, 1932. Bennett's desire to avoid this was completely destroyed when two of his MPs were arrested on spurious charges by the RCMP in November. While they were quickly released, Crerar came out of that situation loudly saying that Bennett had failed Canadians and that the country needed a new government to try and fix the mess created. Despite Bennett's efforts, he resoundingly lost the Confidence vote, and a desperate attempt to convince Progressive and Liberal MPs to support his government through offers of financial support to their ridings was blown open by the Calgary Herald and the Mail and Empire, which both considered it little more than organized bribery. But both the Conservatives and Liberals were not prepared for what came in the early 1933 elections - the Progressives, despite not running a candidate in every riding, came out with just eight seats shy of a majority government, running on policies that took far more than a little inspiration from President Roosevelt's New Deal south of the border. Bennett went so far to try and avoid this that he proposed a coalition government with Mackenzie King to stop what he called "The Socialist Menace". King, however, was completely unsympathetic to this, and his members had little difficulty embracing many element's of Crerar's policy proposals, which he labeled the 'Canada of Tommorrow'. Recognizing the concerns others might have, Crerar did come to an informal agreement with Mackenzie King, who broadly approved of the plans brought forward by Crerar.

While Mackenzie King and Bennett were more liberal financially, Crerar as Prime Minister knew that the country had real issues, and while also proposing many similar elements to the American New Deal such as banking and securities reform, getting off of the gold standard (which Crerar had fought with Bennett on repeatedly) and enacting bank stabilities along with closing down seriously insolvent ones. The fact that this effectively expanded the reach of Canada's biggest banks did not go unnoticed, but more than a few people felt that government-arranged expansions in return for major law changes which reduced their management freedom was an acceptable trade-off. But where Crerar really got down to work was in Relief programs.

Far from the small and sporadic efforts of the Bennett Government, Crerar's asked of the provinces to provide plans and projects that could be funded by Ottawa specifically to reduce unemployment and then tasked both private interests and public agencies to build them. The National Economic Recovery Act, passed in May 1933, made Crerar's desires a reality - and as there were tons of projects that had been planned in the booming 1920s that had been stopped cold by the Depression, those who could develop such plans quickly did just that, and in a few cases Washington and Ottawa co-operated on things, including the biggest single project of them all - the St. Lawrence Seaway and the reconstruction of the Erie Canal.

The building of the St. Lawrence Seaway had been proposed by Canadian industrial and some transport interests (though naturally opposed by the railroads) for many years, and these interests had in the mid-1920s funded a construction study which included detailed planning to build a Seaway system which would allow ships of slightly bigger than Panamax-size to move into and out of the Great Lakes, the building of the Welland Canal, which would be the first section of the Seaway completed, reflected this. Meanwhile, the Erie Canal was planned for rebuild on the American side to somewhat smaller dimensions owing to concerns about water supplies in the canal regions. Roosevelt, Crerar and Mackenzie King all knew of the proposals, and with the NERA in Canada and the PWA in the United States, they could do it. The St. Lawrence Seaway, completed and opened in May 1938, was built to address many of these issues, and the Erie Canal's rebuild, completed in April 1941, added to the ability of shippers to use the Lakes. Built to big dimensions - Seawaymax is 1175' length, 138' beam and 41' draft, along with 175' air draft - the Seaway's ability to handle large vessels was shown clearly by the fact its first ships through, fittingly enough, were American battleship USS Maryland, the flagship of the Royal Canadian Navy HMCS Canada and British battleship HMS Rodney, none of which had ever made any attempt at moving so far into fresh water bodies before. (The American battleship made a tour of Canadian Great Lakes ports while there, while the Canadian and British vessels did the same with American ports.) The Seaway would prove itself invaluable during WWII, allowing repair and construction of vessels far from the Atlantic. The Erie Canal was built rather smaller - Eriemax is 815' length, 110' beam and 36' draft - but the project provided a vast number of jobs in the region and allowed the Hudson River to be used for transport that had before then mostly been lost to railroads. The old Erie Canal west of Baldwinsville, NY, wasn't rebuilt as part of the process - the new canal used the Oswego Canal to access Lake Ontario, saving hugely on costs - but the rest of the canal would be revived by New York State in the 1950s.

Beyond the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Canadian efforts also included the first dams of Ontario Hydro's Ontario North and Hydro-Quebec's James Bay hydroelectric projects, with the first Ontario North dam (Albany River-1) finished in May 1937 and the first of the James Bay Project (Le Grande-1) finished in September 1937. Three Ontario North dams and two James Bay Project dams were finished before the outbreak of war, and while initial problems with power transmission did exist, the development of HVDC power lines, the first of which began transmission in Quebec in 1955, all but eliminated the problem and ushered in an era of cheap electricity in Ontario and Quebec, which would rapidly followed by dams and hydroelectric systems in British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland in the post-war era. Also built as a result of this was the three dams built on the Columbia River, the largest of which was the mammoth Grand Coulee Dam, which began producing electricity in 1941. BC Hydro and the Bonneville Power Authority worked hand-in-hand for many years starting in the 1930s to manage water and power supplies in the region, and it showed in the co-operation. Likewise, the rivers that connected the Great Lakes also were dammed and channeled for hydroelectric power in a number of cases, providing a welcome boost to the power supplies of the region.

In addition to the large infrastructure actions, lots of other tasks got done. The Trans-Canada Highway, a priority of the Act, was completed in 1937, with the Lions Gate Bridge completed in 1935 as part of the projects, helping link Vancouver's busy northern suburbs with the city itself. Toronto and Montreal got new subway lines, Calgary and Edmonton got above-ground public transport, Canadian National Railways built the Confederation Bridge-Tunnel between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick between 1934 and 1940 (an engineering marvel in its own right) and rural electrification was stretched practically everywhere. In the smaller projects, better transportation, water conservation, sanitation and flood control were prioritized at first, but as those problems got fixed, the focus shifted to public facilites - schools, hospitals, libraries, armories and parks and recreational facilities. High Park and the Toronto Islands in Toronto, Stanley Park in Vancouver, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Glenmore and Riverside Parks in Calgary, the Confederation Parks in Ottawa, Discovery Park and Seward Park in Seattle and hundreds of other spaces got rebuilt or refurbished. Montreal got its immense new hockey arena, the Montreal Forum, while Vancouver and Seattle also got immense new stadiums - British Columbia Place for Vancouver and the Exhibition Stadium for Seattle - while many smaller sports arenas were built.

All of the work was immensely costly, but it had the effect it was supposed to - it gave a massive boost to the Canadian economy, and both working on the projects and supplying them became a major undertaking. The Welfare Capitalism ideas that had been shelved amidst the chaos of the Great Depression came roaring back after the NERA, with the government effectively using its financial muscle to direct projects to which a vast segment of the country's industry supplied them. The NERA also forced many companies to rebuild and advance their own infrastructure on their dime - over two dozen cement plants were needed to supply the massive construction projects (making huge income for cement firms), steel plants were revived and upgraded, along with the mines and quarries that supplied them, CNR and CPR engaged in something of a rivalry towards locomotive sizes with CPR's 4-6-6-4 'Selkirk' types running a rivalry with CNR's 'Superpower' 4-8-2+2-8-4 Garratts, several companies (including Robinson, Massey-Harris, Russell-Evans, Prevost, Bombardier, Sterling and Western Auto) all fought for the market in trucks and construction vehicles and several companies used the opportunity presented by the St. Lawrence Seaway construction to build vessels big enough to properly use it. GM of Canada and Westland-Reynard soon began to see a big spike in demand for their products, as did Ford of Canada and lots of importers, many of whom set up assembly plants in Canada to accomodate demand. Both government agencies and private development interests took to the task of rebuilding the country's housing stock, forming the genesis of development titans Olympia and York, Brookfield and Tremblay-Gauthier. The need for raw materials sent many who had left the mining and forestry towns headed back to them, only in most cases to far higher wages and safer working conditions. It was a good sign, and it said much that tens of thousands of new companies came to pass, creating a whole new generation of business titans, particularly among French Canadians and Native Canadians - Montreal's long English-dominated business community began to be challenged by French-speaking businessmen during the late 1930s, and after the war these men would challenge the old elite for control of the business community in Quebec and Canada in general.

Crerar and Mackenzie King's efforts made them beloved among the Canadian population and brought a new progressivism to light. The Progressive Party, well-established federally but with little provincial infrastructure, allied itself with the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation from its foundation in 1932 (as the CCF was vocally anti-communist, this didn't bother too many people) and sought to define itself as the more liberal side of Canadian politics, while the traditional Liberals themselves began to establish themselves as centrists who tended to lean left, with the Conservatives, whose traditional values had been shattered by the Bennett era's spectacular flameout, sought to create a new identity for itself. It was a political re-alignment that would last for decades to come. The 1937 elections handed a dominant victory to the Liberals and Progressives, but it put Mackenzie King back in the Prime Minister's Office....but knowing of Crerar's work, the Liberal-Progressive accord remained and Crerar and eight of his caucus members were part of King's 1937 cabinet. The Conservatives found inspiration from the more-pragmatic efforts in several provinces (particularly Ontario) to begin a long rebuilding process during World War II, but would find themselves largely shut out of federal political power until the late 1950s. The harder ideological tones of many of the conservatives of the past had been burned badly by Bennett and then by the highly-successful efforts of Crerar and Mackenzie King to revive Canada's economy.

Having followed heavily along the lines of the New Deal, Ottawa and Washington began to see each other as one of its most dependable allies, which contributed heavily to Canada's willingness to focus its armed forces on expeditionary work. The Royal Canadian Navy got four seaplane carriers built between 1933 and 1936, and the building of the Montreal-class light cruisers between 1937 and 1940 (the first Canadian-designed cruisers, which used Canadian diesel engines and drew substantially from American design practice but still used British gun and electronics designs) and the RCN's big destroyer fleet was done with Washington's knowledge and approval, and the Americans provided Canada's destroyers with SG surface search radars, despite all of them also using British fire control radars and all Canadian larger warships being fitted with the latest in RN radar by 1941. Washington by the outbreak of World War II saw Canada as the big ally to the north, and Canadian warships (including HMCS Canada) were frequently invited to participate in American fleet exercises, and they did so frequently. (It was at one of these just before the outbreak of war that the USN learned just how good the British Type 284 radar was, thanks to the accurate shooting of HMCS Canada during the exercise.) Tarriffs between the two nations tumbled significantly during the New Deal and NERA eras, and when war broke out the oil supplies of Western Canada became an invaluable supply to both the Americans and the British Empire.

Canada's inclusiveness of immigration policy would indeed be tested by the 1930s. Neither Mackenzie King, Bennett or Crerar made any real attempt to restrict immigration more than already existed - far fewer people traveled during the Depression - but Canada did, however, see major differences in policy from other nations, primarily with regards to Jewish immigration.

While anti-Semitism was by no means unheard of in Canada, the exclusionary laws passed in stages by Nazi Germany starting in 1933, while largely ignored by other European nations, was regarded by many Canadians as being at the very best truly barbaric. Indeed fascism was looked down upon more in Canada than communism was even before the outbreak of war, and Canada's small Jewish community found it hard to stay quiet. But the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 changed the equation. News of it spread worldwide rapidly, and both Crerar and Mackenzie King found themselves hearing calls to allow Jews fleeing Nazi persecution a safe haven in Canada. Those calls had been heard since Hitler's rise to power, but by 1935-36 the calls were incredibly loud, and by the winter of 1935-36 one of the racial biases so commonly used to justify anti-Semitism - that they controlled international finance - became an asset.

It started in Toronto, where aldermen David Scott and William Sebastian both wrote in a Toronto Star editorial in July 1935 that the Nuremberg Laws were "the gift that has been given to any nation that has the courage to take it" as any country could "instantly, and with nearly any terms they desire, take in a whole class of people who are far more educated than the norm, and thanks to Hitler, far more dedicated to their new homes than most". It called upon "Men of Honour" to speak up for the Jews, and that if Hitler truly wanted them out of Europe that badly, that Canada should take them on. The latent anti-Semitism that existed in Canada made sure that it turned into a spirited debate, but one where there was a substantial problem - while French-Canadians were as divided as any other group about it, Native Canadians weren't - and they had been more disgusted by Hitler than anyone else, having in their not-too-distant past been on the receiving end of such hatred, were absolutely on the sides of allowing Jews into Canada. A key turning point was a public debate in the House of Commons in February 1936, when Frederick Blair attempted to make the case to Ottawa that allowing in the Jews would antagonize other nations, leading John Lightfield, an Ojibwa member of the Parliament for the Progressives, to demand "who, exactly, are we going to be antagonizing, Mr. Blair? Hitler? He wants them gone anyways. Other Europeans? They don't want them either. So, tell me again, who would we be antagonizing by taking in people whose home doesn't want them?" Lightfield wasn't finished there, speaking again a week later to a gathering in Toronto "Are we the Men of Honour or not? Are we the nation that allows those to come to build a better life, or are we going to just say to people who are being hated because of their religion, you can't come because we fear the Jews? More to the point, how do you fear people who are fleeing their would-be murderers in Europe?" Lightfield was not the only MP who felt this way, and by late 1936, things had shifted with Canada's immigration policy. Jews were allowed into Canada if they had a certain amount of assets to bring with them, but that limit was made lower and lower as more news of Nazi barbarism came out.

On September 11, 1936, Canada tossed out its Jewish exclusionary laws at the order of Cabinet, and Frederick Blair's attempts to hold this up saw him fired in February 1937. Lightfield personally organized help committee for arriving Jewish refugees, and he organized the ad-hoc "Men of Honour" committee which fought for equality for refugees. By mid-1937, Toronto in particular was taking in Jewish refugees at bigger than expected numbers, and no sooner than they had gotten their assets organized in Canada then they began making loud public statements about improving Toronto's urban environment, a situation mirrored in Montreal, Halifax, London and Winnipeg where more than a few of them congregated. The violence of Kristallnacht stopped just about all forms of objection to the openly-allowing policy of Jews, and several ships who had left Europe with Jewish passengers who were seeking asylum, including the famed MS St. Louis and SS San Sebastian, were among those that docked in Canada. Canada took in over 150,000 Jews between 1936 and 1939 and between 1945 and 1948 as Holocaust survivors. After the war, over fifty of the "Men of Honour" were given the status as "Righteous Among The Nations" and those who had so loudly advocated for the Jews to come to Canada quickly gained recognition, and notable anti-Semites (Frederick Blair most famously) found themselves almost ostracized from Canadian society. When John Lightfield was appointed Canada's ambassador to Israel in 1954, he was personally greeted at his arrival by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and one of the youngest of the 1930s Men of Honour, 26-year-old legal apprentice Michael Howland, would go on to also be one of the chief negotiators of the Ottawa Treaty, and when he died in 1995, Israel's Ambassador to Canada offered Howland's family a place for him on the Mount of Olives. (They respectfully declined this.) Israel and Canada would have a very good relationship after the war, a relationship which would ultimately culminate in the Ottawa Treaty.

TheMann · Oct 8, 2016

Part 8 - The Greatest War

As countries fought the Great Depression in the 1930s, the rise of political movements that advocated racial supremacy and aggressive militarism was an unfortunate part of the conversation. While the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States and those who imitated or were inspired by them (including Thomas Crerar and William Lyon Mackenzie King in Canada) did much to recover from the problems without destroying political systems, the greatest single problem that grew out of the 1930s was the rise of fascism. Benito Mussolini's Italy was the first personification of this, but it was the creation and rapid rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in the 1930s from having to use conspiracies and violence to achieve goals in 1933 to rising his country into being a world power by 1939. Eager to avoid war, nations around the world appeased many of Hitler's demands, but by 1939 and after his betrayal of the Munich Agreement nobody was fooled any more, and Canada, having antagonized Hitler on numerous occasions (particularly in Canada's open disdain for fascism and Canada's taking in vast numbers of Jews from Germany), was one of the first to accept what by 1939 everyone knew was coming. Having been building up the Royal Canadian Navy since the early 1930s and building the Royal Canadian Air Force and Canadian Army during the same time period, Canada was rather better prepared for war than many nations, though the extent to which the Western Allies had to catch up would become apparent rather rapidly following the outbreak of war on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's Wehrmacht stormed into Poland, with Josef Stalin's Red Army coming the other way. While the Poles fought bravely, they simply had little chance of stopping either side and it showed.

The British Commonwealth didn't take long to declare war on the nazis, and Canada was one of the first to do this, and while World War I had largely been seen as a European conflict, Canada had little difficulty recruiting soldiers this time. Indeed, among the most willing to fight were Canada's vocal minorities - the Asians of the West Coast, Native Canadians and, of course, Jewish Canadians, the latter of whom felt that the Allies' victory in this conflict was a matter of survival of their entire religion. (How true this was would prove to be true by the end of the war, when the horrors of the Holocaust would be fully known.) The Royal Canadian Navy was rapidly organized to fight, and the first convoys departed Halifax just six days after the declaration of war on September 10, 1939. While Britain's pre-war plans had originally planned for Canada to primarily be a supplier of materials and food to Britain, the Royal Canadian Navy's ready to fight nature was obvious early on. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was the first real contribution to the war, but Britain's original feelings that it could handle Hitler on its own did not stop the Canadians from being prepared. Britain's view that it could supply Canada with what it needed for weapons hadn't been believed by Canada for a long time for a variety of reasons, and co-operations had resulted in the development of the Ram tank, and with the Canadian Army and their Australian counterparts having taught each other much about their tank designs saw both Canada and Australia preparing their medium tank design, called the Ram II in Canada and the Thunderbolt in Australia, for production by mid-1940. Canada's navy rapidly also got to work building numerous smaller vessels, and the development of the Orca-class submarines, a modified variant of the American Gato-class fleet submarine, also began in earnest. By June 1940, Canada's Montreal-class cruisers and Orca-class submarines were complete, and they began to operate as their own units, working with the RN but taking orders from Ottawa and Halifax rather than the Admiralty. This included battlecruiser HMCS Canada, which escorted its first convoy in October 1939 and would see plenty of use from then on.

While the early war had been focused on preparations for war, Hitler struck and struck hard on May 10, 1940, invading the Netherlands and Belgium in an attempt to circumvent the fortified Maginot Line built by the French. The Netherlands fell in just eight days while Belgium held on for three weeks, but the German assault was next to impossible for the armies stationed in northern France to stop. The blitzkrieg was indeed at the time impossible to stop, and the encirclement of the majority of the British and French armies at Dunkirk resulted in them having to be evacuated, though as a result they left behind nearly the entirety of their equipment, vindicating the Canadian position the Britain's military needs would make it impossible to supply the Commonwealth effectively. Dunkirk was, however, the first action for HMCS Canada, as well as heavy cruisers Ontario and Quebec and light cruiser Vancouver, as they were in the area - while the British initially demanded they be part of the evacuation, Canada denied this and instead sent them, along with destroyers Iroquois, Athabaskan, Huron, Haida and Cayuga, to cover the landings. This made them enemies of the Luftwaffe, and they indeed took a vicious beating from the Luftwaffe and elements of the Kriegsmarine (and losing Athabaskan to a German torpedo boat), the Canadian ships did their job, undoubtedly saving thousands of lives, and they were actively supported by the RAF, which did their level best to support both the evacuations and those supporting it. All of the Canadian vessels shot out two complete loads of ammunition in the process, and Canada insisted on the removal of as many of the French rear guard as possible, saving thousands more lives in the process.

The Royal Canadian Navy's dogged support of the evacuation at Dunkirk when the Royal Navy couldn't do so caused an uproar in Britain, and it was no surprise to anybody that the Canadian vessels were repaired - all had been damaged, in the case of heavy cruiser Ontario and destroyers Haida and Huron quite seriously - by British dockyards at British expense. But the die was cast - the Royal Canadian Navy was now being taken seriously, and Dunkirk ended debates about the desire of the Canadians to run their own show. While they would always co-operate with the Admiralty, it was no surprise that the Canadians would run their own Navy for the war - and they would prove good at it. Perhaps more importantly, Canada's loud public call that France fight on was indeed heard, and while Francois Darlan was unable to stop his country from falling, he was not about to take orders from Marshal Petain, and he ordered the French Navy to get to British ports, fighting the Germans if necessary. That call was heard at Oran, Mars el Kabir and Toulon, and on July 9, the French Navy was on the move, having to battle their way past the Germans in multiple cases and losing several vessels, including old battleship Bretagne and heavy cruiser Dupleix, to German attacks. Despite this, the Free French Navy's fighting on made sure that the Vichy regime was viewed at illegitimate by the world. But the damaged vessels, however, couldn't be repaired in British shipyards owing to desires of the Royal Navy to get working for the seemingly-inevitable invasion of Britain itself.

So they sailed across the Atlantic instead.

The desire to fight on still very much burned in the French, particularly as Darlan and de Gaulle were calling for vicious resistance against the Nazis and their Italian allies. Unable to find sufficient docks in Britain, a large portion of the fleet, commanded by Darlan himself aboard battleship Strasbourg, sailed out of the Firth of Clyde with the Canadian fleet leading the way on September 21, arriving in Halifax on October 6 and then fanning out, with damaged ships going to shipbuilders in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario. The biggest job of the war here went to Ontario Shipbuilding and Marine in Whitby, Ontario, whose "Massive Dock", meant for the construction of large lake freighters, was cleared out in preparation for the arrival of incomplete French battleship Jean Bart, which the Canadian dockyard workers finished building in just 14 months, allowing the battleship to commission on December 23, 1941, at Toronto. The French Navy soon had a base of operations established for it by the Canadians in Halifax, and understanding that their facilities depended on it, they were soon co-operating with the Canadians as much as the British.

By the end of the summer of 1940, Canadian industrial capacity was fully turned towards war, and it showed. Conscription never proved to be necessary even in the darkest depths of the war, in large part because by 1943 the Axis powers had come to fear the Canadian armed forces. Whether it was producing weapons or supplies, Canada's involvement in the war was huge, and by the time that President Roosevelt called on America to be the "Arsenal of Democracy", Canada was already doing just fine at that. The Ram II and Canadian-improved versions of the Churchill heavy tank were in production by late 1941, and Canada's expertise in diesel engines produced the Reynard-Napier, Robinson and Massey-Harris diesel engine designs which powered pretty much all Canadian armored fighting vehicles during the war. Canada's Navy built hundreds of smaller vessels - ranging from destroyers and submarines to frigates and corvettes for escort duty, and their fleet also sported three light carriers (Warrior, Vampire and Triumph) and a large seaplane carrier similar in design to the massive French Commandant Teste (Terra Nova). All would see extensive action during the war, and the Royal Canadian Navy would be the point force the Battle of the Atlantic - indeed, Vice Admiral Leonard Murray would be the commander in chief of the Northwest Atlantic theatre for almost the entire war, commanding British, French and American units as well as his own. The French Fleet soon also established their own facilities in Quebec, and the relationship between France and Canada would be dramatically changed by the War.

The replacement of Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister by Winston Churchill on May 10, 1940, was a sign to the Allies that Britain wasn't gonna surrender. Hitler made more than one public offer to end the war, but the British rejected these outright, pointing out that Hitler's word was worthless. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the war, as the stubborn defiance of the Royal Air Force (which included No. 1, No. 3 and No. 9 Squadrons of the RCAF) in defending Britain ultimately put a halt to Operation Sealion, the planned German invasion of Britain. Despite the best efforts of the RN, they were clearly over-extended by 1941 and the Kriegsmarine, in particular the U-boat fleet, was doing serious damage to the convoys of supplies, causing major logistical issues for the Allies. The RCN in particular worked their tails off to fix this, but it took time to get success, despite radar-equipped patrol aircraft that by early 1941 were ranging far and wide from Newfoundland and Iceland in an attempt to chase down U-boats before they struck. However, the Germans still saw the best way of destroying a convoy was to use surface ships, and the Germans' use of pocket battleship Admiral Scheer to attack convoy HX 84 on November 5, 1940, was a sign that there was a need for bigger ships in the convoys, a problem for the Allies, but one which HMCS Canada and French battleships Strasbourg, Dunkerque and Richelieu, along with old British battleships Ramilies and Malaya, were able to accomplish. That, however, pushed the Germans to up the ante again, sending out battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to fight back. The latter paid for that on February 25, 1941, when she sought to attack a convoy but was ambushed by HMCS Canada and cruisers Quebec, Colbert, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, which pounded the Gneisenau to pieces but suffered serious damage to Montreal and Ottawa as a result.

In May, the Kriegsmarine went to the extremes, sending out battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen to support the Scharnhorst. The British found out about this as the fleet attempted to go around Iceland, and British battleships Hood and Prince of Wales intercepted the two, but this did not go well - Hood was sunk by a magazine explosion and Prince of Wales took serious damage, forcing her to withdraw. That victory forced movements by convoys, even as Churchill's infuriated demand to "Sink the Bismarck!" was answered by the Royal Navy. But Hitler's fleet had a second goal - having seen the patrol planes cause havoc for the U-boats - which was by May 1941 becoming a serious problem - the battleships sailed towards Newfoundland, intent on shelling St. John's and the great air base at Gander. The RCN didn't take long to figure this out, and HMCS Canada and FS Richelieu raced out of Halifax in an attempt to intercept it, along with RCAF bombers, which also raced to Newfoundland. Despite this, Bismarck and Tirpitz did indeed shell St. John's on May 25, 1941, doing serious damage to the city itself - but encountering plenty of unwelcome surprises, as destroyers Assiniboine, Gatineau and Kainai roared out of St. John's in an attempt to attack the battleships - all three were lost, but not before they put a pair of torpedoes into Prinz Eugen and shells into Bismarck - and coastal artillery units of the Royal Newfoundland Artillery, which scored 155mm hits on Prinz Eugen and Tirpitz. The shelling claimed over 650 lives in St. John's before the German battleships were attacked by RCAF bombers, which caused them to run. The bombers damaged both battleships and left Prinz Eugen dead in the water, which allowed destroyer Niagara and frigates Prince Rupert and Stone Town to finish the cruiser off with torpedoes.

The dead of St. John's left the RCN absolutely livid, and HMCS Canada and her cruiser escorts along with French battleship Richelieu and cruiser Algerie, along with the Commandant Teste, were quick to join the battle. Their actions in St. John's didn't make finding the battleships hard, and British heavy cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk, which had been attempting to shadow the German battleships, quickly joined up with the Canadian fleet even as Prince of Wales was joined by battleships Rodney and King George V and aircraft carrier Ark Royal in the Home Fleet's vengeful pursuit of the German big guns. Knowing what was coming, the Germans quickly broke into the Atlantic, but the damage to Tirpitz allowed the British and Canadian-French battle groups to chase the two battleships down. On June 3, the two ships were spotted by Ark Royal's aircraft, followed not long after by Commandant Teste's seaplanes. The co-operation, however, started there - Ark Royal launched an air strike on the two battleships, but the approaching battle groups forced the Germans to try to escape the pincer movement. The knowledge of Force H's heading for the scene resulted in a second air strike, this one damaging the Bismarck's steering gear to such a degree that she could not maneuver effectively. knowing what that meant, the Germans held their ground, waiting for the assault. The final battle of the two ships on June 6, 1941, was the bar fight everyone expected it to be - Canada and Richelieu approached from the West, while Rodney and King George V came in from the east, both sides also bringing in their cruisers. Both German battleships, damaged but still functional, took sides, with Bismarck taking on Rodney and King George V while Tirpitz took on Canada and Richelieu. It didn't work well for either one - one of Canada's first salvos destroyed Tirpitz' forward control post, and despite the danger of the battleship's 15-inch guns, Quebec, Algerie, Vancouver and Ottawa went right in with their big guns, with the cruisers also shooting torpedoes. Richelieu's guns put the rear turrets of the Tirpitz out of action, while two of Vancouver's torpedoes put a monster hole in the battleship's starboard side which quickly caused flooding problems. Despite this, Tirpitz fought hard, landing 15-inch shots on the faceplate of Canada's B turret (which disabled the turret though didn't destroy it) and the Richelieu's starboard secondary battery (which blew it to pieces and caused extensive fire damage) before at least twenty big shell hits and dozens of smaller hits, as well as at least five torpedoes from the cruisers as well as destroyers Salish, Abenaki and Tuscarora and frigate Springhill finished off the mighty German battleship. Bismarck didn't fare any better - Rodney and King George V shelled Bismarck to pieces before Norfolk and Dorsetshire put the coup de grace torpedoes into Bismarck.

The loss of the biggest elements of the German surface fleet enraged Hitler and proved a huge boost for the Allies, at a time when the Battle of the Atlantic was shifting in their favor. Canada and Richelieu were given a heroes' welcome when they arrived back in Halifax, even though both needed repairs at that point. The destruction of the two most dangerous elements of the Kriegsmarine, combined with the losses of Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, made sure that the HMCS Canada was a famous ship. "Canada Cannot Be Stopped!" Read the headline in the Toronto Star on June 9, 1941, the day after the Canadian Admiralty had announced that Bismarck and Tirpitz were indeed sunk, while the Toronto Telegram read out "Take That, Hitler!" The Montreal Gazette was no less estatic, saying "The Nazi Navy thought they could take on the might of Canada, France and Britain. They thought they could shell Newfoundland with impunity. They thought they were invincible. They were wrong. And now they are history. One hopes Hitler will soon face the same fate." The French Navy's men in Canada, who had fought hard in the Battle of the Atlantic and wanted vindication, definitely got it as a result. The RN and RCN by this point were learning how to beat the U-boats, even as Canadian shipyards built ships plenty rapidly enough to replace those lost to U-boats.

The entry of the United States into the war was initially a good thing for the U-boats, as the Americans initially were unable to provide enough escorts to protect all of its ships, including in coastal areas. The Germans took advantage of this, but the Royal Canadian Navy, already well connected with the United States Navy, was quick to pass tactics and information on, even if many of the American senior officers didn't always use it. Canadian officers were so good at organizing shipping movements that they were working with the Americans almost from when the war broke out, and by the summer of 1941 they were almost entirely handling convoy organizing and movements. Between improving tactics and weapons, in particular the breaking of the Enigma naval code and the development of ASDIC, Leigh Lights and Hedgehog- and Squid-type depth-charge throwers, and the better tactics, the Royal Canadian Navy by the summer of 1942 had the upper hand on the U-boats, and when combined with the German surface fleet's losses - made worse when Scharnhorst attempted the Channel Dash and got blasted by British shore batteries, followed by RAF bombers finishing her off, on August 16, 1942 - made sure that the big guns weren't needed in the Atlantic. While the French Navy's vessels went to fight the Italians and Germans in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1942, HMCS Canada was dispatched to the Pacific to assist the Americans, who after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought them into the war found themselves somewhat shorthanded in the Pacific Ocean.

October 1942 was the high-point for U-boat attacks, but by this point there were sufficient fleet destroyers and frigates, both from the United States and Canada, to not only protect all of the Convoys but also aggressively go U-boat hunting, and the introduction of ASW-equipped B-24s into both the Canadian and American navies in June 1942 added to the problems. By this point RCN crews were aces at U-boat hunting, to the point that the pack tactics of the Germans were turned against them by Canadian frigates, who hunted U-boats in packs and were frequently able to break up packs of the German submarines. By the summer of 1943, the Kriegsmarine was well aware that they had lost the Battle of the Atlantic, and with their U-boats being attacked shortly after departing their bases in occupied France (even before the U-boat base at St. Nazaire, along with much of the rest of the city, was leveled by American firebombing in June 1943), the Germans spent the rest of the war on the back foot, and the convoys kept on rolling.

While the BCATP proved to be highly successful, the Royal Canadian Navy soon had exploits for days and the moving of supplies in huge amounts was obvious (and Canada added to the Allies' supply advantages when the Trans-Canada Pipeline was completed in May 1944, allowing direct oil shipments from Western Canada to Quebec City, Halifax and Saint John) and contributed to the massive growth in Canadian industrial capacity, By the summer of 1942 Mackenzie King was agitating for the Canadians to get involved in ground action, and as Canada had ten complete divisions ready to go (including the complete First Canadian Army based in Britain from July 1942 onwards) and the developments of the Atlantic Charter (which Canada was a signatory to) made sure British plans to wear the Germans down would indeed bear fruit. As the Americans tooled up for combat, at Churchill's suggestion (and Mackenzie King's agreement), the Second Canadian Army's airmobile and seaborne units were the response to Japan's invasion of the Aleutians in June 1942 - and the first actions of the famed 2nd Seaforth Highlanders, a unit made up nearly entirely of Asian-Canadian servicemen, who fought viciously and in the process ended early American concerns that Asian Canadians would not be entirely loyal to Canada. (Indeed, after the war former Japanese intelligence officers would make it clear that they found recruiting agents from Canadian Nisei and Sansei populations all but impossible and from first-generation immigrants little easier, stating categorically "they were loyal to America and Canada".) Indeed, in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans, more than a few headed for Canada, taking advantage of a provision that those Asian Americans willing to join the Canadian Army would them and their families be allowed into Canada. The men of the 2nd Seaforth Highlanders would earn a Victoria Cross and numerous other bravery awards in the Aleutians, and gave a stiff message to the Japanese - we are here and we don't like you any more than the Americans.

In North Africa, the success of Operation Crusader against the Italians led to the deployment of Erwin Rommel's famed Afrikakorps, but Rommel's best efforts were unable to sever the Suez Canal (Rommel's strategic objective) and led to the British-led Commonwealth forces (including Australian, New Zealander, South African and Rhodesian units) fighting back against the Afrikakorps, a problem for the Germans made worse once American reinforcements came to the scene. The Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 made sure that the German position was untenable, and the Free French forces in Algeria ended up pincering the Germans and Italians, as well as wounding Rommel himself. The Axis Powers retreated from Africa in April 1943, which almost immediately resulted in plans to invade Italy itself and go after what Churchill called "The soft underbelly of Europe".

Before that, however, the Canadians got into the act again, once again supported by the Free French in the Dieppe Raid. Despite the relatively close proximity between Britain and occupied France, the original plan of using the raid to draw out the Luftwaffe into a fighter battle against the RAF was seen as idiocy by the Canadians, and they insisted on taking the initiative. The Free French forces, led by Darlan and De Gaulle, were soon in on it, and the decision to raid Dieppe saw the Canadians and Free French get the initiative, and despite the reservations of the Royal Navy, Free French battleships Strasbourg and Lorraine and Canadian heavy cruisers Ontario and Quebec and light cruisers Montreal and Toronto were assigned to support the operation. This proved a crucial advantage, as the big guns shelled Dieppe to pieces before the troops arrived, shelling which drew the Luftwaffe out - just as the RAF and RCAF wanted - and Canadian units didn't land in Dieppe until both the ships had shelled everything they could, and after the RAF and RCAF engaged the Luftwaffe units that answered the Raid, a complete group of RCAF Avro Lancaster bombers flattened pretty much everything else that the battleships and cruisers hadn't hit. Dieppe was still a costly operation, but it sent a message to Canada that they were gonna get into the action in Europe. The arrival of Canadian Lancasters and B-24 Liberators also put the RCAF into the RAF's plans for bombing occupied France and Germany. Indeed, the Royal Canadian Air Force would by the end of the war be the fourth-largest air force in the world (behind the USAF, Soviet Air Force and RAF) and would inflict huge damage on Germany from 1942 onwards using their bombers, though losses in the process were substantial. Dieppe was only held for less than twelve hours, but the Raid was despite this considered successful, though it also taught many lessons to the Allies, particularly Canada.

After the losses of Bismarck and Tirpitz all but eliminated Germany's surface fleet threat and after the Americans awful losses at Pearl Harbor, HMCS Canada was dispatched to the Pacific, and recognizing that the Americans in the Pacific could use a boost, the Canada made a fairly short stop in Seattle before heading to San Francisco to met up with USS North Carolina, and the two battleships and their units sailed to Pearl Harbor together, where HMCS Canada was the first foreign vessel to render honours to the lost USS Arizona and was very much appreciated by the Americans, with the sailors there saying Canada's arrival was "The greatest support another land could possibly give us." Canada and cruiser Vancouver - whose crew was majority made up of Native and Asian Canadians who nonetheless developed an excellent rapport with the Americans - sailed with North Carolina and aircraft carriers Enterprise, Wasp and Hornet, joining Australian heavy cruiser Canberra - which HMCS Canada rescued from the Japanese when her crew refused to give her up during the Battle of Savo Island - as the Commonwealth support for the Americans in the Pacific. (Once repairs were completed, HMS Prince of Wales and the survivors of the ABDA force, namely HMS York, HMS Exeter, HMAS Perth and USS Houston, also joined this fleet.)

Canada took a torpedo hit from I-19 (as did North Carolina and Hornet) but while damage was extensive, it was not enough to put the ship out of the fight, a similar situation to the North Carolina. With the support in the Pacific and with the Canadians planning to be an integral part of the operations against Sicily (and with the Americans' damaged battleships coming back into the fleet), HMCS Canada along with Vancouver headed back to the Atlantic, with Rear Admiral Willis Lee, the Americans' senior battleship commander in the Pacific, commenting in his memoirs "I was sad to see the Canada head back to the Atlantic. We never had any issues with her....she taught a lot of our battleship gunners about how to do their jobs. She was capable, agile and strong, a true fighting ship and worthy of any man's command and any man's respect."

Ottawa, which had had an election in the spring of 1942 which had overwhelmingly supported massive action against the Axis Powers on all sides, had been pushing for over a year for a major operation of their own, and while the Canadians had done well at Dieppe, Mackenzie King and Crerar proposed the First Canadian Army be the point force for the invasion of Sicily, allowing British units to recuperate some. This was supported by the Americans, in large part because General Eisenhower and his Canadian counterpart, General Andrew McNaughton, had become intimately aware of what both sides were capable of, and McNaughton correctly felt he could provide tons of naval fire support. The entire Canadian heavy gun fleet - battlecruiser Canada, heavy cruisers Ontario and Quebec and light cruisers Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and the newly-commissioned Seattle - was assembled at Halifax with the goal of supporting the invasion of Sicily, allowing McNaughton to fulfill his promises to Eisenhower. The result was that when Operation Husky began on July 9, 1943, it did so with the Americans and Canadians co-operating and with the Canadians not under British overall command. Operation Husky would up achieving the goals assigned to it, and it showed what the Canadian light cruisers could do in vivid fashion, as the German Hermann Goring Panzer Division and several Italian tank units were engaged by HMCS Vancouver and HMCS Seattle, both of the eighteen-gun light cruisers spitting fire at such a rate that Allied aircraft initially assumed she had been hit by shore batteries but really devastating both divisions. USS Boise was also sent there to support the landings, but Boise's commandering officer made a point of radioing to his superiors "The Canadians already blew those Panzers to hell." While the Germans and Italians were able to evacuate sizable numbers of troops, equipment and supplies from Sicily to Calabria, the result was still the Allies gaining firm control of Sicily, and the huge First Canadian Army had done their job beautifully. The operation also led to Mussolini's arrest and the capitulation of Italy to the Allies, and gave increasing confidence that the Allies would indeed be victorious, particularly as the Nazis and the Red Army fought viciously on the Eastern Front - but in one of his greatest miscalculations, Hitler cancelled the operations at Kursk to rush men back to contain Italy after its switching sides, and initial neutrality didn't last long after the Germans attacked Italian units, causing a civil war, and the Italian Navy asked to join the Allies after their attempt to move to Malta for internment resulted in them being attacked by the Luftwaffe, sinking battleship Roma in the process.

Italy's being occupied by the Germans caused more than a few to change sides, and after refits, Free Italian units were soon involved in the war. Battleships Vittorio Veneto and Italia were soon covering Allied units during their fight up through Italy in the fall of 1943, with the Free Italian battleships being instrumental in the Americans' success in the amphibious landing at Anzio, assisting the Americans' ability to hold off the Axis counterattacks on their positions and allowing the Americans to use the Anzio perimeter to make mayhem behind the Gustav Line, a move which resulted in the fall of the Gustav Line as the Germans count themselves having to both defend the line against Canadian, British and American units as well as the Anzio perimeter, while all the while Canadian and American air strikes and naval gunfire support made their lives hard. Backed up by the Americans' actions and British support, the First Canadian Army punched through the Gustav Line on the Adriatic Side in February 1944, forcing the Germans to retreat, but as they did that the perimeter at Anzio fell as well, resulting in nearly the entirety of the German Tenth Army being encircled by the Allied Forces. Canadian, American and Free Italian units entered Rome on June 4, 1944, and through 1944 the First Canadian Army largely took over responsibility for the Italian Front as British and American units (as well as more than a few Canadian units) were redeployed for the invasion of Normandy. Joining the Italian fight was, however, a motley collection of reinforcements - Australian, New Zealander, South African, Free French and Free Italian reinforcements were also joined by those from India, Brazil and Mexico, and they had no difficulty supporting the uniits already on the scene. Despite multiple attmpts by the Germans to punch holes in what they thought were weak units, the Latin American and Indian units proved to be anything but weak, and units like the American 442nd Regimental Combat Team (nearly all made up of West Coast Asian Americans) and the Canadian First Rocky Mountain Regiment (over half of whose members were Plains Native Canadians and whose commanding officer was a descendant of one of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1885) combined with the Latin Americans and Indians to make Hitler's racial theories look pretty stupid.

With the home front all but unassailable, the Second Canadian Army was sent to Britain in November 1943, and as the Army included almost all of the units who had covered themselves in glory in World War I, Hitler soon took a real hard look at them. The Canadians, ably assisted by Canadian Security and Intelligence Service officers, began to use this repute to their advantage, creating phantom plans of attacks everywhere from the Netherlands to the Balkans. The Free French helped this, taking advantage of Allied naval and air superiority to make mayhem in several different places along the French coast, from bombing German positions across the Channel to having the French battleships and heavy cruisers shell the German base at St. Nazaire on May 16-17, 1944. The repeated attacks on France's Western Coast, in particular the ports of Brest and St. Nazaire, forced Hitler's commanders to move units away from the Channel, their thinking being that the closeness of Britain to invasion zones would make logistics difficult if the Luftwaffe's bombers could attack the supply bases in the south of England. With Allied naval superiority, they thought, attacking from sea would be easier to create secure supply lines.

Of course, this is exactly what the Allies wanted Hitler to think.

Operation Overlord kicked off on June 6, 1944, after months of preparations and with the Second Canadian Army having responsibility for Omaha Beach. German resistance was vicious, but yet again, the Canadians could call upon help - their landing craft and assault vehicles had been equipped with artillery and anti-tank weapons, and the introduction of the Carl Gustav 84mm reciolless rifle to the Canadians was a huge help when dealing with Panzers. In addition to that, HMCS Canada was in the channel along with British battleships Nelson and Rodney and American battleships New York and Texas, providing accurate battleship fire support, which the Germans attempted to answer with field artillery. The Germans even resorted to firing V-2s at the landing force. The Allies didn't quite reach their objectives, but they were successful in punching through the Atlantic Wall, and Operation Dragoon's launch on June 27 helped matters, as it forces the Germans to send forces to southern France to stop the invasion there. (They weren't successful at that, either.) The foothold held, however, and gradually grew, resulting in the taking of the port of Cherbourg on June 26 and, after a long battle, Caen on July 19. A counterattack by the German Seventh Army ended up beign encircled in the Falaise pocket, resulting in massive German losses and their retreat across the Seine River, with Paris liberated on August 16 and the Germans abandoning positions beyond the Seine on August 28. The Allies now had a foothold in Europe.

The now three-front war was nothing short of disastrous from the Nazis. Already losing ground to the Red Army in the East, Hitler's generals couldn't hope to hang on with a war coming in from the West as well. The units that had invaded France from the south rapidly moved up the Rhone Valley, only encountering difficult resistance when they ran into German forces in the fortified Vosges Mountains. The British 11th Armored Division took Antwerp on September 4, but with the troops holed up in the Scheldt Estuary, they couldn't use Antwerp for supply purposes. Enter the Second Canadian Army and elements of the First Canadian Army, who were assisted by a handful of other nations' units in the Battle of the Scheldt. The Breskens pocket and Walcheren Island were held in force by the Nazis, but yet again HMCS Canada ably backed up their brothers on land and made life a bitch for the Nazis, particualrly on the island, while Canadian attack aircraft first handled air defense units and field artillery, allowing Lancaster and Liberator bombers to make life even harder for them, and that was before Canada's artillery units, led by the famed Royal Newfoundland Artillery, made sure German field guns couldn't do their jobs well at all. The Estuary was cleared by early November, and with German resistance fading and Canadian naval gunfire support proving a key advantage, the Canadians set about liberating the Netherlands. This did, however, get a lot easier with Operation Market Garden - the First Canadian Army's fast-moving units were sent to support this, figuring the Germans would respond, effectively committing the First Canadian Army to make Market Garden a success - and thanks to rapid responses from the Army along with British reinforcements, a varitable flood of Ram III, Churchill and Sherman tanks roared through the cities of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, sweeping German units there out of the way and relieving the Allied First Airborne units that undertook the first part of the operation. The Germans reacted fast, though, forcing a bitter battle between the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions against four crack Canadian Army armored regiments, the Canadians able to hold their ground. Supply from Antwerp helped with this, and the Canadians soon had plenty of reinforcements. Within weeks, however, the Battle of the Bulge forced everyone involved to hold off on offensive operations to hold back the massive German counterattack. The attack was indeed driven off, but at a ghastly cost to the Americans.

The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler's last hope at going on the offensive, and it showed. 1945 was spent for the Allies shredding the Third Reich, with the Canadians primarily handling the job of clearing out the Netherlands. Facing huge numbers of starving people during the "Hungry Winter", the Canadians made a point of both delivering food to civilians and also giving up many of their own rations and blankets to Dutch civilians. Even as the war waged on, food air drops were made to places across the Netherlands, with the Germans agreeing not to shoot at transport planes doing this. By the time the First Canadian Army completed the liberation of the Netherlands in March 1945, thousands had been claimed by starvation but many, many more had been saved by the efforts of the Allies, and when the Netherlands fell, the Canadians treated their prisoners by division - those who had helped the food supply were treated much more gently than others who hadn't done so.

With the war all but over on the Western Front in naval terms, the big guns of the Royal Canadian Navy were all dispatched to the Pacific in January 1945, traveling through the Panama Canal and having a break in Vancouver in early February before sailing out on February 21, joining the planned battle for Okinawa. The new force, named Task Force 54.1 by the Americans before it arrived at Okinawa, was immense - the Royal Canadian Navy's battlecruiser Canada, heavy cruisers Ontario and Quebec, light cruisers Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa and Seattle, light carriers Warrior, Vampire and Triumph and seaplane carriers Terra Nova, British Columbia, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were joined by British battleship Prince of Wales and French battleship Jean Bart and heavy cruisers Colbert and Suffren - and capable, with all of the ships involved having seen more than a little bit of service. Joining the British Pacific Fleet for Okinawa, the Americans initially assigned the BPF the job of neutralizing the Sakishima Islands, but with the discovery of Yamato departing in an attempt to defend Okinawa, the gun ships were sent to assist Admiral Morton Deyo, resulting in a fleet of twelve battleships and battlecruisers - Canada, Prince of Wales and Jean Bart joining American battleships Massachusetts, Indiana, New Jersey, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Missouri and battlecruisers Alaska and Guam, along with HMAS Australia - and knowing of a near-total lack of air support and the fleet's effective anti-aircraft gunnery, the American admirals focused their air attacks on Okinawa to support the troops there, leaving Yamato and her small number of escorts to face down the Allied gun fleet. Outnumbered eleven to one - and that was just the big guns, and Allied cruisers were willing to fight alongside the big guns despite the threat of Yamato's 460mm guns - on the morning on August 9, Yamato and her escorts were discovered by the fleet. Nobody is sure who shot first - differing reports said Missouri, Canada and Prince of Wales all shot first - but Yamato ran headlong into a huge fleet. Yamato's huge guns fired on the battleships, only hitting Jean Bart and Indiana - and those hits, while damaging, weren't even close to fatal - while Yamato got absolutely hammered by battleships, while heavy cruisers Baltimore, Ontario and Colbert finished off light cruiser Yahagi (after one of British Columbia's seaplanes put a torpedo into Yahagi's engine room, leaving her dead in the water) and the shells falling like raindrops made sure the destroyers didn't get off any easier. In a particularly ironic measure, Yamato was finished by a massive magazine detonation of her forward magazines, most likely caused by New Jersey, Wisconsin, Missouri, Australia or Canada as they used speed and maneuverability to loop around the by-then stricken Yamato. Operation Ten-Go finished, the fleet headed back up to support the troops on Okinawa, who the Allies were finding out weren't gonna budge unless blown off, and facing the biggest possible fear - kamikaze attacks.

Kamikazes resulted in the British Pacific Fleet being sent closer in, as the armored flight decks of British carriers and the tougher armor of some BPF vessels made them less vulnerable to kamikaze damage, a fact proven both right and wrong by carriers Victorious and Illustrious which both took awful kamikaze damage. Indeed, the suicide pilots of the Japanese resulted in the largest Canadian warship loss of the war, as three kamikaze hits in short order ultimately doomed heavy cruiser Ontario, which sank west of Okinawa on April 19, 1945. Canada also suffered, as her commanding officer, Captain Mark Redlen, was killed by a kamikaze hit on April 24. Despite the losses - and nearly all of the big gun ships did take damage from kamikazes - they never left the battle lines, and the Marines on Okinawa were more than a little grateful for the help. The awful battle for Okinawa - the number of dead from the battle topped 200,000 in both sides' fighters and civilians and left the island nearly barren - convinced the Allies that the atomic bombs, by then nearly complete, had to be used. The gun fleet would after Okinawa be sent out for shellings of the Japanese mainland - Canada, Australia, King George V and Prince of Wales fired the last shots ever taken in anger by Commonwealth battleships in shelling Hamamatsu on August 10, 1945 - but the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9 broke Japan's will to fight, and they surrendered on August 15.

The sailing of the fleets into Sagami Bay on August 26 and then Tokyo Bay on September 1 was indeed a sign that the war was over, and it said much that the commander of the BPF, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Bruce Fraser, who accepted Japan's surrender on behalf of the British, chose to do so from the deck of HMCS Canada rather than one of his own ships, with the documents of surrender here also signed by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Leonard Warren Murray of the Royal Canadian Navy, Percy Nelles and Leonard Murray having been made five-star Admirals for their efforts during the war. V-J Day in Canada wound up being one of the great days in Canadian history, and indeed the British Pacific Fleet chose to sail as one unit, first to escort troops to take back Hong Kong and Singapore, then to Sydney and then eventually to Vancouver, where they arrived on November 3, 1945, to the greetings of Prime Minister King and British Columbia Premier John Hart.

World War II was over, and Canada had come through it, though far from unscarred. 62,800 Canadians died in the war, with over 100,000 wounded or injuried during it, and the country's cost running to very nearly $40 Billion. Despite the massive costs, it had however resulted in vast changes in the country itself. The lack of a need for conscription proved beneficial to Canada's unity, avoiding many of the awful divisions of the First World War. Even more than previous World Wars had, Canada's total disregard for ethnic background, race or skin colour in their recruiting and assignment of men proved beneficial in countless ways, and Canada's own armed forces were only too happy to play up the fact that many units of the Canadian Army with an incredible reputation - the mostly Asian-Canadian Seaforth Highlanders, the French-speaking 22nd Regiment of Canada, the almost entirely Native Canadian raised Six Nations Warriors Regiments, the mostly Jewish 1st Royal Toronto Armored Regiment - were made up of visible minorities. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were often as not assigned security duties in cleared areas, doing this to great effect in Italy, northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Canada's industrial infrastructure was completely rebuilt as a result of the War, and expanded dramatically beyond its 1920s highs. Industrial production requirements created the genesis of Canada's own major aerospace and vehicle making industries which would see much use after the war, while the shipyards built for the war in many cases would find civilian uses once the war finished.

OOC: Thoughts?

TheMann · Oct 14, 2016

Part 9 - The Post-War World

Victory in Japan on September 2, 1945 brought to an end to the deadliest war in human history, a war that had brought with it changes of sorts never imagined even a few years earlier. The 55 million casualties of the war made sure of that, and the nearly 63,000 Canadians who lost their lives in the war made sure that Canada was going to have a place in the post-war world. Beyond the loss of life and the vast financial cost to the nations of the world, fascism was utterly discredited as a governing ideology, making clear that the intense disdain for it from much of the British Commonwealth nations was more than justified - and in Canada's particular case, the discovery of the epic horrors of the Holocaust made sure that anti-Semitism in Europe all but evaporated and those who had fought against the depths of Nazi hatred on the subject were vindicated in ways that before had never been imagined. It was not an exaggeration to say that Canada, which had been vocal about supporting Jews run out of Europe with the Men of Honour, was able to shovel crow into the faces of those who continued a belief in disdain for Jews. Indeed, this caused something of a diplomatic incident for Canada in spring 1946 when John Lightfield and Cordell Hull ran across each other at a reception in Washington. Hull spoke of being wrong about fascism's threat to the world, but his lack of pointing out America's anti-semitic policies led Lightfield to comment "It's unfortunate that it took six million people murdered for anti-Semites like you to figure out what Hitler meant when he spoke of a 'final solution'. One cannot revive the dead." Hull's objections to this statement were answered by Lightfield by him saying "Go see how lush the grass is around Auschwitz, know that its people guilty of nothing you are walking on, and hang your head in shame, never to speak of your objections again." When pressed about this by Prime Minister King, Lightfield angrily snarled "If the Men of Honour hadn't been there, Sir, how many people alive and contributing to Canada today would be among the ashes at Auschwitz? Hull is one of many men who should be willing to grovel at the feet of those whose lives they so destroyed, at the feet of those who now only know of loved ones in memories." Indeed, Canada's kindness towards Jews did not end with the Holocaust - Canada admitted over 100,000 Holocaust survivors between 1945 and 1948, and was one of the first states to recognize the State of Israel at its formation in May 1948.

The post-war rehabilitation of Germany saw the country divided into zones of control by the United States, Soviet Union, United Kingdom and the fourth zone run jointly by France and Canada, an agreement that the French had little difficulty with owing to their desire to spend more of their efforts rehabilitating their own country. Canada and France, however, had little interest in the industrial reduction policies that were pushed by the Americans and British (beyond France's desire to control the Saar Protectorate), and by the time the dismantlement of German industry was halted in 1947 the French-Canadian occupation zone had by and large been spared the worst effects of it. The ultimate partition of Germany, however, was a result of the divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, and Canada was one of the first of the powers to call for Germany to be rebuilt as a bulwark against the growing threat of Red Army aggression. By the mid-1950s, however, Germany was back to prosperity, and the 1960s would see the demolition of both the old 'deep state' that reached back to pre-Nazi times and the growing acceptance of Germany's sordid past among ordinary Germans. The fact that many of the lower-level Nazi Party members were able to retain political influence in post-war Germany would lead to more than a few political earthquakes during the 1960s.

For Britain, victory had been achieved, but it had been at murderous cost. The end of the war saw Britain victorious but financially crippled, utterly reliant on the Commonwealth and America to keep it financially afloat and facing loud demands for vast public services, a fact that was laid bare by the unwillingness of ordinary Brits to accept the poverty of pre-war times. The creation of the NHS in Britain in 1946 was one sign of what was to come, but Britain practically had to beg to have its former colonies retain its financial reserves in British pounds. This ended up being something of a sore with some of the colonial nations (particularly South Africa and India, the latter of which became independent from Britain in 1947) but in several others the reserves held by the other nations were used as leverage, with Canadian and Australian interests riding right next to the Americans in buying into Britain's hard-hit industrial sectors. The cost of rebuilding Europe was immense, to which the American Marshall Plan was a major help (and which Ottawa and Canberra were only too happy to support, as energy, raw materials and equipment from these nations contributed in not small amounts to Europe's rebuilding) along with the desires of those who had lived through the Depression and the War to not suffer any longer. Europe would be rebuilt through the second half of the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s, but Europe's ability to control the world had been forever changed.

One of these vast changes was Canada's relationship with France. The relationship had always been cordial, but the French never forgot whose support had allowed a large portion of the French armed forces to fight on after France fell. The Free French Navy's basing out of Canada and Canadian training of armed forces personnel and support of the Free French armies dramatically shifted the relation between Paris and Ottawa, and so Canada's desires for the post-war world were in more than a few cases supported by France. It was a similar story with the Netherlands - having almost single-handedly liberated the Netherlands from the Nazis and with the Canadians' generosity during the famines towards the end of the war, the Netherlands was only too happy to be a close ally of Canada. France's first action was to cede St. Pierre and Miquelon to Canada, which was agreed upon by Ottawa and Paris in November 1945, though the French Navy requested that the islands' residents be allowed to retain dual citizenship and that French Navy units be able to use it as a base, both conditions that Canada had few objections to. Having taken refuge in Canada - and having Princess Margriet of the Netherlands born in Canada but able to hold her position because of the Canadian Parliament allowing the maternity ward of Ottawa Central Hospital as temporarily extraterritorial to allow Margriet to be a Dutch-born citizen - the Dutch Royal Family was only too happy to publicly say that while they could do little to repay Canada with their country in ruins, they publicly said that if there was a way for the Netherlands to give back to Canada, it would be done. (This would be proven true plenty of times in the years to come.) The poverty and hardship of Europe of the 1940s and early 1950s also contributed to immigration to many nations - Canada was the top choice for emigrants from France, Germany, Belgium and the netherlands between 1946 and 1952, and one of the top choice for those from the British Isles and southern Europe.

At the formation of the United Nations in 1945, France and the Netherlands (among others) publicly called for Canada to be a permanent member of the United Nations' Security Council, its governing body, and the vehemence in this position, when combined with Canada's sacrifices in the war, made sure both London and Washington weren't difficult to sway. When the United Nations began operations on October 24, 1945, it did so with Canada as one of the six permanent Security Council members, widely seen as being a mediating party between members. This position also resulted in a proposal to have Navy Island in New York State, territory which bordered Canada across the Niagara River, be the headquarters of the United Nations - and with a collection of Canadian industrialists offering to foot the bill for the development of the site, it as agreed to by the UN in January 1946. The site's construction went sufficiently rapidly that the United Nations held their first meetings at Navy Island - now named Peace Island - in March 1950, though the last buildings at the site were not completed until 1952.

For Canada, the post-war world was one of prosperity. The Liberal-Progressive Alliance would remain in power after their 1938 election victory until John Diefenbaker's Conservatives booted them from power in 1959, but the Alliance resulted in Ottawa after the war introducing a great many expansions of social welfare programs, giving birth to the genesis of Canada's modern welfare state. Old-age and Veterans' pensions, hospital insurance, low-cost or free child care services, tax concessions and baby bonuses were enacted to encourage women to leave the workforce to make way for returning veterans - this was largely successful in ensuring jobs for returning veterans, and it also contributed to a monster baby boom which swelled Canada's population rapidly in the post-war era. The development of the oil of Alberta during the war discovered that the Wildrose Province could supply energy to the nation, and after the war the huge hydroelectric projects of Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland ensured a massive supply of cheap electric power, a power that was added to as Canada embraced nuclear energy in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing nuclear power plant development on the Maritimes and the Prairie Provinces. The explosion in Canada's population - the country's population more than doubled between 1945 and 1970, rising from 26.5 million people in 1945 to 39.1 million in 1955 and 54.6 million in 1970 - leaned on the country's infrastructure and many elements of its commitments to social justice and high standards of living, but it never broke the line, and the post-war era soon proved a boon for a great many people, both newcomers and new generations. Welfare capitalism was now engrained in Canada's psyche, and its advancements were pushed far in the post-war world. As Canada moved closer to the United States - a necessity considering the geopolitical realities of the time - both countries pushed hard for economic growth and civic improvements. Having been through the Depression and then World War II, Canada's infrastructure needed work, even in many cases the infrastructure built during the Depression as economic stimulus measures. This was first and most heavily seen in major cities - the Queen Street Subway in Toronto began operations in 1947, with the Montreal Metro's first two lines following the next year and the Vancouver Metro in 1949. Even as car ownership exploded after the war, it was recognized in Canada early on that the central regions of major cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Seattle and Halifax simply could not handle being rebuilt for the car, setting off massive rivalries about the relationship between the car and the city which culminated in Montreal and Toronto's freeway battles in the late 1950s. Broadcasting was one of the most changed worlds of the post-war era - as radios became all but universal, television burst onto the scene, with commercial TV broadcasts beginning in Canada in 1948 by the CBC and upstart rival CTV the following year. Technological progress in Canada's broadcasting fields would be a post-war hallmark, with the efforts of men like Alan Turing, Kalman Tihanyi and Johann Hendriks (all three of whom were immigrants to Canada in the immediate post-war era) and the soon-to-be-famous North American Broadcasting Laboratories in Kingston, Ontario, making Canada a center of many high-tech industries, forming the first elements of the tech industries that would come to be a major source of prosperity for eastern Ontario and southern Quebec in the future. New homes were built with provisions for appliances, as refridgrators, home freezers, washing machines and tumble dryers, televisions, electric stoves, microwave ovens (rare in the post-war period, though much more common starting in the 1960s) and dishwashers began appearing in Canadian homes. Canada's roads, railways and power grids began the process of modernization, and the first of the 'fast ships' that connected Newfoundland with Canada, MV Caribou, entered the service of CNR in 1949, and CNR finished the long rebuilding of the Newfoundland Railway into standard gauge and building of the Trans-Newfoundland Highway in 1950, dramatically improving the economic conditions at the center of the Island and helping to shift a sizable portion of Newfoundland's relationship with Canada in the 1950s.

While World War II had ended with the Soviet Union and America as allies, it was not long before that alliance soured, and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 was meant to counteract both the Berlin Blockade and the growing concern of what the West called Communist subversion. This was never much of an issue in Canada - Communism had next to no support in Canada, and the combination of prosperity and growing social welfare programs made it less popular still - but the Berlin Airlift following the Soviet's blockade of Berlin in 1948 made sure Stalin was not a popular man with Ottawa or many Canadians. Indeed, Thomas Crerar before his 1952 retirement loudly called upon the Progressive Party to unequivoacly denounce Communism in all of its forms. The RCAF did indeed draw down during the post-war era - every nation did, it was just a matter of how much - but the RCAF was still more than capable of assisting with the Berlin Airlift, and RCAF collection of Dakota, Commando, Conestoga, Skytrain, Constellation, Lancastrian and Sunderland transport aircraft were pressed into service as part of the airlift, helping to deliver the 2.54 million tons of cargo that the Airlift delivered between June 24, 1948 and May 12, 1949. The deterioration of relations between East and West and subsequent realization that any naval war fought by the West would be focused on keeping shipping lanes between America and Europe open resulted in the ASW mastery that the Royal Canadian Navy developed during the war being kept alive. This mission would be the focus of the RCN from the post-war period until the 1960s, resulting in the retirement of its big gun fleet and its worn-out seaplane carriers, with HMCS Canada being decommissioned in Halifax on March 26, 1948 as a result. The Canadian big guns, however, weren't going to treated ingloriously - Canada was made a museum ship in Halifax, and heavy cruiser Quebec was presented to its namesake province in April 1950, with the ever-considerate-of-image Quebec government proudly proclaiming the new museum ship as the flagship of the Quebec Navy, though with both the Fleur de Lis and the Canadian naval ensign flown from it at its berth in Quebec City.

World War II and the Men of Honour had driven the final nails into the coffin of racial supremacy in Canada. Native Canadians, now politically powerful in some areas and economically prosperous in many, were among those who advocated for the policies of multiculturalism, arguing that Canada was made up of many different cultures that all shared common goals, values and beliefs, and that Canadian society should accept and respect these beliefs. The many racially-integrated units of the Canadian armed forces during the war had driven this point home as though with a sledgehammer, and the willingness to express one's identity had long been present among the Asians of the West Coast, French speakers in Quebec, the Maritimes and Northern and Eastern Ontario and Native Canadians pretty much everywhere, and the Canadian Government sought to push this further in political acts post-war, including mandating education in both of Canada's two official languages every year until the end of high school, and most provincially-overseen systems of higher education made the learning of other languages a condition for most business and arts programs as well as some scientific ones. Native communities had had the right to instruction in their tribal tongues since the Treaty of Orillia, and many did teach their children in these tongues, contributing to a revival of several of the languages in the second half of the 20th Century along with many other elements of their culture, even as Native Canadians, once ostracized to the edges of Canadian society, were very much a part of it in the post-war era. With all provinces mandating education to the end of Grade 12 by 1952, many provinces massively expanding their systems of higher education between the war and the 1970s and retraining programs for those of lower education becoming eligible for their participants being financially supported starting in 1955, Canada would by the 1970s be one of the most highly-educated societies in the world, which would contribute much to the nation's future prosperity. Canada's health care system also ended up expanding rapidly in the post-war era, and Canada scored its second world-shifting medical drug discovery in 1950, as Canadian doctors Michel Resneault, Alexandre Mynaus and William Kennedy confirmed the findings of American doctors David Lester and Leon Greenberg that paracetamol did indeed not cause methemoglobinemia, which led two firms who had worked with the Doctors Resneault, Mynaus and Kennedy to begin marketing paracetamol as an over-the-counter pain medication known as acetaminophen, under the name Tylenol, in 1953. Ever-greater improvements in infrastructure all-but-eliminated many diseases of the past, and major growth in the usage of antibiotics in the post-war era would also have a major effect on the country's collective health.

By the end of the 1940s, while austerity was easing in Europe, Canada's prosperity was enormous and it showed in the country's tastes. The men who returned from war settled into new jobs displacing most (though not all) of the women who did them during wartime, and every newcomer who came to the country could rapidly find his or her place. Other than European refugees, the single largest immigrant group into Canada was those from the Indian subcontinent, particularly after the patrition of India during its independence wars in 1947 and the subsequent substantial humanitarian crises that resulted.

TheMann · Oct 25, 2016

Part 10 - Korea and The Cold War

While the Post-War World was one of rebuilding for much of the world, it was clear by the Berlin Airlift and the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 that battle lines were being drawn, and the first test of a Soviet nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949, made it absolutely abundantly clear that while the threat of fascism had been eradicated by World War II, communism was rising in its place, even as the monstrous Red Army soldified its hold on Eastern Europe in Moscow's favor. The development in the 1950s of nuclear-capable bombers by both the Soviet Union and the United States (and by Britain as well) and by the 1950s the development of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear payloads caused the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" to enter into the lexicon on people of the world, causing untold fears of what many by the early 1960s felt was inevitable, that being a clash between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. The extent of how big the problem was began to be seen in Korea in June 1950.

Korea had been divided between the Soviet Union and the United States after the latter's declaration of war against Japan in August 1945, which had allowed Stalin's Red Army to easily take over Korea as far as the 38th Parallel, which had been the point where the USSR and US had agreed to form a barrier line. After multiple rounds of political chaos descended on Korea during the occupation period and with the divisions of the Cold War brewing, Stalin and Mao supported Kim Il-sung's invasion of South Korea, which was almost immediately answered by the Americans, but not before the much-better-equipped North Korea Army made a mess of the South Koreans, shoving them back to the Pusan Perimeter. However, once the American units in Japan and the Western United States (along with many others, including elements of the 4th Canadian Infantry Division) got into the fight, it led to the amphibious assault by the Americans at Incheon, which effectively encircled the North Koreans and cut off their supply routes, effectively forcing the North Koreans to retreat. They did so but not well, with many simply choosing to hide in the mountains to fight a guerilla war. American commander General Douglas MacArthur quickly decided to force the issue and go north beyond the 38th Parallel. This occured at the same time as the United States Navy's Seventh Fleet was sent to the Taiwan Strait, aiming (successfully) to stop a Communist invasion of the island of Taiwan, a position that was by now being loudly supported by the Americans. After the United Nations forces crossed the 38th Parallel on October 1, 1950, loud calls began to go out from the KPA and indeed Stalin to support the Koreans, even as Stalin made it clear the Red Army was not going to get into the fight themselves, Stalin fearing a war with the West. The UN forces, however, had run into a situation of their own - MacArthur, who was anti-communist to the point of almost madness, had made it clear to the other nations that he intended to punish China "if they dared to get involved in our fight". Most of the Western Allies felt this was insanity - British Lieutenant General Richard Gale privately thought "MacArthur has lost his mind" - and several of the nations involved in the UN Operations felt that China's involvement was inevitable. In an attempt to head this off, Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union Mark Jansen attempt to get messages through to Mao that the UN forces would not cross the Yalu unless the Chinese did so first. (If Mao ever got that message, it was ignored.) Canadian, British and South African reconnaissance aircraft detected signs of Chinese units in Korea on October 22 - which MacArthur initially didn't believe, but the British Commonwealth and Korean forces did - and their assault on the positions of the ROK II Corps decimated them, forcing the Chinese to assault American and British positions at Unsan. Held off only by the presence of British heavy armor, the Chinese soon committed everything they had in their Second Phase Offensive.

The Chinese attack had been expected by many, but the size and scale of it, and the discipline of the Chinese Army and their hiding tactics, was impressive and made for huge problems. The Commonwealth in Korea Commands found themselves in a similar situation to the American Eighth Army, forced to withdraw from the Yalu River and eventually all of North Korea as the massive Chinese Army drove south, but by the winter of 1951 the Chinese had found themselves in the same problem the Noth Koreans had a year earlier, slowed down by inadequate supply lines. After withdrawing to positions north of the 38th Parallel, the UN Command quickly regrouped. MacArthur ultimately did himself in when he claimed to diplomats from several European countries that he would yet turn Korea into a showdown between Communism and the West, infuriating President Truman, and MacArthur also got himself into trouble with his troops by rarely surveying the situation himself, whereas his lieutenant in Korea, General Matthew Ridgway, rarely left Korea and in many cases faced many of the same dangers his troops did. It was the same story with the Commonwealth Commands, as their leaders, British General Richard Gale and Canadian General Guy Simonds, also rarely left Korea - indeed, Simonds would be wounded in battle at Kapyong - and the officers on all sides closest to their units made a point of trying to lead from close positions, both for tactical purposes and to show their men that they were not afraid to face the enemy. By Spring 1951, Soviet supplies were pouring into the Chinese hands and MiG-17s were battling in the skies, but in April the Chinese tried their Third Phase Offensive against the UN line. This turned out badly for them - despite huge attacks (the Canadian, Australian and West Indian units at Kapyong were outnumbered over twenty to one, and yet they still held their positions) and massive artillery fire, the line held, and the Chinese took sufficient casualties in the process that their units were depleted, and with air campaigns causing huge logistical difficulties for the Chinese, in May the UN troops were moving again, with the II Commonwealth Corps - led by British 11th Armored Division and the Canadian 3rd Armored Division (which included the famed Fort Garry Horse and Sherbrooke Hussars) and their Ram III, Centurion, Churchill R-VII and Sentinel medium and heavy tanks leading the way. Heavy armor supporting big - and fast - infantry movements made sure the Chinese, despite the presence of KV-1 and T-34 tanks in numbers, ultimately had to back down, giving ground thanks more than anything to logistical difficulties.

The West scored a spectacular blow to the Communists on June 25, when an operation of the British, Canadian and Australian SAS units ripped off a shocker - dropping from aircraft behind enemy lines, they co-ordinated and attacked the HQ of the Communist forces south of Sariwon in advance of the armored movements, killing both Kim Il-Sung and Peng Dehuai and driving a huge blow into the Chinese attackers. That situation got worse the next day as the attackers raced to get out, masking it to the lines of the American 8th Army along the Western Coast of Korea, helped by huge gunfire support courtesy of American battleships Wisconsin and Missouri and a number of cruisers. The daring raid would be the first of many such operations, aimed at killing commanders. They didn't always work out, but it made already difficult command and control issues for the Chinese worse. By August, the 8th Army had taken back Pyongyang and the II Commonwealth Corps had taken back Wonsan, the latter's major port captured thankfully mostly intact thanks to fast movements by the Sherbrooke Hussars and the 22nd Regiment of Canada, the famed VanDoos. The keeping of Wonsan - which was kept despite Chinese attempts to take it back - allowed supplies to go there instead of to Seoul, and the reduced supply lines helped the Commonwealth. The summer saw the Chinese withdraw back towards the Mountains and border regions, but having had enough of the latter's issues, the American battleships made another visit, this time spending twelve days in September plastering Sinuiju and Dandong on the Chinese side, and huge bombing raids added to the Chinese supply issues. By this point, however, China's armies were near exhaustion, and despite Mao's pushing, Zhou Enlai eventually got Mao to accept what by the end of the fall of 1951 was effectively inevitable - the West was winning, and there was little to be gained in continuing to fight on. Enlai, wisely, proposed in November 1951 that the Yalu River be a demilitarized zone on both sides, and that China would withdraw from Korea if the UN Command agreed that they would not step foot over the Yalu. This was acceptable to the West, and the armistice negotiated out entered into effect on December 21, 1951, ending 18 months of horrible nastiness on both sides.

Korea after the war was devastated but free of communist forces, and while the ROK and PRC would remain officially at war until the Treaty of Seattle of 1986, the war was over, and while the PRC and USSR would be allies for a while to come and the Communists' hold on China was all but unshakable, it did result in the development of several nations around the Pacific Rim as allies for the Western powers in a conflict. The Treaty of San Francisco in 1952 ended the occupation of Japan by the West and officially allowed Japan to be a fully-recognized nation once again, a fact which initially was not popular with the Koreans but was accepted as a fait accompli. Fearsome of what could happen with regards to China, pretty much everyone around China quickly established alliances with the United States, gaining military protection in return for being loudly against communism. This, however, caused a number of countries, including Korea and Taiwan, to engage in downright vicious suppression of leftist elements in the 1950s and 1960s.

For Japan, World War II had a similar impact in many ways to the Opening of Japan during Emperor Meiji's reign. Its ingrained sense of racial supremacy destroyed the war and with many of its old bad habits swept away by the Americans, Japan exited World War II with its confidence shattered and seeking something to rebuild it. The Korean War, which showed the ability of many different kinds of others to fight together successfully, in many ways gave it to them. The Japanese people, as well educated as most on Earth even despite the ravages of war, took what they had learned in war and applied it to their own societies. Kaizen, the theory that change is good, became a social turning point for Japan after 1945, and it saw a rapid and marked erosion of the norms that Japan had accepted as reality during its Imperial Era. Facing out to the world as well as themselves, Japan's economic miracle of the 1960s and 1970s, driven by huge investment in the automobile, electronics, shipbuilding and metals industries, was soon pushed out by Japan into other nations - while they were willing to strictly supply many Western countries by export, they did not do so for the nations closer to it, preferring to create far greater numbers of local jobs in Korea, Taiwan, the Phillippines and Southeast Asia by using local industries and developments, a decision that was both well-liked in those nations and copied by others, Korea most of all. The proud Koreans soon found themselves conflicting at times with the equally-proud Japanese, but it wasn't long before the competition was one based more on cultural developments and bragging rights than economic or military powers. Japan didn't just stop with economics, either - Japan's citizenship laws with regards to ethnic minorities were rewritten in 1956 to allow newcomers to Japan of non-Yamato origin to retain their names and identities, though social customs continued to push against this for some time to come. Japan, however, took plenty of cultural inspiration from the English-speaking world during this time, and it manifested itself in English being by far the most common second language in Japan by the end of the 1950s, and ever-greater relationships between Japanese people and their descendants abroad, particularly in the Americas.

If Berlin hadn't driven nails into the idea of world peace, the war in Korea certainly did. Faced with Soviet and American nuclear weapons and the cancellation of Lend-Lease information transfers in 1946, the United Kingdom was quick to relaunch its nuclear weapons program, and having been the ones who discovered Plutonium in the first place and with both Norwegian and Canadian sources of heavy water along with both Canada and Australia having substantial sources of uranium and Canada having the ZEEP nuclear reactor, the Brits quickly aligned themselves with Canada and invited Australian involvement, which led to the building of four separate laboratory complexes - the famed Chalk River Laboratories in Canada, the Sellafield Research Complex and Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Britain and the Tiboobura Nuclear Complex in Australia - to develop nuclear weapons. Australia was hesitant from the start to develop such weapons - their primary interest was better power reactor technology - but both Canada and Britain felt that nuclear weapon proliferation was somewhat inevitable and that having them was better than not having them, even as most Commonwealth scientists knew well of Albert Einstein's comment "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" and believed it, leading to the idea of mutually assured destruction being taken seriously by the Commonwealth. Britain tested its first nuclear weapon in March 1952 at the Montebello Islands Lagoon in Western Australia, somewhat to the aggravation of the Americans and displeasure of the Soviets, particularly when Canada conducted its own first nuclear test at its Tyhee Ridge Test Site in the Northwest Territories in August 1953. (All Canadian nuclear tests done at Tyhee Ridge were done deep underground, aiming to avoid the sort of radioactive fallout that was already proving troublesome for the Americans and Soviets.) The Commonwealth nuclear weapons were soon followed by French nuclear weapons as well (France conducted their first nuclear test in the Algerian Sahara in 1960) and China testing its first nuclear weapon in 1964.

Nuclear weapons presented the same quandary for Canada that it did for everyone else - how could we use these without destroying our world? What kind of technology could we develop from this? While the former question would ultimately go unanswered, the latter's development began with the NRX reactor, which became operational at Chalk River in July 1947. The NRX, which had a thermal power of 42 MW, showed that heavy-water power reactors were possible, and the Commonwealth, blessed with massive uranium reserves in Canada, Australia and South Africa, saw nuclear power as a way of producing seemingly-limitless electric power for their societies, in Canada's case even as the construction of the La Grande, Ontario North and Manitoba Hydro-Electric System hydroelectric projects continued at full pace and the development of HVDC power transmission lines made producing power far away yet supplying the big cities further south possible. Nuclear energy presented technical challenges on a massive scale, but despite that development of it was indeed pushed and pushed hard across many nations. The first operational civilian nuclear power station, the Calder Hall Generating Station in Britain, was opened in October 1956. The first American nuclear power plant, the Shippingport NPP, began operations in October 1958. Canada's heavy water reactor designs soon also bore fruit, and Canada's first nuclear power plant, the Alexander Rutherford Nuclear Electric Power Station located west of Red Deer, Alberta, on Sylvan Lake, began operations in September 1960. Several other power stations similar in design to the Alexander Rutherford NPP though larger were built both in the Prairie Provinces, New Brunswick and power-hungry Ontario, along with a single nuclear power station in Quebec (at Gentilly), a smaller one built in Newfoundland (the Avalon NPP at Mall Bay, Newfoundland, began producing power in 1971) and additions to plants in Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia. By the time the Georgina Island and High River NPPs were completed in 1986, Canada got over 90% of its electricity from nuclear or hydroelectric sources, and several provinces had huge surpluses of power that they sold to customers in the United States.

Canada's armed forces showed the effects of Korea's learning curves. The Army, badly bruised by Korea, saw all of its equipment replaced in the post-war era, including the adoption of Centurion main battle tanks (these repalced the Ram III and Churchill in the mid-1950s, more quickly after British Centurions proved devastating effective in Korea) and the development of armored personnel carriers, namely the Bobcat and Cougar APCs, and Canada developing mortar-carrying versions of these vehicles. Adopting the approach that having troops have armor in front of them as much as possible being a good thing, the Canadian Army built huge numbers of armored personnel carriers and developed cold-weather variants of these vehicles, along with the development of tracked cargo carriers and support vehicles to improve mobility where even well-driven trucks couldn't go. (The Canadian Army by the late 1950s almost universally used trucks with all-wheel-drive, another lesson learned from the brutality in Korea.) After years of debate among the Commonwealth and the Americans, the British and Canadians adopted the .280 British round as the standard round for their assault rifles, naming it the 7.1x43mm NATO round, ignoring American desires for all of NATO to go with 7.62x54mm NATO assault rifle rounds. Canada split with the British here, as the Canadian Army felt the EM-2 rifle the British had developed was too radical, and in any case the Quebec City Arsenal (which had been Canada's small-arms incubator since WWI) had developed a rifle they felt could do better than the EM-2, the Diemaco IAR-4, nicknamed the 'Challenger' for using both the 7.1x43 NATO round and not being the EM-2 which the British really wanted the Canadians to adopt. Testing rapidly showed that while the IAR-4 was larger and heavier than the EM-2 it had greater accuracy at longer ranges and was more reliable - indeed, the IAR-4 proved extraordinarily reliable (a short-stroke gas system helped this) and also incredibly durable, the latter more than anything a result of the entire weapon being made of either forged or milled parts in the firing mechanism, aluminum and plastic outer components and precision assembly. Despite being more expensive than the FAL, EM-2 and M14 as a result of its construction standards, the Canadian Army adopted it in any case because of its quality of construction. (This would prove a good call, as the IAR-4 remained in Canadian service from 1954 until the 1990s.) While Canada went with the 7.1x43mm round in its infantry weapons, they went with the standard 7.62x54mm round in its machine guns, using (like most Commonwealth nations) the FN MAG as its standard medium machine gun. Having proved successful with the IAR-4, the Quebec City Arsenal would from the mid-1950s onward be willing to try just about anything to develop better Canadian armed forces firearms.

The Royal Canadian Navy evolved after the war just as the land army did. While the Tribal class destroyers that survived the war remained in service long after that (the Canadian Tribal class vessels remained in service until 1964), the WWII-era destroyer escorts and frigates were cycled out of the fleet in the 1950s as the St. Laurent and Restigouche class destroyer escorts came into the fleet, but it was soon apparent that these vessels had issues of their own, and that Canada needed more capable vessels than these to escort its navy. The result was the Mackenzie-class destroyers, the first of which entered the fleet in 1957, which were rather bigger than the Tribal class destroyers and were designed for the purpose of being a submarine's worst nightmare, with these vessels equipped with variable-depth hull sonar, a towed sonar array and, in a first for such vessels, a large helicopter hangar for two helicopters and the first installation of the beartrap system. The ships also featured a dual 155mm main gun system, the full electronics suite for sub-hunting, Canadian-built Westland Sea King helicopters equipped themselves with dipping sonar transceivers and CODAG power, completely dumping boilers in favor of Reynard-Napier Deltic turbocharged diesel cruise engines and Orenda-built boost gas turbines in a CODAG system that could transfer all of the ship's power to any destination necessary. The Mackenzie class, all named after Canadian rivers, proved to be the finest vessels in the world at their job and set off a scramble among other NATO naives to copy the design principles, and such was the respect for the design among the British that the British and Canadians came to a rather big deal - the Canadians could build copies of the Type 82 destroyer if the British can build copies of the Mackenzie class. The Canadians took this deal and subsequently improved the Type 82 further, using the British hull design but with similar power to the Mackenzie class, though the Canadian vessels pitched the Ikara anti-submarine system in favor of the American ASROC (with a reload system) and lengthened the hull, allowing the Canadian vessels to have a large helicopter hangar for two Sea King helicopters, a hull sonar similar to the other vessels and a second dual 155mm mount, along with the Canadian CANTIS naval data systems. Perhaps somewhat audaciously, the Canadians named these the Vancouver class and gave them cruiser designations, with the first of the class, HMCS Vancouver, commissioning in 1964 with the pennant number C 08 - indeed, the seven ships built of the class (Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton) would carry on with cruiser designations and in many ways cruiser duties, their powerful air defense systems proving excellent escorts for aircraft carriers and amphibious groups. The Mackenzie class was followed by the Iroquois class, which allowed the modernized Tribal class vessels to be honorably retired (two became museum ships in Toronto and Hamilton) and give the Canadian Navy even more ability to bring pain on Soviet submarine units, a primary fear of the time for the RCN.

Even as the Royal Canadian Navy got its new vessels and did a brilliant job with their design and development and the Army got its modern equipment, the Royal Canadian Air Force captured the public's imagination perhaps more than any other. While the Canadian aircraft industry had grown strong during the war and the 1950s would see a long series of brilliant developments by the industry, the most legendary and attention-grabbing project of them all began in 1953 - the Avro Canada CF-105, the legendary Avro Arrow. Having built the Avro CF-105 Canuck in the early 1950s and built the excellent improvements on the North American F-86 Sabre, The RCAF, Avro Canada and the government began development in 1955 of the Arrow, which was meant to be the absolute best interceptor money could buy, and Avro Canada delivered - the CF-105, first introduced to the public in a very public ceremony on May 26, 1957, was easily the equal of anything that existed in the world at the time, with the Orenda Iroquois engines, Blue Sword radar and Cantech fire control system for Sparrow and Velvet Glove missiles being the best in the world at that point, and easily superior to anything that at the time existed in the NATO arsenals, with the American F-106 Delta Dart and the British English Electric Lightning being a match for it in speed and aerodynamic performance, but the Arrow faster to climb and turn and having far superior electronics. Such was its level of advancement that the week it announced the British Government sent a formal request to purchase it for the RAF, and Australia and Israel weren't far behind the British.

Even more than the tour-de-force airframe and engines, the Arrow's internal electronics suite, which included inertial navigation, multiple radar emitters to allow a fire-and-forget capacity using Doppler beam sharpening and multi-function plasma displays, was easily the best in the world at the time and was at the time the clinching achievement of the years of development by Canada's electronics companies and laboratories, with most credit going to Queens University's Department of Computer Science, led by the famed Dr. Alan Turing. The Arrow was a big, two-seat delta-wing design with twin engines, a big, expensive machine that nonetheless could - and did - blow the doors off of its rivals and became something of a public icon, starting from its first public flight in March 1958. The stability augmentation system of the Arrow proved somewhat troublesome and getting the Blue Sword radar to talk to the Sparrow missiles proved a tricky task, but by late 1958 these jobs had been finished, and despite the change in government, with new Prime Minister John Diefenbaker loudly calling the Arrow "a monumental waste of resources" in his election campaign, he didn't even try to slow it down or make any changes to it, and the first RCAF acceptance trials began in February 1959. The Arrow passed these with ease, and 409 Squadron became the first squadron to transition to the Arrow in full, trading in its CF-100s for the CF-105 in April 1960. Ultimately eleven RCAF interceptor squadrons transitioned to the Arrow, the last one being 441 Squadron, which started flying the Arrow in September 1962. By that point, Avro Canada had done an agreement with Handley Page, where the smaller British aircraft maker would use their production facilities to build Arrows for the RAF (The RAF's order was for 165 aircraft, and the Arrow relegated the English Electric Lightning to secondary roles between 1962 and 1964) and Handley Page would move to develop a Canadian version of its Victor bomber, built for the British V-Bomber force.

Handley Page's disagreements with the British Government's desire to limit the number of aircraft firms into a small handful of large entities ultimately wound up changing the RCAF. While the Canadian Air Force had been studying developments in bombers for years, the V-bombers and Britain's desire to have the Commonwealth also operate them as an extension of the Commonwealth nuclear deterrent wound up becoming a factor in several air forces. The RAF had its greatest faith in the Avro Vulcan, but Canada was a bigger supporter of the Handley Page Victor, believing that the Victor would be more effective in a conventional bombing role and that its larger bomb bay would be capable of handling more types of missions. The launch of Sputnik and the missile race of the late 1950s confirmed the RCAF's belief in the conventional bombing role, with the thought being that nuclear war would be based on missiles and not bombers. (In a particularly odd turn of events, the RCAF wasn't a particularly big supporter of the NORAD system, but the Navy was, which pushed it into existence.) The shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers' U-2 reconaissance aircraft over Russia changed the game again, forcing bombers to adapt to low-level bombing to evade anti-aircraft defenses, a situation that favored the Vulcan. In the end, the British Government's pushing against Handley Page led to a much larger order for the Vulcan, forcing Handley Page to try to sell the Victor to allied nations in an attempt to recoup its development cost.

Two things made Canada buy the Victor. The first was that Avro Canada by 1962 was entirely independent of British companies (somewhat paradoxically, Avro Canada had been a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley) and was looking to move into the domestic airliner business, which Handley Page was also looking to move into, and Avro Canada used this to push Handley Page into working with them. The second factor was that Canada both was much more concerned with conventional bombing roles, believing that not every use of bombers would involve nuclear weapons. Knowing of Canada's long interest in the Victor, Handley Page had by 1961 developed a new variant of the Victor meant for conventional bombing, including the distinctive anti-shock bodies that became a hallmark of the design, with much stronger wings to allow the bodies to act as bomb bays as well as reinforce the aircraft for low-level flight. The aircraft initially was powered by Rolls-Royce Conway turbofans, but the design had anticipated the development of a higher-bypass turbofan for it, and Orenda rose to the challenge, developing the PS.16 Blackfoot medium-bypass turbofan, which while considerably bigger than the Conway (178"x58" in size, against 134"x38" for the Conway) was a little more fuel efficient overall while providing rather greater power at all altitudes and being able to create rather better power at low altitude. The development by Canada of standoff weapons, primarily the Canadair Dark Knight missile system (which was nuclear armed, though conventional warheads were developed for it fairly early in its operational life) also worked in favor of the Victor, as the reinforced Victor would carry two Dark Knights, one under each wing. Following tests, and with the development of the Dark Knight nearly finished, the Victor B.4 was ordered by the RCAF in March 1963, with the first aircraft delivered from Avro Canada in May 1964. Ultimately 41 Victor B.4s were built for the RCAF, the last one delivered in June 1966.

TheMann · Oct 30, 2016

Part 11 - Modern Canada Rising

By the end of the 1940s, Canada's post-war Renaissance was very much underway, even as the country had a political changing of the guard in 1948 - both William Lyon Mackenzie King and Thomas Crerar retired from politics, in both cases after nearly thirty years in high positions and both saying publicly that they wanted to pass the torch to a new generation of Canadian leaders, with Louis St-Laurent and M.J. Coldwell taking the places as head of the Liberal and Progressive parties and, after the 1948 elections, St. Laurent as Prime Minister of Canada and Coldwell as his deputy, maintaining the alliance between the Liberal and Progressive Parties that dated back to 1933 and had worked beautifully for both sides. In the midst of a baby boom and having sizable tasks ahead in terms of building up Canada, the 1950s were a time of major government spending, growing involvement in the economy and multiple battles over federal versus provincial power, but with impressive results.

The results were obvious. The Trans-Canada Highway was expanded into a proper expressway (this would be completed across the country in 1967), the railroads replaced steam power with diesel and electric power, the country's power grid was rebuilt, new suburbs caused practically every major city to expand far beyond its original borders, helped by the development of ever-better commuter rail and the building of expressways into cities to allow people to commute more efficiently into the cities, while war plants built out in suburban areas also themselves into the centers of communities. While the 1950s would see full-steam ahead with the redevelopment of major cities to suit the automobile, by the early 1960s the flaws of this would be readily apparent, leading to multiple bitter highway fights in Toronto, Montreal, Seattle and Calgary. The development of jet-powered airliners, starting with the De Havilland Comet in 1952, Vickers VC7 in 1956 and both the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 in 1958 changed the world of commercial aviation, which was to immense benefit of Canadian travelers and introduced the Jet Age to Canada. It also led to the building of modern airports in all of Canada's major cities, and the massive improvement in the 1960s of passenger rail services in the St. Lawrence River Valley, Lethbridge-Edmonton and Olympia-Vancouver corridors to compete with the jet airliners. Canada was on the commercial aviation act early - Avro Canada's C-102 Jetliner proposal had died out of a lack of production capacity, but by the the mid-1950s Vickers wanted into the American airliner market and contracted Canadair to handle the job of building VC7s for North American markets, resulting in the first Canadair-built VC7 entering service for Canadian Pacific Air Lines in 1956. Ever-bigger demand for cars in Canada grew production capacity for cars in Canada as well, and the arrival in North America by Toyota and Nissan (which used the Datsun name in North America until 1981) in 1958 along with the European automakers made sure the car buyers of Canada had all of the choices they desired. The post-war world for Canadian business saw most of the big industries choose between working with the increasingly-close Commonwealth of Nations or with the massive adjacent American market - not an easy debate for most, but one which the companies had to take on. For some, particularly Canada's steel and aluminum industries, were focused on domestic demands, facing the problems that the Americans and British were trying to do the same thing they were. Wealth, however, made most of these situations easier.

The Commonwealth of Nations, created by the London Declaration in April 1949, defined all of the independent states of the British Empire as free and equal to each other, with the Declaration having been carefully crafted in an attempt to retain newly-independent India as a part of the Commonwealth (Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wanted to remain as well) and to establish that the British portion of the Commonwealth was historically accurate but not a definition of what the future would hold, that position also proving popular with the newly-elected National Party in South Africa. The London Declaration also set about that all of the members of the Commonwealth would recognize the citizenships of all other such countries. The Declaration also recognize King George VI as the Head of the Commonwealth, though with compromises that allowed India and Ireland, both of whom were looking at declaring themselves as republics. Prime Minister Louis St-Laurent got around the problems of allegiances that were the basis of the Balfour Declaration and the Statute of Westminister by proposing the creation of the position of the Head of the Commonwealth, a position which would be held by King George VI. This allowed the Commonwealth to come into existence, and the furthering of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s led to many new members of the Commonwealth. The London Declaration did, however, create an opening for greater integration between Britain and those nations who wished to expand their relations - and Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland were quick to jump on this.

The Commonwealth of Nations Citizenship Act, passed by the British Parliament in August 1951 and led to similar legislation passed in Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 1952 and Ireland in 1953, allowed for visa-free travel among the nations that agreed with the Act, allowing for Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Irish to reside in any of the other nations for any length of time, to seek employment and use government services of the nations in question. This would initially have only smaller effects, but with the development of jet airliners and ever-better travel systems, it proved an economic boon to all of the nations involved, and contributed to the Commonwealth's development as a much more influential entity in the 1960s and 1970s. The Act also gave preferential treatment to immigrants from other Commonwealth nations, one of the big effects of this in Canada and Australia being a big wave of Indian immigrants in the 1960s. The law and Canada's ground-breaking Treaty of Orillia was noticed by Australia, leading to formal end of the White Australia policy in 1956 and the beginning of negotiations between Aboriginal Australians and the country's government, which culminated in the 1971 Newcastle Treaty, which recognized Australia's past treatment of its aboriginal populations. (They had been enfranchised entirely in 1958, and activism for their benefit had been widespread since WWII.) In Britain, The CNCA was hailed that Britain would continue to have influence over its empire, even if the nations involved were in control of their own destinies. The CNCA also caused the first problems for the Commonwealth with regards to South Africa - The South African government was in favor of signing into the Commonwealth of Nations Citizenship Act, but its policy of apartheid, very much real by 1954, was seen as abhorrent by Canada and New Zealand and troublesome by Britain and Australia, and their desire to limit such passports to just white South Africans was deemed as unacceptable by all of the other nations.

The Commonwealth, however, faced a stiff test barely a few years into its existence, when the ruler of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, forcibly annexed the Suez Canal in 1956 after years of declining relations between Egypt and Britain. Nasser, who had been trying to lever himself as leader of the Arab World and was attempting to play the United States and Soviet Union against one another, had by that point worn out his welcome with everyone, though the Russians were much more keen to work with him. The Suez Canal crisis resulted in multiple rounds of diplomacy led by Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, but Nasser stood firm in demanding that the Canal be owned by Egypt. Months of negotiations failed, and the armed forces of Britain, France and Israel invaded the Sinai and the Suez Canal zone on October 29, 1956, leading to a crisis. The Commonwealth was ambivalent at best about the Suez Crisis, even as Britain sought the help of the Commonwealth in the operation - but nobody, Canada included, had any interest, and after the invasion the Canadian foreign minister, Lester Pearson, went to Egypt in an attempt to mediate a settlement. The Suez Crisis, however, put Canada in a tough spot - a supplier of oil to both Britain and France, the importance of those supplies grew after the invasion and the oil embargo imposed on them by the Middle East, and Eisenhower's refusal to make up for lost Middle East production forced London and Paris to 'strongly request' that Canada seek to make up the difference, a situation that Ottawa knew would cause more than a bit of trouble for Washington, thus wedging them between a rock and a hard place. Pearson demurred while seeking to set up a negotiated settlement, and Canada's aggressive pushing of the international force to secure the Canal Zone was in large part out of desire to not get caught in the middle between their two historical allies (and Israel, which Canada was a supporter of) and its biggest trading partner. Britain and France withdrew from the Canal Zone less than a month after they had deployed to it, and Israel withdrew from the Sinai in March 1957 as a result of the agreements that allowed the UN force to be deployed to the Canal Zone.

The Suez Crisis was for the time being the end of Britain and France's colonial influence, and while Washington was only too happy to step into the void left by the now-discredited British and France in the Arab World, it would, however cause changes for the relationship amongst the Commonwealth. Faced with a collapsing Empire, Britain swiftly withdrew from much of its empire in the later 1950s and 1960s, a situation France followed, while pushing hard for ever-greater economic and resource integration with its Dominions. But it also massively changed relations between Britain and France, as the two soon became much closer allies, and while the Anglo-American 'Special Relationship' lived on after the war, London was forced to have to rebuild its prestige and clout after Suez, and it leaned heavily on the Dominions to do that, a situation that in many ways benefited Canada. Despite the disagreement over Suez, Washington was also keen to keep the Commonwealth strong, and despite the refusal of Britain and Canada to deploy to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, the relationship stayed strong.

Canada's by-now-famous efforts at racial integration made sure that arrivals into the country of color in the 1950s and 1960s were more than welcome, and so it was to Britain quite logical that their West Indies territories may well be better off as Canadian provinces than as independent nations. With this in mind, Britain proposed to Canada that Canada annex the British West Indies colonies - Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Bahamas, Leeward and Windward Islands - in diplomatic discussions in 1953. Ottawa wasn't entirely against the idea, knowing of ever-larger populations of people of West Indies descent in Canada, but Ottawa made clear that they would not take over the administration of the territories without their approval. Britain quickly approved that their Caribbean territories allow visa-free visits by Canadians in 1954, which the people of the West Indies colonies were happy to do because of the wealth that Canadian tourists brought alongside their British and American counterparts. But when the proposals were passed to the colonial authorities in 1957, they were quickly dumped into the public sphere, causing an uproar - those who desired complete independence claimed that Britain's actions were tatamount to exchanging one colonial master for another. Prime Minister St-Laurent answered that by pointing out that Canada had said from the start that any takeover of administration by Canada would be entirely contingent on that territory's approval.

Louis St-Laurent's defeat in the 1958 elections be John Diefenbaker initially seemed like the end of the road for Canada's involvement in the Caribbean, but Diefenbaker proved to be a totally different animal that many expected - his stance on apartheid, which led to South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth in 1962, endeared him to the West Indies (among others), and Diefenbaker sought to expand the rights of Native Canadians beyond what was already written into the Treaty of Orillia, and his Bill of Rights in 1960 was a sign that Diefenbaker, a barrister before a politician and who had fought for a Bill of Rights for his entire political life. Diefenbaker's stances on equal rights did smooth things over with the Caribbean territories' populations, but it would take the West Indies Federation's problems that would bring the measure to a head. By 1960, the idea that the Caribbean islands join Canada was gaining support, primarily as more of the power brokers in the Caribbean realized that Canada's Federation would give sizable influence to the provinces, that they would be provinces with full representation in Ottawa instead of represented by appointed colonial governors, and the idea was gaining traction in Canada as well.

The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the matter to a head. Canada's two aircraft carriers, Bonaventure and Warrior, were deployed to support the American blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and while war was averted and ultimately the Soviet nuclear missiles deployed there were withdrawn from Cuba, but it rattled London, Ottawa and the Caribbean something awful, and by November 1962 Britain was privately looking to hand its Caribbean islands to Ottawa, without the consultation of the territories themselves. This broke in the media in Canada, Britain and the Caribbean on December 4, 1962, and it caused a political crisis in the Caribbean territories, but with Ottawa unwilling to just take over the territories. By this time, the join Canada position had some support. The political crises caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis in Canada when combined with the Caribbean situation brought Diefenbaker's leadership of Canada to a head, and in April 1963, sensing that the tide was turning, both Liberal leader Lester Pearson and Progressive leader M.J. Coldwell proposed that if Canada was to take over the Caribbean territories in 1963 that all of the colonies would be granted a referendum on complete independence in the fall of 1964, and that Britain and Canada would respect the result if the islanders chose to seek independence. This was enough for the crumbling West Indies Federation, and after Canada's 1963 elections were held in June (resulting in a Liberal minority government, which the Progressives supported), Ottawa moved quickly to offer the terms to the Caribbean territories. On September 14, 1963, Jamaica became the first of the British colonies to be taken into Canadian administration, which in early practice meant nothing aside from who the administrators reported to. By the end of October 1963, all of the West Indies territories of Britain aside from Guyana and Bermuda had passed their jurisdiction to Canada, and 1964 would in the territories be taken up by the debate of whether the future lay in independence or joining Confederation, and similar debates in Canada on whether to take the islands in.

The debate was a spirited one in both the Caribbean and Canada. The debate over the vast sums that would undoubtedly be needed to improve the economies of the islands, vast social changes that bringing nearly four million people into Canada at a stroke would create and the efforts that would be involved to organize governments in those territories would be a tall task were put against the argument that once all of the efforts were done that the islands would be able to contribute to Canada's society and economy as well as the country's standing in the world. While the federal government and most of the provinces stayed neutral, organizations in Canada itself were happy to be involved in the debate, most of these in favour of the islands' joining Canada, and their efforts were not small - Canadian Pacific Resorts publicly proposed a set of four massive resorts to be built in the Caribbean (at an estimation cost of $250 million) and that it would begin service from the islands to Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa within days of the islands joining Canada, Alcan proposed one of the world's largest aluminum production plants for a location west of Spanish Town in Jamaica, Canada's big banks proposed the establishment of special development funds for the islands and numerous smaller companies happily supported pro-Canada movements. What tipped the scales in favor of joining Canada was the promise from the Province of Ontario to dedicate over $4 Billion from the Trillium Natural Resources Fund to projects for the development of the Caribbean, a sum bigger than the economy of the entire islands at the time. That investment, pushed by Premier John Robarts, was at first politically controversial, but proved a major benefit for the province. The visions of incoming wealth turned the tide of the debates towards Confederation, and the plebiscites, held across the islands on October 8, 1964, saw all of the colonies - Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Bahamas, Leeward Islands and Windward Islands - vote in favor of joining Confederation. Ottawa was happy to accept the result, and negotiations about borders began immediately.

The result was five new provinces - Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and the Province of the Caribbean Islands. The Turks and Caicos were attached to the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands to Jamaica, Barbados (owing more than anything to its long history as its own colony) stayed its own province and the islands north of Tobago - British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Barbuda, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines and Grenada - became the province of the Caribbean Islands. The five provinces, which had a population of 4.1 million in 1964, were able to come to excellent terms with Canada, and the first of the provinces to be formally named was Jamaica, with Sir Alexander Bustamante becoming Jamaica's first Premier on January 25, 1965. Former provincial bodies during colonial rule rapidly evolved into provincial legislatures in Canada, and the new provinces sent their first MPs to Ottawa through a large number of by-elections in 1965. And true to form, Canadian investment poured into the islands - Premier Robarts was true to his world, and the funding for a massive series of public works projects started with money from Toronto and Edmonton.

The Caribbean proved to be something of an early cost to Canada, but by the end of the 1970s the once-massive movement of Canadian 'snowbirds' to Florida had evaporated, as many chose instead to flood into the new islands, a trend seen most of all in the Bahamas and Jamaica. People and money were soon rapidly moving both ways, and vast numbers of people of Caribbean descent poured into canada in the 1960s and 1970s seeking better employment opportunities, though some moved back to the islands during the booming 1980s. The cultural elements weren't far off what many predicted - association football, already fairly popular in Canada, grew in popularity with the entry into Canada of the islands. Jamaica arguably had the greatest impact on Canada of the new provinces - Jamaican culture and music came to Canada in sizable amounts in the 1970s, and the craftsmanship of many Jamaican craftsmen resulted in Jamaican-made furniture becoming a status symbol in Canada, as well as the cultivation of many types of crops (a result of economic diversification efforts in the 1970s and 1980s) and the growing cultivation of cash crops for export, particularly tropical fruits and coffee. The eager markets for this in the rest of Canada also contributed to the development of ferry and transport line Caribbean Seaward, which began operations between Montego Bay, Jamaica and Cockburn Town, Bahamas in 1970 and rapidly grew the market for island-to-island ferries, contributing to both commercial advancement and cultural advancement, particularly after the entry into service of MV Island Advancement in 1985, this being by far the largest vehicle ferry ever built at 68,750 gross tons and capable of making trips from ports in the northern Leeward Islands to the Turks and Caicos or northern Jamaica. This service was added to with the agreement with the United States by CNR in 1988 to build the Fort Lauderdale Islands Terminal, which allowed passenger trains where the passengers also brought their cars on the same train to travel non-stop from CNR's terminals in Pickering, Napanee and Stittsville, Ontario and Longueuil, Quebec, to Fort Lauderdale, where they and their cars would be loaded onto the big ferries for the 168-kilometre hop to Freeport in the Bahamas.

Britain's handing over of the Caribbean territories was to them a sign of what was to come. By 1965 the exploitation of natural resources by Canada and Australia had resulted in both nations having vast sums of money in the bank, and both nations were openly willing to use these to buy influence in Britain and Washington. (This was to become far more pronounced for Canada after the 1973 Energy Crisis.) Canadian and Australian commercial interests and governments at all levels were able to buy into British and French industry in the 1950s and 1960s, thus giving the two nations considerable influence over their former colonial powers, while also contributing to a stronger economy for the Europeans and allowing geopolitical changes, which Canada used to lever itself into Britain's defense industries in the 1950s, and the two countries used to push their way forward into the largest military co-operation project of the Cold War era, the Four Powers Aircraft Carrier program. That program, which had begun development in 1958 as a plan to replace the WWII-era carriers used by most of the NATO and NATO-aligned nations, rapidly swelled into a major undertaking.

The aircraft carriers developed by the powers were designed to fit in the shipyards of the navies using them (not really a problem for Canada or France, thanks to Canada's massive Versatile Pacific, Todd Pacific and Saint John Shipbuilding shipyards, or France with its huge Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyards and its huge naval base at Toulon) but resulted in Britain expanding its naval berths at the Fifth of Forth and Portsmouth and Australia to build its huge Alpha Drydock at the Sydney Naval Base. The carriers developed in the program were angled-deck aircraft carriers of a similar design to incoming American carriers, and were big, big ships - 952 feet long, 226 feet across at the flight deck and with 34 feet of draft, displacing some 64,600 tons at full load. These huge ships were designed around their huge aircraft hangars (meant for over 60 aircraft) and armored decks, and incorporated a fair bit of aluminum in the superstructure and even in some cases stainless steel, despite it weight, was used in situations were hardness was desired. Canadian and French demands for flexibility resulted in the carriers being powered by four nuclear reactors of the CANDU type, which despite their larger size and additional capital cost were used for the ability to be refueled without needing to be overhauled (a major plus for operating economics) and not needing heavy pressure vessels. The huge hangars were designed for the largest naval aircraft in service at the time, namely the Blackburn Buccaneer, and be capable of mounting multiple strikes as well as see use in many different missions. Experiences from the Americans resulted in the ships being equipped with only shorter-ranged anti-aircraft armament (originally the Sea Cat, but this system was replaced the Sea Sparrow and Sea Wolf in the 1970s and 1980s) and the ships were built with all of the best creature comforts available. More complex than any ship ever used by any of the navies, nonetheless the design was shown off to the nations involved in 1962, and the construction of the carriers began in early 1963. The first finished was HMCS Terra Nova, which was launched in May 1965 and commissioned in Halifax, on July 2, 1966. The nine ships of the design - three each British and French, two Canadian and one Australian - all became operational by 1970 and would be a fixture of the Cold War, replacing older carriers. The new carriers also proved a benefit to India, as the Indian Navy bought both the former HMS Eagle and HMS Ark Royal after both were decommissioned in 1968, and both were refitted in Britain before sailing to India, entering into Indian Navy service in 1970 and both seeing extensive service in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. India, however, was more than happy to have the two carriers, and both vessels saw a lot of miles put on them in the 1970s and 1980s as India sought to define its place in the world.

The new carriers were, along with the Iroquois-class destroyers, Vancouver-class cruisers and the St-Laurent and Restigouche class anti-submarine frigates, the backbone of the Royal Canadian Navy from 1970 onward, giving a potent force, along with the development of an amphibious capacity which was developed in the 1970s. When combined with the long legs of the Victor B.4 bombers and their VC-7 (and after 1966, VC-10) refueling tankers and support aircraft, made for Canada having the ability to project power a long, long ways, particularly as Canada's bombers developed one of the world's first standoff cruise missiles, The Canadair ASNM-04 'Blue Ranger', which first were deployed on RCAF Victors in 1966. The big Blue Ranger missile, only ever armed with nuclear warheads, was state of the art then, using an interial navigation system for closer ranges and an early form of computer guidance, along with a Orenda R2 ramjet engine giving a speed of Mach 2.5 and a range of just over 900 miles, similar in capability to the American AGM-28 Hound Dog (though many orders of magnitude more accurate, as the Blue Ranger had a CEP of just 75 metres, the AGM-28's CEP was 3500 metres). Not long after the entry of the Blue Ranger into service, however, was the development of a conventionally-armed version of the same missile, that coming to pass as the Blue Challenger, which entered in 1971. The Challenger was actually longer and larger than the Blue Ranger and was equipped with either a 2500-pound shaped-charge warhead or a large cluster bomb warhead, allowing it to be used either to be a single-target or in an area-denial operation. The Challenger was designed for the Victor, but to the surprise of no one, the Challenger was bought by Britain and deployed on the Avro Vulcan, and tested by the French for the Dassault Mirage IV bomber, but in the end wasn't bought the French.

Canada by 1970 was very much into its role as a global player, though one which tended to search for middle ways. While very much a member of NATO and armed with powerful deterrents in both nuclear and conventional forces, Canada's peacekeeping developments during the Suez Crisis were a sign of what was to come. The era of detente between the United States and Soviet Union and the changes in the world resulting from decolonialization were ones that demanded flexibility and neutral players, and Canada was keen to push itself as that neutral player, strong and capable but wanting to use diplomacy and peacekeeping to keep conflicts from growing. Ottawa had a steadfast ally in Canberra, who was more than happy to support similar positions, and the 1970s would see Canada and Australia use their diplomatic abilities to settle differences in the world, a situation that would be to both nations' benefit both at home and in the world. For Canada, continuing economic growth and prosperity seemed an inevitability, but even as the 1970s would prove challenging to Canadian society just as it posed challenges to so many others, it would be a classic case of what doesn't kill one really does makes them stronger....

TheMann · Nov 2, 2016

Part 12 - Man And His World to Canada And Its Destiny

Canada reached the end of its first century having accomplished so much of what had been set out by its founders a century ago that it was remarkable. From the North American outpost of the British Empire to a major power in its own right, having built a nation across one of the largest countries in the world, having built a society like no other on Earth, populated by many peoples living in rather-good harmony, for the most part avoiding the racial problems that so many other nations, and celebrating the entry into Canada of its new warm-weather islands, who despite their being poorer than the rest of Canada still made a note of funding the development of a 'Caribbean Pavilion' at Expo 67 in Montreal which went on to be one of the most beloved pavilions of the fair itself and one of those which stood the test of time.

While counter-culture was raging in the United States (and was crossing the border into Canada), Canadian society was much more peaceful, in large part because of the changing social norms of the time. Few younger Canadians remembered the sacrifices of World War II and the Great Depression before that, resulting in them being used to prosperity and as a result seeking more to integrate the world and advance their own futures. The 'Baby Boomer' generation in Canada all but eradicated the problems of racism of the past, and also sought to change many elements of the country's society, including forcing the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1968 and advancing individual rights far beyond the ones that had been enshrined in law by John Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights in 1960. Asian Canadians began to move far beyond the West Coast and Alberta where they had been for decades particularly into the cities of Toronto and Montreal, while the entry into Confederation of the Caribbean provinces resulted in a steady stream of job-seekers and entrepreneurs north into the major cities. It was a time of great advancements in technology and society, and nowhere was it more pronounced than in Montreal with Expo 67.

Expo 67 was the ultimate project of Canada's Centennial celebrations, and it was perhaps up to that point the greatest sign of what Canada was becoming. Quebec was changing dramatically in the 1960s, with the new generation of Quebecers - by percentage of population, Quebec had the biggest single baby boom of any of the provinces, namely through its sky-high 1940s and 1950s birth rate - asserting both modernism and their position in Canada, and Expo 67 was one of the first signs of their influence, the Expo combining French-Canadian flair for the grand with English-Canadian pragmatism, proving expensive but worth every nickel of the money spent, both because of the facilities and the cultural aspect. Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67 made him justifiably famous (Expo wasn't over before Safdie was commissioned by the Province of Ontario to design and build the monumental Harbour City project in Toronto, at the time the largest redevelopment project in Canadian history) and many of the Pavilions were designed with lasting in mind. Expo was a roaring success, hosting over 75 million visitors between April 28 and October 29 and resulting in Montreal getting quite a repute as a tourist destination, a situation helped by Montreal's new Mirabel Airport opening in March 1967, just in time for the event and which proved invaluable during that time period, as did CNR's gas-turbine powered UAC TurboTrains, which entered service in the fall of 1966 and proved invaluable in ferrying passengers from as far out as Detroit as well as throughout Ontario to Montreal. All of Canada saw visitors to Expo and to Montreal, and most liked what they saw.

1967 is seen in many minds as the summer where Canada finally began to assume its own identity. Despite being a bi-cultural nation at its formation (and one which many claimed would become tri-cultural starting with the Treaty of Orillia and the integration of Native Canadians into Canada's society), the Canada that had appeared in the 1960s was one where the worldly, multicultural modern Canada emerged in the hearts and minds of its people. With bilingualism common among younger Canadians (and nearly universal by the mid-1970s) and French by far being the most common second language, Quebec's social rebirth in the 1960s and 1970s rapidly found kindred souls in the rest of the country, and while Montreal by the 1960s was losing some of its former business prominence to Toronto, those English-speaking businessmen who left Montreal saw their old positions filled by an ever-larger group of both French-speaking businessmen and those of Native descent, and Montreal was only too happy to pose itself as a European city in North America, a more laid-back, youthful, culturally-minded rival to busy, workmanlike Toronto down the St. Lawrence. It was a sign of the rivalry that was to come between the two cities. As French proficiency grew across Canada, so did many elements of its culture, including the rich literary traditions, dance and music scenes, visual and performance arts (in this regard, the creation of Nuit Blanche in Montreal in 1977 was to be followed by Nuit Blanche Toronto in 1982 and similar events in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Seattle in 1985) and many culinary traditions, though in the latter case Toronto and its environs rather stole the spotlight from Montreal in the 1980s by combining fine dining with new flavours, tastes and cuisines, primarily brought there by Caribbean, Indian and Asian immigrants. Montreal's influence was also seen in the groundswell movements that stopped many monster-sized redevelopment projects in the rest of Canada, as Montreal had been among the first cities to truly pay attention to its heritage and pay respect to it. As French proficiency grew across Canada, so did English proficiency in Quebec, following the trends closely.

The 1960s also were defined by what became known as the "Great Canadian Flag Debate" as Canada sought to replace the Red Ensign, Canada's flag since its independence in 1867, with something that was more appropriate of Canada's place in the world. This had been kicking around since the 1950s, but Diefenbaker had refused to budge on the use of Red Ensign, and while Lester Pearson's government was in favour of the flag change, Diefenbaker wouldn't budge from the use of the Red Ensign, which resulted in rounds of debates that defined the Flag Debate until on the recommendations on the part of Progressive Party leader Tommy Douglas, Conservative MP Leon Balcer and Social Credit MP Real Caouette to invoke cloture and force a vote. That done, the vote was definitively in favour of the new flag, much to Diefenbaker's disdain. Indeed, the former Prime Minister was to suffer multiple drawbacks in the future - losing the leadership of the Conservative Party to Robert Stanfield in 1967 was the first of many, but Diefenbaker's own visions of a singular nation of Canada as opposed to multiple cultures under one flag by the time of his defeat in 1967 looked increasingly outdated. Pearson, however, having failed to win a majority government in no less than four separate elections, resigned his position on March 16, 1968, turning it over to his successor as leader of the Liberal Party, the charismatic Pierre Trudeau.

Trudeaumania was to make headlines in Canada for all kinds of reasons, namely due to Trudeau's abundant charisma - neither Robert Stanfield nor Tommy Douglas could hope to match Trudeau in that regard, though they were more than a match for him in policy debates, and the elections between the three men in 1968 and 1971 would go on to be among the high points in Canada's modern politics, as all three men tended to focus on policy proposals and each one was more than a match for the other two in terms of intellectual ability. Trudeau, however, opened his first campaign with several dramatic plans, most notably a re-write of Canada's Constitution to bring it to Canada instead of the existing document that came from Britain and loud and proud support for multiculturalism. For Trudeau, talking about this was a political benefit to him, and he figured - entirely correctly - that such actions would cause mayhem among the Conservatives, well aware that Robert Stanfield had not been the first choice among many Conservatives to succeed John Diefenbaker. Stanfield, for his part, was not annoyed by Trudeau's talk - and indeed, he would have the last laugh on Trudeau's games in 1968. Having a firm belief that a more forward-thinking Conservative Party would be a benefit to him and to Canada, Stanfield was proven entirely correct when three of his known political allies - William 'Bill' Davis in Ontario, Peter Lougheed in Alberta and Edward Seaga in Jamaica - all became premiers within a few months of each other in the spring and summer of 1970. Trudeau got his majority in the 1968 election, but he also got a lot more than he bargained for with his talk of a new constitution, even as Stanfield had to repeatedly deal with Diefenbaker and his loyalists' shots in his direction during the 1968-1972 time period.

Trudeau's calls for a constitution for Canada were heard rather louder than he had anticipated in the Caribbean, Quebec and the West, and so by 1970 work was underway to patriate the Constitution from Britain. The problems faced were considerable - the provinces wanted more control over amending formulas (Robert Bourassa in particular was very, very loud in this demand, and Dave Barrett in British Columbia supported his efforts) and several provinces wanted complete control over social policy which Ottawa would then fund, a demand Trudeau was not going to accede to no matter what. Stanfield's insistence of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms into the new Canadian Constitution was seen as an olive-branch (which was only moderately successful) to Diefenbaker and his loyalists but was also a very popular idea. The status of the Senate of Canada was another contentious manner - after initially favouring abolishing it (and finding that position highly unpopular), a compromise position was put forward that would reform the Senate to allow Ontario 24 Senators, Quebec 16, British Columbia and Alberta 12, Barbados and Prince Edward Island 4 and all of the other provinces 8, as well as 8 additional seats for First Nations. The issue of how to choose Senators was initially left open, but Edward Seaga in Jamaica and Errol Barrow in Barbados pushed for an amendment demanding a democratic process to elect Senators chosen by individual provinces and that Senator elections should be held at the same time as all House of Commons elections. The Constitution's First Nations' sections provided them greater self-government with only federal vetoes initially, something which several provinces (British Columbia most of all) hated until Bill Davis got that changed to provincial vetoes. Demands for several policy areas to become exclusively provincial jurisdiction (notably natural resources) were fought bitterly by Ottawa, eventually this being watered down to federal government approval being required for changes involving such policies and provincial government approval being required for federal changes - a compromise that was to prove Trudeau's downfall just a few years later. Bilingualism across all provinces was opposed by Alberta and the Caribbean as being too costly, but this time Bourassa had the compromise, making it a requirement that Ottawa fund programs for the advancement of bilingualism.

But the biggest changes of all were the Societies Clause and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

On the Societies Clause, Bourassa's demand for recognition of Quebec as distinct society from the rest of Canada had been regarded as idiotic by many - Lougheed referred to it as 'self-righteous stupidity' - but what came out of that acrimonious debate was the Societies Clause, which defined as Canada as having "A land of distinct cultures and societies, born from many peoples and many ways of life, forged into a nation bound by geography and made one by desires for peace, prosperity, freedom and good government." This statement, which Bourassa had initially felt was much too weak for Quebec's public opinion, turned out to be just the ticket among younger Quebecers, many of whom openly felt the new constitution was an assurance of their culture's place within Canada. The Clause included defining Canada as a federal state and as a democratic nation and dealt with a number of elements, including aboriginal rights (which started with those granted under the Treaty of Orillia and in many cases expanded from there), official-language minorities and bilingualism, cultural and racial diversity, individual and collective rights, gender equality, non-discrimination on a large number of fields (including, famously, sexual orientation) and the equality of all of the provinces within Canada. The Premiers of all five Caribbean provinces - Edward Seaga of Jamaica, Errol Barrow of Barbados, Lynden Pindling of the Bahamas, Arthur Robinson of Trinidad and Tobago and Herbert Blaize of the Caribbean - were publicly happy that Canada would say in their constitution that the provinces that had joined Canada only a few years earlier and were so culturally different to the rest of Canada would consider them as equals, to which Bill Davis happily pointed out "We are a land whose people came from practically everywhere in the world. They chose to be Canadians, and so they have every right to be treated the same as any other Canadian." (One major effect of the Constitution was to all but end the lingering desires for independence in many of the Caribbean territories.) First Nations groups were equally proud to support the proposed constitution, saying that it would enshrine Native Canadians as an integral part of Canada, taking what had been established with the Treaty of Orillia to the greatest of outcomes. Quebec was also in favor, as Quebecers, by that point fully caught in the revival movements in Quebec's society in the 1970s, felt that Quebec's culture was now as safe as it could be from assimilation into English Canada. While there were some segments of Canada that didn't entirely support the proposed changes for a variety of reasons, the Societies Clause was a popular thing.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was just as influential. The 36-section Charter, which enshrined a very broad section of rights and freedoms which were to be enjoyed by all Canadians, was a major deal as it would be the first time in a Commonwealth Nation (though it would not be the last time) there would be absolute governmental limits to where they could violate the rights of their citizens, and also enshrined the right of the Supreme Court of Canada to interpret the Charter with regards to laws and statutes passed by governmental bodies in Canada. This provision led to charges of judicial supremacy, but in practice the ability of the court to influence was limited to individual laws and statutes, thus avoiding the controversies the United States Supreme Court had gotten itself into on multiple occasions. It was a great compromise, the presence of the Notwithstanding Clause to the constitution allowed a government to violate the Charter, but only for a certain period of time and on limited matters, the clause being seen as the 'nuclear option' in the event of an event or scenario that required such actions.

Trudeau called an election for the fall of 1971, wanting to use the Constitution as a crowning glory that would allow him to extend his term at a time when his approval ratings were high, but the 1971 election was to show that Stanfield was more than capable of playing Trudeau's games - he was very much a supporter of the proposed Constitution, saying publicly "The document proposed is nothing less than a codification of the state of Canada today, a document that says to the generations that will follow us 'This is what Canada stands for, this is how Canada's laws and lawmakers work and this is what as Canadians you are entitled to from your government.' No ambiguity, no bias, nothing less than a true statement of what over a hundred years of progress has done for us and the people we love." Trudeau found out that Canada's slowing economy of the time - the Nixon Shock was felt in Canada just as it had been everywhere else - and he found out that Stanfield and Douglas had been able to blunt his personal popularity, with Stanfield running as a competent, honest man with whom you could trust anything and Douglas as a crusader for social and economic justice. Trudeau saw his majority eliminated, resulting in a Liberal-Progressive Cabinet being required to keep Trudeau in power. Despite the election, the Constitution was easily passed by Parliament in November 1971, and Trudeau (with Stanfield and Douglas' enthusiastic approval) asked Britain if Queen Elizabeth II would come to sign it in Ottawa herself. Her Majesty, who had long been a supporter of Canada's efforts, was enthusiastic in her response, and she and her husband Prince Philip came to Canada for a full Royal Tour in March and April 1972. It was a big event to say the least - Royal Yacht HMY Britannia sailed across the Atlantic with them, with the Yacht being enthusiastically received in St. John's and Halifax before sailing down the St. Lawrence Seaway, stopping at Quebec City, Montreal, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie before docking in Thunder Bay, where a special train conveyed her across Canada to Vancouver before flying back to Ottawa (on an RCAF VC-10, a fact noted by the British press with surprise) for the signing ceremony, patriating it in a very public ceremony in Ottawa on April 7, 1972, in the presence of all of Canada's political party leaders, provincial Premiers (including Bourassa, who Her Majesty reportedly rather liked), all living Prime Ministers (Diefenbaker, St. Laurent and Pearson all stood together in pictures at the ceremony, something the press had a field day with) and a vast number of dignitaries. That done, she flew to Halifax, where Britannia again conveyed her to the Caribbean provinces, where she spent another 16 days before returning to Britain on April 25. It was also notable that the Royal Navy dispensed with the guard ship during the tour of the Great Lakes, letting Canadian cruiser HMCS Vancouver handle the duty on the Great Lakes and brand-new destroyer HMCS Haida handle it on the Caribbean tour. Despite early concerns, Her Majesty had no difficulties anywhere on her tour and she was enthusiastically received everywhere she went.

The eurphoria about Canada's absolute independence from Britain was to be short-lived, however, owing to the 1973 energy crisis, which was in a very real way directly tied to the United States' withdrawal from the Bretton Woods system in 1971 which had caused the Nixon Shock. Canada's economy was not helped by this, as most of its raw materials exports were priced in either dollars or pounds, and both currencies took sizable hits in value in the early 1970s. The Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbours in October 1973, however, was to become the point where geopolitics caused mayhem. In response to the Americans' decision to resupply Israel after the Yom Kippur War (as the Soviets were doing for the Arabs), OPEC embargoed oil sales to the United States and all of the nations of the Central Commonwealth as well as immediately raising the price of oil by nearly 75 percent, this combining with the existing stagflation to cause substantial shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel all across the developed world and much of the less-developed world as well. The Arab nations made life particularly hard for Canada and the United States - Canada in particular had strived since WWII to be even-handed when it came to disputes, even in the depths of the Suez Crisis, but the Arab members of OPEC were quite persistent that Canada had to abandon Israel to get the embargo ended, and while Trudeau may have considered it, doing so would have almost certainly destroyed his government - both Stanfield and the Progressive Party leader, Stephen Lewis, were unapologetically pro-Israel - and he stuck to his previous positions, a situation that helped the situation Canadian diplomats managed to get the Israelis to withdraw from the west side of the Suez Canal in early December 1973. The crisis eased by the spring of 1974, but it had had the effect of massively increasing the price of oil, and resulted in a major growth in income for producers of it - and Canada was no exception, as Alberta's Wildrose Natural Resource Fund showed - its assets grew from $61 Billion in 1971 to $288 Billion in 1981 and $876 Billion in 1991. Despite this, the rest of Canada took something of a dim view of the energy crisis and stagflation.

Trudeau's response was the creation of the National Energy Resource Program, known more commonly as the NERP. The Progressives and several provinces wanted the NERP to force Alberta oil to be sold to the rest of Canada at below world price, which Trudeau was not going to even attempt - but the idea of this still got into the press in the winter of 1973, resulting in Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed to infamously say "Those who wish to make us pay for their prosperity, go freeze in the dark." Stanfield (and Diefenbaker, a rare case where both were in complete agreement) made all kinds of hay about the NERP's proposals, even though they were never taken seriously. What was created was the Canadian National Petroleum Corporation, better known as Petro-Canada. Petro-Canada initially took over the assets of PetroFina and Phillips (both were looking to leave Canada as a result of losses) and entered as competition into the business, as well as support new sources of petroleum. Initially highly controversial, the company would go on to be a Canadian institution, and Petro-Canada's ambition began early, when Petro-Canada joined with Hess Petroleum and Neste to develop a better variant of the Fischer-Tropsch Process using a coal base and iron as a catalyst, the first such facility in Canada beginning operation at Roberts Bank, British Columbia, in 1977. Petro-Canada also began developing new places for oil exploration, particularly in the Atlantic provinces, and the F-T Process netted Petro-Canada a way of making ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel, which initially was soon able to take over a large share of the market for diesel fuel in Canada (forcing competitors to catch up) and then resulting in a growth in the use of diesel cars and trucks in the mid-1980s.

The NERP was to be Trudeau's downfall, as his decision not to push for nationalization of oil assets would end up causing the Progressives to break with his government in June 1974, resulting in an election set for September 22, 1974. The NERP initially ruined the Liberals in the West and by the mid-1970s the Progressives were the largest party in the caribbean provinces, forcing the Liberals to dominate Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia to hold on to their positions - but Stanfield was able to break the Liberals' hold on Ontario (thanks in large part to Bill Davis), and the result was a victory for the Conservatives, giving them a majority government in the House of Commons (though with a Liberal minority in the Senate), and Stanfield was sworn in as Prime Minister on October 2, 1974. Trudeau was defeated but defiant, but he was about to face the collapse of the traditional Liberal-Progressive alliances that went back half a century - having lost an election many felt he could win, Stephen Lewis stepped down as Progressive Party leader on October 22, 1974, and the leadership campaign to replace him elected firebrand university professor Ed Broadbent, who as more than willing to work with both Stanfield and Trudeau. Broadbent would prove to be every bit the equal of Trudeau and Stanfield, and it made 1970s Canadian politics a rivalry between the honest-to-a-fault Red Tory Stanfield, the charismatic, intellectual and always-ready-with-a-soundbite Trudeau and the idea-slinging, dedicated, socially-minded Broadbent. All three men saw little advantage in fighting societal battles (by the end of the 1970s, few Canadian politicians did) but rather working on policy ideas, proposals and speaking eloquently about where they felt Canada should go as a nation, and all three men rapidly came to have immense respect for the other two. This ability to focus politics on the issues, when combined with innovative economic leadership and intelligent fiscal management and monetary policy, allowed Canada to dodge the worst of the 1970s recessions, making sure the country was well placed for the future....

TheMann · Nov 8, 2016

Part 13 - Energies Dedicated To Results

Robert Stanfield's election in 1974 was a sign that politics had shifted in Canada, but what Stanfield also represented was that the Progressive Conservative Party was very much seeking to combine those two elements, aiming to make life better for as many Canadians as possible while sticking to their principles, using whatever solutions worked. This process began almost immediately upon Stanfield's election, as he pledged that he would not do anything to dismantle Petro-Canada, which at least two Western Premiers were howling loudly for. Stanfield was also more than willing and able to use crown corporations for national purposes (something which drove men like Diefenbaker nuts) and to negotiate with his political opponents on important issues. Stanfield called this "intelligent, pragmatic, conservative decision-making". Stanfield's first government created two new crown corporations in Via Rail Canada (which took over Canadian passenger rail operations from Canadian National Railways and the Canadian Pacific Railways) and the National Infrastructure Bank of Canada (which was meant to government projectsat provincial and municipal levels). Canada saw certain provinces benefit enormously from the raised energy prices, but the rest of Canada was more than able to adapt to the realities of the time, and the vast sums in the bank from several provincial natural resource funds (and two in Ottawa) helped to make sure the Canadian dollar didn't fall to any particular degree. Stanfield was also willing to push for continued advancement of Canada's energy realities, with the Trans-Canada pipeline rebuilt in stages between 1974 and 1980, the Canadian National Research Council conducted experiments and developments into new energy sources (one result of this was the first ocean-thermal-energy-conversion power station in the world, built at Pedro St. James on Grand Cayman and entering service in 1982) and the building of the Sir Alexander Bustamante Nuclear Generating Station at Hopewell, Jamaica, which began producing electricity in 1985. Stanfield also pushed for improvements in the operations of crown corporations that had private sector rivals in order to create efficiencies, and in the particular case of Petro-Canada, Air Canada and Canadian National Railways they had more than a little bit of success.

Canada was similar to the United States in its social transformations in the 1960s leading to economic ones in the 1970s. Canada avoided the worst of stagflation but still saw very sluggish economic growth, testing the Welfare Capitalism idea to the limit, but by the later 1970s new generations of workers were entering positions of greater authority and leadership in many companies, a situation mirrored in the United States and supercharged in Canada by the country's vast electronics industries and laboratories and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which introduced ever-better technologies into the television and radio worlds in the 1960s and 1970s. Solid-state electronics began to be made in Canada in large amounts for public usage during this time period, and the presences of the famed computer science laboratories at the Queens and Carleton Universities in eastern Ontario and McGill University in Montreal led to eastern Ontario and southwestern Quebec becoming a hotbed for electronics development, even as the by-now famous Bell Canada Laboratories developed Quadraphonic stereo sound and ever-better color television systems in the late 1960s, creating the 'Hi-Vision' system of television transmission that all of Canada rapidly adopted, while Canadian firm Avaria Technics worked with Phillips to develop the first modern cassette players and then some of the first commercially-available VCRs, the Avaria V100 becoming available in Canada in 1969, and Avaria and Phillips both sided with the VHS system during the VHS vs. Betamax conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s as well as making their own V2000 players, which due to the ability to play much longer movies and all models offering Quadraphonic sound carved themselves out a substantial niche, which got bigger after Sony gave up on Betamax in the early 1990s and began making V2000-format players and movies themselves. Bell Canada Laboratories also were among the first to setup fiber-optic communications networks (which proved to be a major improvement over the older copper wires) and develop satellite phones and microwave telephone networks, the latter a major benefit to rural regions of Canada which struggled to get good communications services.

Mergers and consolidations also happened, as did foreign investments, in Canadian industries. The largest ones by some margin was the alliance between Renault and American Motors in 1978. This was a merger between a French and American company, but which was negotiated out by Canadians, and one of the results was two of the largest auto assembly plants ever built by the companies, the mammoth Brampton Assembly and Brantford Engine Manufacturing facilities, which opened in 1982. This was followed by an alliance between Subaru and Westland-Reynard in 1986, and that merged company became allied with PSA Peugeot Citroen and Chrysler in 1991. (Chrysler had for decades been entirely reliant on exports to supply Canadian markets, a situation which changed dramatically after their alliance with Westland-Reynard.) GM of Canada by this point was the second-largest division of the firm after its American counterparts (and by the mid-1980s the Trillium Natural Resource Fund and Wildrose Resource Fund were two of GM's biggest shareholders, and this did make a big difference in GM's decisions with regards to Canada), and Ford Motor Company's expansive operations in Canada only grew larger in the 1970s and 1980s after the signing of the Auto Pact in 1969. Dominion Steel and Falconer Metals were merged into Dofasco in 1976, the former after having been suffering through bankruptcy problems for a decade. Dofasco's takeover of Dominion Steel was classic welfare capitalism - Dofasco spent over $75 million modernizing the massive Sydney steel mill and reworked several coal mines in the area, and while demand for the coal suffered from recessions, its demand was subsequently assured for good when Petro-Canada built its first East Coast F-T refinery in Brownsville, Nova Scotia, the plant beginning operations in 1982. Canadian Pacific took over the almost-bankrupt Milwaukee Road railroad in 1972, a move that looked curious considering CPR's long-standing ownership interest in the newly-formed Burlington Northern, but it was soon clear that the purchase was done because CPR saw it as a passage to Chicago and serving the rich agricultural lands of the American northern plains as well as Welfare Capitalism move, proving that even very large companies could do good for those who work for them.

Indeed, Welfare Capitalism's passing of its 1970s tests came to be beneficial to many others besides Canada, as the 1980s would see a long string of American corporations taking the Welfare Capitalism ideas to heart, and the passing of changes to union laws in the 1970s (most famously the Employee Free Choice Act, passed by the United States in June 1977) also resulted in greater employee involvement in their workplaces, a situation that was growing on both sides of the border. This also resulted in the 1980s in a wave of employee-owned businesses, both ones created by employees and those spun off of major corporations, with the workers at such businesses seeking to improve the viability of the businesses and thus preserve their livelihoods. This saved North Bay-based Ontario Metals, a former steel industry giant which had suffered badly through economic issues in the 1960s and 1970s before the company filed for bankruptcy in 1972, only for the employees of Ontario Metals to work with the United Steelworkers of Canada union to organize an employee takeover of the firm. Ontario Metals became an employee-owned firm on May 22, 1975, and subsequently rebuilt the company in Northern Ontario, including preserving the company's famed North Bay Integrated Mill - it was closed for rebuilding in 1978, re-opening with more than a little fanfare in August 1981 able to produce many metals it couldn't before.

As the Baby Boomers' authority grew, in Canada so did its desire to change the world, and having built sizable diplomatic influence, huge economic clout, social influence and a powerful military to back it all up, Canada by the 1970s was able to swing the Commonwealth on issues even when Australia and Britain weren't always in total agreement (this was most pronounced with regards to South Africa, whose policy of apartheid was something Canada absolutely loathed) and was acting as a middle player in the world. Canadian diplomats began to grow a reputation first with negotiating out the terms of the final treaty between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh with the Treaty of Colombo after the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, the treaty's signing in January 1973 ensuring Bangladesh's independence, even as Washington (a major ally of Pakistan) wasn't particularly happy with the end result - however, the brutality of the Pakistanis in defeat (as opposed to the Indians, who were rather more restrained, though by no means perfect) caused a rift between the Commonwealth and Pakistan that subsequently made life difficult for Washington. Regardless, the successful Treaty of Colombo was a sign of what was to come, as Ottawa got in 1975 the call of a lifetime, one which many had had a hard time believing.

The Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab Neighbours in 1973 had ended with an Israeli victory, though at truly awful costs to both sides, and with Israel's losses from multiple wars having by then affected every family in the nation and done atrocious harm to the Arabs, calls on both sides for peace were being heard on both sides. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made the fateful first move, making agreements with Israel over the disengagement of their forces in 1974 and 1975, allowing the Suez Canal to re-open in June 1975, and setting the groundwork for Sadat to continue to work on improvements in relations between the two nations. Recognizing Canada's involvement in the peace treaty in India, peacekeeping, the ability to influence the Commonwealth and a reputation for being even-handed, Sadat in September 1975 asked Ottawa to help him negotiate out a full peace deal with the Israelis, and had Ottawa pass to the Israelis a message that Egypt would accept losing the Sinai if the Palestinians were able to have a sizable part of it as part of their homeland. Israel initially responded with shock, but Sadat's visit to the Vatican in April 1976 was a very loud sign that he was intent on bringing Egypt into the world, that the bluster and excesses of the Nasser era was going into history. Sadat was something of a visionary in this regard - he could see the Soviet Union's stagnation was not being matched in the West, and Sadat saw the Commonwealth as the best potential ally, and saw Egypt as an ally of the Commonwealth to allow it to not have to live with the problems that could come from Washington and Moscow. Diplomatic contact between Canada and Egypt made clear that the Egyptians, in return for recognizing Palestinian independence and a land of their own, were willing to establish full diplomatic relations with the Israelis and would push the rest of the Arab world to do the same. Canada quickly passed this on to Israel, and the Israelis sent back that they wanted to negotiate with the Egyptians face to face.

Sadat proved true to his word, leading a delegation to Israel in March 1977 and speaking in the Israeli Knesset of a desire to put a generation of bloodshed behind them. Even Israel's more hawkish government officials could see the interest was genuine, and Sadat convinced Israel's new Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, to be a part of an international conference on the future of the Holy Land, and said categorically that Egypt would not have any issue with a Canadian proposal for Jerusalem being an international city, so long as Arabs could live and work there along with the Israelis. That news didn't take long to get to Ottawa, London, Washington and Moscow, and all parties were supportive, with US President Jimmy Carter calling an international conference in New York City for April 1978.

The New York Conference and the Berkshire Conference that followed it the following year between delegations from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the PLO, United States, Canada, Britain and the Soviet Union laid out what the parties desired for the Holy Land. Sadat's willingness to give up a large chunk of the Sinai to a Palestinian state was a genuine shock to much of the Arab world but Sadat made it stick, and the Jordanians got the PLO to agree that an independent Palestinian state would be the home of the Palestinians alone, thus reducing the problems Palestinian refugees had caused for Jordan in the previous decade. Everyone agreed that Jerusalem would be an international city open to all Israelis and Palestinians, and Sadat proposed that both governments be able to locate all of their departments and ministries there save their armed forces and security services. The Canadians proposed that Israel's security concerns be settled by the deployment of Western armed forces to Israel with a clause in the treaty that in the event of an emergency that the forces would be put under Israeli control, and both Britain and America offered the Israelis access to pretty much anything they desired out of the NATO arsenal as a way of ensuring Israel's security. King Hussein openly called for commerce links after peace, and he made an offer to Canada to have Canadian National Railways contracted to build rail lines from Tel Aviv and Haifa to Amman and throughout the Palestinian territories as a way of improving commerce, and the Soviet Union offered to restrict arms sales to the region in an attempt to help with the peace process.

Even with the promising start in New York, the Arab street was unconvinced and Hafez al-Assad in Syria was livid, loudly trying to stir up trouble for Sadat, a situation mirrored in the Arab world. But within days of the New York Conference's breaking up, two big allies jumped into the game - the Shah of Iran and Pope Paul VI, the former getting involved in an attempt to improve his country's diplomatic position (though by this point Iran was in good stead economically and was a staunch ally of the United States, and was improving its relationship with the Commonwealth) and the latter saying that he had a duty to advance the cause of peace in the world. While 1978 was to be dramatic year for the Catholic Church, with three popes in a year as a result of John Paul I's untimely death from a heart attack, it did nothing to change the Church's viewpoints, and John Paul II in November 1978 proposed that "The City of God should be governed, at least in part, by Men of God, and if the good men of Israel and Palestine so desire, I will be quite happy to assist their efforts in any way possible." Shah Pahlavi, for his part, proposed the creation of a vast fund supported by both Iran and the Arab states for the Palestinians' economic rehabilitation, and made the first move for it, dropping some $26.5 Billion into the fund, and he publicly called on Saudi Arabia's King Fahd to contribute to the Palestinian cause as well. Fahd rose to the skillfully-delivered challenge and matched Pahlavi dollar-for-dollar, and privately Fahd spoke to Hafez al-Assad, asking that he back off his sabre-rattling. The result of this was a shifting sense on the Arab street, particularly after PLO members began to begin arriving back in Palestinian territories in the fall of 1978, allowed to do so by the Israelis. Israel made a sizable concession by releasing a number of convicted PLO terrorists in January 1979, and the good terms between the sides involved and the shifting sands in the region, particularly in both Egypt and Jordan, made sure that the Berkshire Conference that followed began with high hopes that the March 1979 would come to a complete agreement on the future of relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at the incredible Windsor Castle and chaired by Canadian Prime Minister Robert Stanfield, the Berkshire Conference hammered out the complete agreements in principle, though with specific lines to be drawn. Jerusalem would become an international city with a third-party force protecting it, with any crimes involved in the city resulting in the perpetrators having their choice of being tried by Islamic law or Israeli civil law. The city would be governed by three religious clerics - one Jewish, one Muslim and one Christian, chosen by their respective sides. The city would also have two civil mayors - one Israeli, one Palestinian - and a complete civil service that answered to them, and they in turn would answer to the clerics. The city was to be open without restrictions to citizens of Israel and Palestine, and both governments could - and both indicated they would - claim it as their capital city, and Sadat's proposal that only armed forces and security services be excluded from Jerusalem was accepted at the Conference. Israelis living on Palestinian land would be moved back into Israel, but they would be allowed to stay where they were until their new homes were built. There would be a section of Israel where Palestinians were allowed to travel through, live in and do business in as they pleased, on the condition that they followed Israeli laws, connecting the two sections of the state of Palestine. About half of the Sinai would be returning to Egypt, with the israelis keeping a small section and the Palestinians having the rest of it, with the Palestinians having a long section of land that took the whole of the west coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, which also had the effect of separating the borders of Israel and Egypt, a situation Sadat was keen on pushing for. Both Israel and Palestine would get a sizable amount of economic aid to help to move their existences forward.

Israel's security would be taken care of by the United States and the Commonwealth of Nations, with the United States committing to building a naval base at Haifa and a huge army training facility at Mitzpe Ramon which also served as the base for the American army contingent, as well as massively expanding the Beersheba Air Force Base to also be used by the Americans. The Commonwealth was to build a major air base at Ashalim and a major army base, Camp Lightfield, between Eliakim and Bat Shlomo in northern Israel, and both countries agreed on contributions at the Berkshire Conference - the Americans sent two cavalry regiments, a Marine unit, six air force attack and strike squadrons and two air superiority squadrons to Israel, while Commonwealth would deploy three infantry regiments - one British, one Canadian and one Australian - and two armored regiments as well as units of the RAF, RCAF, RAAF and RNZAF. The knowledge of these new units being in Israel - and both the size of them and their relationship with Israeli command - tipped the scales in favor of the treaties in Israel, and rumors that the Americans would base an aircraft carrier in Haifa and the Commonwealth stationing heavy bombers at Ashalim made the point stronger still. (Indeed USS Kitty Hawk was assigned to the newly-built Naval Base Haifa in July 1982, and 480 Squadron RCAF, equipped with Handley-Page Victor B.4 bombers, was deployed to Ashalim in January 1983.) The Arabs weren't left out, as (with Israeli approval) the United States offered a vast fleet of American equipment to the Palestinians, including AH-1 SuperCobra attack helicopters and F-4E Phantom II fighter-bombers, in an attempt to help the Palestinians gain some repute, even if the Israelis would be far stronger. With the agreement in general signed on April 10, 1979, the negotiations shifted to Ottawa in June to make the final arrangements and draw the borders. In the middle of this, anti-Treaty elements in the Knesset made a point of dramatically expanding the size of Jerusalem's borders in an attempt to poison the negotiations, only for Arafat to brush that off and Begin to push the agreement through the Knesset anyways. Israel passed the treaty in the Knesset on May 23, 1979, thus clearing the way for the final negotiations.

The drawing of lines done and agreements made, the leaders of the nations involved - Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan and their allies - the United States, Canada, Britain and the Soviet Union, along with the Vatican City and Iran - converged in Ottawa's famed Chateau Laurier on August 4, 1979 to sign what was now known as the Ottawa Treaty. Menachem Begin signed for Israel, Yasser Arafat for Palestine, Anwar Sadat for Egypt, King Hussein I of Jordan, President Jimmy Carter for the United States, Prime Minister Robert Stanfield for Canada, Queen Elizabeth II for Britain (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was initially to do so, but Her Majesty was favored by the Middle Eastern participants and nobody in London objected to the action), Alexei Kosygin for the Soviet Union, Pope John Paul II for the Vatican and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for Iran. The speeches were impressive and the agreement was an incredible one, but a lot of work remained to be done, as the treaty mandated that the agreements be finalized by September 1, 1980. All involved took to the task with a will, however, and the job was done. The Israelis and Palestinians agreed that the first guardians of Jerusalem should be Canadians, as they had been key drivers of the operation from the beginning, and they sent that request to Ottawa in late August 1979. That led to the Canadian Army reviving one of its storied regiments, the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) for the duty, commanded by two of its most senior battalion commanders, Colonel Jean-Paul Gauthier and Major Romeo Dallaire. They deployed to Jerusalem in July 1980, raising their flag in Jerusalem on August 17, 1980. Canada's contribution was also joined by the famed Fort Garry Horse armored regiment and the 22nd Regiment of Canada, the famous VanDoos, who both deployed to the Commonwealth base at Camp Lightfield in August 1980. Just days after the signing of the treaty the first settlers moved back into Israel proper, and fast work meant the last to leave were only there until October 1981. The clerics selected by the Arabs (their choice was famed Sunni scholar Abdul Haadi Rahman), Israelis (who chose moderate scholar Eliezer Zahavi) and the Vatican (they chose Husaam al-Bagheri, the Archbishop of Beirut, who was elevated to Cardinal upon his selection), they issued their first orders to the two mayors (Teddy Kollek and Amin Majaj) and Colonel Gauthier on September 2, 1980, officially marking the beginning of Jerusalem's new world. The agreements done and in place, Palestine declared independence on September 8, 1980, and was recognized by Israel the next day, and Palestine formally recognized the state of Israel's existence alongside Jordan and Egypt on September 12. Iran followed on September 15, and Palestine's recognition came fast and furious from the West. Prime Minister Stanfield was the first signatory leader to visit Jerusalem and inspect his troops, doing so in November 1980 on a trip to the Holy Land.

The Ottawa Treaty was to be Canada's greatest diplomatic triumph for some time, and the new world between Israel and the Palestinians did indeed last. The booming 1980s saw the Palestinians, who had never been dumb and had a greater level of education than many places in the Arab world, took to trading with the Israelis and their neighbors with a will. Israel's situation was even better - hugely-reduced military spending and much-improved international standing contributed to give israel a tech and science boom in the 1980s, taking an already well-off nation and making quite wealthy indeed. Egypt and Jordan did well also, and the Treaty's success made both Sadat and King Hussein enormously popular people among their countries, indeed Sadat having little difficulty leading Egypt until his death from a heart attack in 1997 and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, ultimately being the last military leader of Egypt, leading it into democracy in the mid-2000s, peacefully handing power to Mohammed El Baradei in 2007. Aid from the West led to massive growth in all of the nations involved, and the success of the more liberal-minded politicians ultimately discredited many of the harder-line leaders in the Arab world. Hafez al-Assad's loud calls for the treaty to be rejected (and equally-loud shouts from Saddam Hussein in Iraq) led to Assad facing a monumental uprising in 1982 and an attempted coup by his brother in 1984.

Hussein also suffered, though in a way that was entirely his own making - Iran was in the middle of troublesome changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the thuggish Hussein in August 1980 invaded Iran under the guise of reclaiming Aran territory from the Iranians and taking away foreign attention focused on Israel and Palestine. Hussein's action would prove a monumental mistake, as the Shah took personal command of his country's armed forces and went himself to the region to lead his armies from a strategic viewpoint, proving both competent at it and perfectly willing to trust both his military commanders and political allies in Tehran. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-81 united Iran behind its leadership, in the process destroying much of the support for Islamists like Ayatollah Khomeini and communist groups. The Iranians were victorious, defeating the Iraqis for fair in March 1981, and in the process the Shah, who had insisted on doing whatever he could to assist his officers until cancer forced him out of a day-to-day position in February, was made into something of a war hero, helped by the fact that his son Reza Pahlavi, a fighter pilot for the IRIAF, also fought in the war and was wounded in it when his F-4 Phantom was hit by an Iraqi SAM on a mission in January 1981 (Reza got his badly-damaged fighter back to base and got treated for his wounds before returning to the fight) and the Shah's wife, Farah Pahlavi, proved a very, very good political negotiator and diplomat. Shah Pahlavi died of cancer in a hospital in Tel Aviv on July 24, 1981, but such was his actions during the war and Farah and Reza's popularity that Reza was able to claim his father's throne, being coronated in Tehran on February 20, 1982. The price of the crises of the 1980s, however, was a turn towards demoracy by Iran, something Reza and his mother both publicly and privately supported. After over two years of negotiations, Iran's first completely free elections were held in April 1985, electing long-time pro-democracy activist Mehdi Bazargani as Prime Minister, with a wide 'unity cabinet' selected by him, though Islamists continued to oppose it. Their efforts ultimately came to naught, and by the time Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, his movement was fading, even as the more conservative Mir-Hossein Mousavi replaced Bazargani in the 1990 elections. Iran had been a staunchly pro-Western country during Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's time, but while his son kept that alliance with the West, he was a loud supporter of Iran's place in the world and fought hard to have Iran be seen as the country that the west looked to when working with the Islamic faith, something that drove the Saudis absolutely insane. By the 1990s, however, he was becoming successful, as iran's decades of social progress was proving to the world that Islam and a modern, tolerant society was possible, even if Iran socially was way more conservative than most western countries. Iran did, however, support the efforts of Muslim nations (and not just Shia ones, but all Muslims) to forge bonds with the West, and Iran's relationship with Egypt and Israel proved a major sign of what was to come, as the Middle East was soon divided between those societies which sought to merge Islam with modernity, and those who fought such actions.

TheMann · Nov 22, 2016

Part 14 - The 1980s Means Go Faster, Work Better and Dream Bigger

The 1980s began for Canada with the victories of the Ottawa Treaty, which was widely considered the greatest single triumph for diplomacy since the creation of the United Nations. Canada had always justified its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council through peacekeeping and diplomatic means, and that had never been more true than the Ottawa Treaty, aside from perhaps the creation of peacekeeping. Canada was a prosperous society, and such was the shifting economics of Canada in the 1970s that the vast growth in resource wealth that had followed in the years after the 1973 energy crisis had been a net benefit to Canada, particularly to Alberta, Saskatchewan and the growing oil industries of Canada - a situation that Petro-Canada added to in 1979 with the discovery of massive oil reserves off of the Grand Banks, and 1980s developments would make it clear that the Grand Banks was almost another Alberta, with oil reserves estimated in the billions of barrels. By the end of the 1980s, the size of the Canadian government and provincial funds was of such a size that they were beginning to distort the markets, forcing diversification efforts among the funds to prevent Canada from suffering from Dutch Disease. Newfoundland's own natural resource fund, the Newfoundland Fund, swelled dramatically in size in the 1980s and 1990s as resource wealth flowed into the islands, and indeed one result of this was that the massive reduction in the Cod fisheries of Newfoundland, announced in 1985, proved to be a sizable bump in the road but little more than that, and Newfoundland in the 1980s and 1990s would shovel sizable amounts of funds (and Ottawa did so as well) into finding jobs for the over 30,000 people that lost work as a result. (Perhaps the most notable of these efforts was the building of the massive Newfoundland Resource Port at Conception Bay South and the electrification of the Newfoundland Railway, both completed in 1989.)

Life was good by any measure - the country's vast resource wealth, highly-efficient industrial sectors, strong service sector and efficient, practically-immune-to-corruption government and efficient government corporations combined with the Welfare Capitalism ideals to make Canada's standard of living one of the world's highest, helped along by a very high-wealth currency which (because of government fund involvement in the companies, excellent management, one of the world's most highly-educated workforces and a huge domestic market) despite the fairly high cost of Canadian exports still sold quite a lot abroad. Automobiles and other transport vehicles, aircraft and aircraft engines and components, consumer electronics, steel and aluminum and ocean-going ships were sold by Canada to other nations in large amounts, and the expertise of SNC-Lavalin, Stantec, Canadian Hydro Engineers and Roberts-Cameron-Miller in engineering was known worldwide by then as well. Mammoth Toronto developer Olympia and York was one of the largest such firms in the world by the 1980s, and scored the contract of a lifetime to undertake the monster Canary Wharf Project in London, England, in 1985. Not to be outdone, Brookfield and Tremblay-Gauthier, Olympia and York's main rivals, also dove into global markets, the former focusing on American properties (including building the Library Tower in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 1989) and the former on ones in Continental Europe, particularly France and Germany. The vast wealth of the provincial and federal natural resource funds was now producing buckets of investment revenue and allowed the funds' administrators to use financial muscle to influence major players not just in Canada but increasingly in the world. The ability to borrow these funds also proved hugely beneficial for Canadian banks, as the 'Big Seven' Canadian banks all became increasingly-large international players in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Plaza Accord of November 1985 would indeed also end up being a boon for Canada. Canada, joined by Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Australia, agreed in the Plaza Accord to attempt to push down the value of the US Dollar, in an attempt to hold off an increasingly-protectionist United States Congress from enacting trade measures against foreign competitors by instead allowing American products to be cheaper in many other markets in order to reduce the country's current account deficit. This was largely successful - America turned its first trade surplus in decades in 1991 - but it also contributed to assets in the United States being considerably cheaper to the other nations, and one of its primary objectives, reducing America's trade deficit with Japan, was largely a failure. A result that Canada took advantage of was to buy American goods at cheaper prices, though perhaps to nobody's surprise, one of the results of this was Canadian companies buying into American markets through American companies, exemplified by Bombardier Aerospace buying Beechcraft in 1986 and Learjet in 1987 to massively expand its operations, Canadian Pacific opening new links in its already-monumental system through the buying of the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio railroad in 1986 and Kansas City Southern in 1988, New Holland Agriculture being bought by Robinson in 1986 and Canadian banks getting into the act practically everywhere.

The battle of environmental concerns versus natural resource wealth was a theme of 1980s Canada, but it was one fought on good terms - few environmentalists were against all projects, while next to no resource producers in any field were against tough environmental laws. Canada's wealth of that time also ensured that the producers in many fields were willing to trade shares in the companies involved for government financial help for huge investments, and this manifested itself in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of several new huge players in the economy of Canada - automobile parts giant (and later automaker in their own right) Magna, electronics giants Nortel Networks, Research in Motion and Cameron Semiconductor, Visual Technology developers Dalsa Technologies and IMAX Corporation, recycling company Second Planet Resources, food processor McCain Foods and shipbuilder Atlantic Shipbuilding, which was formed by the merger of Halifax-based David-Sable Shipbuilders and Boston-based New England Shipbuilding Corporation in 1995.

The completion of the hydroelectric development projects in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Newfoundland and British Columbia and nuclear energy projects in the Maritimes and the Prairies gave Canada's power companies a vast power surplus which both contributed to cheap electric power rates, sizable amounts of income from selling power to customers in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon and California and the development of ever-more electrically-operated infrastructure, including the St. Lawrence River High-Speed Rail System, the first segment of which between Toronto and Montreal began operations on June 25, 1984.

Built as a result of the huge popularity of Via Rail Canada's TurboTrains and LRCs in the 1960s and 1970s, the new lines were to revolutionize transport between the two cities and perhaps even more than Expo 67 and the friendly rivalries between the two cities over 1970s events bring French and English Canada closer together, as one with them could blaze between the two cities in two hours and thirty-six minutes on the fastest services at its 1984 opening. (This schedule, as fast as it was, would actually get faster over time.) Hamilton was hooked to the network in 1986, Quebec City in 1987, Ottawa in 1989, London, Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor in 1990 and Sherbrooke in 1992. The line was extended over the borders to Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan in 1992 (in both Buffalo and Detroit, Via Rail bought the massive former Union Stations of the cities in question and rebuilt them for their new services) and Amtrak's development of its Empire Corridor resulted in the building of the Hudson River-Lake Champlain route between Montreal and New York City, opening in 1993, while a new line owned and operated by the Province of Ontario from Toronto to Sudbury began operations in 1994. The LRCs used on the fast services before the building of the electrified lines, as most of them were quite new, weren't retired - they were used to provide services to Brantford, Peterborough, Chicoutimi, Sarnia, Pembroke and St. Thomas, while a bunch of the LRCs were also dedicated to the 'Mineral Belt' services between North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, as well as Ontario Northland's Northlander from North Bay to Timmins, Cochrane and Kapuskasing. This line used French technology for the most part - early Canadian trains were essentially weatherized copies of the First-generation TGV - but demand on the routes proved so high that the original sets were joined by the TGV Duplex sets starting in 1992 and Bombardier's own home-grown Type 04 'Mercury' trains starting in 1996. The Mercury was much more like Japanese or German high-speed trains in terms of power design, but was a sixteen-car double-deck beast with incredible amenities meant for longer runs, and true to form it was soon being used on the 'Six Hopper' Detroit-London-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City express services, as well as the Toronto-New York 'Trillium Service' starting in 1997 (when Amtrak completed the building of the HSR lines along the Albany-Rochester-Buffalo Water Level Route) and the 'Fleur De Lis' Montreal-New York services in 1998.

By the 1980s, however, Canada's greatest advancement in societal terms was the idea of welfare capitalism, and by the early to mid-1980s it had caught on and caught on big time in the Commonwealth and in the United States.

America's political upheaval that had truly begun with the Watergate Scandal that had brought about the end of President Nixon in August 1974, but American society, already seeing vast changes that had begun with the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s, had spent the 1970s battling the demons of its past with regards to government misconduct, and the Church-Moss Committee on Misconduct by Officers of the Civil Service in the 1970s and 1980s kicked over literally hundreds of rocks, and proved absolutely devastating for the Republican Party. It initially led to a revolution among its ranks that led to Ronald Reagan's election as American President in 1980, but the American General Strike in the fall of 1981 and the actions of the Church-Moss Committee that ultimately ended the political career of Vice-President George H.W. Bush (and resulted in the re-organization of the CIA in 1985) caused Reagan's attempt at running for re-election to fall fast and hard, and the Democratic ticket of Edward Kennedy and Reverend Jesse Jackson easily defeated Reagan and his new Vice-Presidential nominee Jack Kemp in the 1984 election.

The discovery that Vice-President George H.W. Bush had personally known of Operation Condor and had approved of Washington's support for it in August 1983 created one of the biggest diplomatic nightmares in modern American history. Coming after Argentina's devastating defeat by the British in the 1982 Falklands War and the discovery of the many crimes of the Argentine Junta in the 1976-83 time period, the knowledge that America had so cavalierly manipulated the politics of South America caused rage across the continent, as well as infuriating the British, who were taught by the committee that America had known of Argentine desires for a conflict over the Falklands as early as spring 1977 and that Washington sold weapons to the Argentines despite knowing this, weapons which contributed to British losses in the Falklands War. Brazil's military junta's connections to the Operation Condor planners resulted in the collapse of the government following monumental street protests in January 1984, and resulted in a sizable move leftward in terms of policy for much of the continent, for which Washington could only blame themselves. However, the turn by the Latin Americans turned out to be far more towards social democracy than communism, and in all fairness what came out of the era was a number of highly-competent leaders in these countries who, despite very progressive social agendas, were able to mix these with sound economic management (though some were more sound than others) and the optimism of the 1980s and 1990s to get results both in economic growth and social advancement, as hunger became a thing of the past in Latin America and wages and incomes grew dramatically in the region during the 1980s and 1990s. America's image, struggled to recover and would do so for many years in the future, creating an environment that others jumped into, including the Commonwealth - which in recognition of strong efforts towards democracy, long-time friendly relations and societal and economic advancements, saw Chile join the Commonwealth in 1996.

The Commonwealth in this time also shifted gears, moving from an organization of nations that were former outposts of the British Empire to an organization of nations that wished to have greater associations with the Commonwealth nations, particularly the affluent 'White Dominions' of Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. This would be laid out first in the Singapore Declarations of 1970, which laid out fourteen points that dedicated all Commonwealth members to the principles of world peace, individual liberty, human rights, equality and fair and beneficial trade. These principles were at first by and large unenforceable, but would gain a whole new recognition with the Salisbury Declarations of 1985, which not only enshrined these but also stated that membership in the Commonwealth was not dependent on being a former member of the British Empire, merely a nation that sought the same principles and associations as the existing Commonwealth. The first non-British Empire nation to enter the Commonwealth was Israel, which joined the Commonwealth in 1989, and Chile would go on to be the second. (The Israeli application was in large part driven by its extensive involvement with the Commonwealth on economic, diplomatic and military issues, and recognition of the Commonwealth Nations' involvement in Jewish history, with the application specifically pointing out the Men of Honour and the Jews saved by Canada before and during WWII.) Israel's entry also saw them immediately become a major influence in the Commonwealth, and they in 1991 passed laws that allowed any citizen of a 'Central Commonwealth' nation to live and work in Israel visa-free for as long as they wished so long as they abided by the law, effectively joining them at the hip to the Commonwealth.

Reagan entered his term with a demand to hammer down inflation, and was able to have his social policies enacted in early years of his term, but the American General Strike of September 1981 and the 'Labor-Manager Alliance' of the 1980s that was an indirect result of the General Strike (indirect in that it was a long-time coming and its early signs could be seen as early as the mid-1970s) ultimately put an end to many of Reagan's economic proposals, but the growth of the 1980s was one he rode in any case, even as the Bush Scandals proved to be incredibly destructive politically. Despite his social policy ending up being more or less hijacked by events and the Church-Moss Committee ultimately sending several members of his administration to ignominy, unemployment or prison (or any combination of the above), Reagan's signature foreign policy goals of confronting the Soviet Union in terms of military strength were widely considered good ideas by the Commonwealth, and the military buildups of the United States were supported and aped by many NATO nations, including the Commonwealth. Perhaps the biggest event of this for the Commonwealth was the ballsy-but-awesome return to service of the Royal Navy of HMS Vanguard, which had been docked as a museum in Liverpool since 1959 but was called back to the service of its country in the aftermath of the Falklands War (to the immense approval of the Royal Marines), aping the return of the four Iowa-class battleships to the United States Navy in the 1980s. After an immense refit, Vanguard returned to service in May 1985 and was immediately given the title as the Royal Navy's flagship as a mostly ceremonial (but still popular with the Navy) measure, and indeed Vanguard would put a lot of miles on in the 1980s showing the flag. The Canadian Navy's movements in this direction included several huge purchases and advancements - F-14 Tomcat fighters for the RCAF and RCN, the Navy's Fraser-class AEGIS-equipped air-warfare destroyers (delivered between 1984 and 1988), new AWACS jets and a large fleet of tactical airlifters, the last one coming out of an alliance between Bombardier Aerospace and Kawasaki Heavy Industries that developed the Kawasaki/Bombardier C-2 airlifter. (Indeed, Canada's antiquated 1960s airlifter fleet was radically overhauled in the 1980s and 1990s, with the aging Shorts Belfast and older C-130 Hercules aircraft replaced by the C-2, Airbus A400M and C-17 Globemaster. All would prove highly useful in future RCAF operations and a great many humanitarian assistance efforts.) The Americans' huge push was so vast that the Soviet Union was simply unable to keep up, and by the time Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Union in March 1985, the combination of booming western economies, their immense military buildups and continued pushing for changes in what was acceptable in the affairs of states was pushing the Soviet Union and its foreign policy to the brink of destruction.

This was no more felt in the world than in the Commonwealth. India had pushed the Commonwealth far enough by the 1980s that New Delhi felt confident enough to move towards the Western side of the world, benefiting immensely economically from this move and the final death of the License Raj in the early 1980s, even as India's turbulent 1980s and early 1990s (culminating in Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination and the infamous Hindu-Sikh riots in 1984 and the just-about-as-bad Hindu-Muslim Riots in 1992 and 1993) caused plenty of problems in India. One result, however, was that India steadily moved to form power of their own, and as even as relations with Pakistan proved a tough subject, India was proud to push its influence in the world and was only too happy to present itself as a destination for investment, and openly sought to advance Indian interests through Indians living abroad. This had some success, but by the late 1980s, India was very much on the Western side of the world. The building of the Indian Navy (which was by the late 1980s was the second-largest in the Commonwealth behind the RN, but not by much) into a global force was a sign of what was to come from India, even as their relations with the Commonwealth were cordial and relations with Africa and Europe improved markedly in the 1980s. India openly sought to be a 'Central Commonwealth' country in the 1980s and 1990s, but fears about numbers of Indian immigrants held this idea off (India understood this), but their efforts made them a favored partner of the Central Commonwealth, and Canadian interests were soon among the biggest investors in India, taking advantage of truly immense opportunities offered by India's huge size, and being in some places plenty of successful, and seeing opportunities coming back the other way.

Politically, Canada ended an era on May 18, 1986, with the retirement of Prime Minister Robert Stanfield, turning over power on that day to his successor, Brian Mulroney. Having been elected in 1974 and having been re-elected in 1979 and 1983, Stanfield felt that the party needed new blood, and Mulroney, who came to power seeking to give the Conservatives a base in Quebec (and being somewhat successful at it), proved to be a much more flamboyant leader than the competency-first Stanfield, but nonetheless was happily supported by Stanfield, particularly as the two agreed on most elements of policy. The elections of November 1987, however, showed that the Liberals, now led by competent Newfoundlander Brian Tobin and charismatic British Columbian Anthony Matthews, reduced Mulroney's House of Commons majority to just four seats, while a powerful showing by the Ed Broadbent-led Progressives resulted in them being in minority control of the Senate. Broadbent, who became a Senator from Ontario in 1987 election, duly became the Senate leader, and proved a massive thorn in Mulroney's side, even as the Liberals also tooled up for the post-Stanfield era. Despite the stylistic differences and massive disagreements in policy, many principles remained unshakable, and Mulroney would be able to get along fabulously well with American President Kennedy.

TheMann · Jan 1, 2017

Part 15 - Ambition Unleashed

The late 1980s in the world were a time of shifting sands in the world of geopolitics. The admission by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 that the Soviet Union was at its breaking point economically and simply couldn't hope to match the economic or military might of the United States or the Commonwealth of Nations was the first sign of what was to come in the world. Gorbachev's policies of Perestroika and Glasnost would have consequences that few could ever have imagined, but in 1985 Gorbachev was indeed helped by the incoming American administration and the fact that the leaders of most of the Commonwealth were quite openly agreeing with many of his signature geopolitical goals, particularly with regards to the reduction of the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The change in policy in the Soviet Union was looked on first with interest and then with enthusiasm in the West, as few sought to completely destroy the Soviet Union so much as narrow the problems with geopolitics in the world, this being a particular concern of the Commonwealth, which was in the 1980s dealing with the shifting sands. The Commonwealth's efforts were focused on Africa in the 1980s, particularly with regards to advancing the standards of living in many African nations and seeking to do as much damage to apartheid as possible - and by 1986, the latter policy had much of the rest of Africa on board, and Washington by that point was unwilling to stomach apartheid more than anyone else. The results showed in the social and economic crises that Pretoria found themselves dealing with in the second half of the 1980s.

By the late 1980s, ever-better transportation systems had finished the job of hooking the Caribbean to Canada, and the once-customary 'snowbird' flood to Florida was all but gone, and Europeans were getting in on the act as well, particularly with the Bahamas and Jamaica. The country's policies with regards to drug problems had been shifting since the 1970s, and in the 1980s it resulted in the steady reduction of the growth of marijuana - once one of Jamaica's best-known exports - in favor of legal crops, and with a massively diversified base. Tourism, specialized agriculture, scientific pursuits and some industry were transforming the Caribbean, particularly in the larger islands which had greater political clout in Ottawa. One result of the moves was that the islands owned by other colonial powers, namely France and the Netherlands, but also the United States as well, saw their fortunes rise with them. Whether it was the huge Alcan Jamaica Aluminum Works (Jamaica's largest employer almost immediately after its 1989 opening) or the monumental Atlantis Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas or smaller-scale businesses in the thousands, the Canadian Caribbean was from the 1970s onward through the affluent 1980s and 1990s filled with Canadian tourists, and the Caribbean's entrepreneurs, of which there were many, rapidly moved to work to fill the demand. By the early 1990s, fast ferries and seaplanes linked the islands together along with conventional aircraft, and millions of tourists began seeking out their own slices of paradise among the tropical islands, and many a story was soon created by people finding the place they sought to find. The drug trafficing of the 1980s in the Caribbean was the dark side of this, but the Royal Canadian Navy along with the Canadian Coast Guard and the RCMP took to the job of hunting the smugglers with as much enthusiasm as the smugglers.

Back in mainland Canada, two massive events made up many memories of the late 1980s - Expo 86 in Vancouver, and the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.

Expo 86 had started in the mid-1970s as a plan to redevelop part of Canadian Pacific's extensive land holdings in Vancouver and it effectively blew up from there, growing into the biggest event in the province's history and a real sign of what was to come in Vancouver. Focused on transport, communications, electronics technology and the sciences, Expo 86 proved to be every bit the equal of the last time Canada had hosted a World's Fair, in Montreal in 1967. With 65 participating nations, every province of Canada adding to it and the vast involvement by private firms and foundations (and with demonstrations and visits to match), Expo 86 was very much when the world came to Vancouver, and it firmly established the city as Canada's glittering gateway to the Pacific. From the building of the Vancouver Metro (built for the Expo) and the rebuilding of Vancouver's airport to deal with the influx of traffic to the city's massive improval of its housing stock and office properties, Expo had the effect of Vancouver that it had hoped to have. Perhaps the biggest single geopolitical event of the times, however, came as a result of the fair, as Gorbachev was a visitor to the Expo, but he scored a major coup on the second day of his visit, when he joined a delegation of the Soviet Navy led by its Pacific Fleet flagship, Kirov-class battlecruiser Frunze, on its visit to Vancouver. Despite many early guesses that the Russians would be unwelcome, the group stayed for five days docked in False Bay, throughly impressing visitors. (American aircraft carrier Constellation, battleship Missouri and their battle group visited the Expo a month after the Frunze had left, with many in Vancouver figuring this was a direct response to the visit by the Russians.) The transport demonstrations were capped off by the 'Demonstration of Flight' (which included the RCAF's Snowbirds, US Navy's Blue Angels and RAF's Red Arrows all trying to one-up each other in their demonstrations, as well as the flyovers of many different aircraft, with everything from WWI-era biplanes to a whole squadron of Supermarine Spitfires to several squadrons of RCN and RCAF fighter and attack aircraft to two Air Canada Concordes taking part) and the 'Great Parade of Steam' steam train demonstration, which was probably the largest gathering of steam locomotives in modern times ever in one place, and included the largest steam locomotive in the world operating at that time (Southern Pacific's 4294) and both the official world record holder for fastest steam train in the world (LNER 4468, the famed Mallard) and the unofficial record holder (Pennsylvania 5521) among many others. One other huge event which ended up being much more popular than expected was the Night Festival of Speed sports car race - this event became an IMSA event after the World Endurance Championship decided they didn't want to do a street race, and they would immediately regret this decision, as the Saturday night event was wildly popular, and IMSA almost immediately began what would become a long tradition of racing in Vancouver. The site was looped by a monorail (this monorail would be rebuilt as an actual public transport device in Vancouver after the Expo), water taxis ran between six points at the site and an overhead gondola track and one of the world's largest ferris wheels (305 feet in diamater) gave views of the site that had few parallels.

Private-sector highlights of Expo 86 were numerous - Nintendo officially launched the Famicom (called the Nintendo Entertainment System) in North America at Expo 86, Canadian Pacific sponsored the creation of the short film Rainbow War for its pavilion which wound up winning its makers an Academy Award, General Motors of Canada's show Spirit Lodge (done heavily with the assistance of holographic design and done almost entirely by Native Canadian artists and designers) was joined by its announcement of the incredible Isuzu 4200R supercar and Turbo Titan V concept truck at the show, British Columbia Television ran a fully-functional television studio and gave visitors the opportunity to see and participate in every little detail of running a TV station and Beechcraft, having only months before been bought by Bombardier, displayed the Beechcraft Starship airplane in Bombardier's pavilion. AT&T and Bell Labs demonstrated the use of fiberoptics for communications, while numerous electronics firms showed off everything from the latest cameras to mobile phones to plasma televisions. Dalsa's MA6000 SLR camera, first shown at Expo 86, was the first by the maker (and one of the first cameras on the market period) to be equipped with both autofocus and a motorized film-advance winder, a development that made it instantly one of the best out there by allowing rapid shooting with the ease of use autofocus systems provided.

Visitors to the Expo ate it all up in spades, and while Expo 86 couldn't top Expo 67's attendance numbers, but it came much closer than many expected, with 60 million visitors visiting the site during the Exposition's run and proving yet agains that Canadians with events like this never, ever do things half-assed. Expo did lose money, but for Vancouver, British Columbia and Canada, few cared - the huge impact it had made and the experiences that had been a direct result of Expo 86 would not soon be forgotten. Vancouver saw the benefits long after the Expo, thanks to a massively-improved mass transit system, a huge airport expansion, new events and a ready-made fairground for them and a substantial rise in tourism to the city and business interest in it after Expo. Vancouver's SkyTrain, its first two lines built for the Expo, was followed by four more lines built between 1986 and 2007, and several of the pavilions built for Expo, including Canada Place, the Science World with its geodesic dome, the Ontario Pavilion, the General Motors Pavilion and several others were preserved as part of the park, and the Expo 86 site after the Expo became British Columbia Exposition Grounds, and the Pacific National Exhibition, a clear and obvious ploy on Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition, began in Vancouver in 1989.

The other vast event was the 1988 Winter Olympics, held in Calgary. Opened by Governor General Jeanne Sauve on February 13, 1988, the Calgary Winter Olympics would be the second global event in Canada in just just 18 months, but upon seeing what Calgary had done, nobody cared about that in the slightest, and even more than Expo 86 changed Vancouver, the 1988 Winter Olympics changed Calgary. Despite being a large city in its own right (Calgary had 2,553,780 residents in the 1986 Census), Calgary had long held a reputation both among Calgarians, other Canadians and people from around the world that the city was a regional center and a center for Canada's agricultural and energy industries which was best known only for the hosting of the Calgary Stampede. The 1988 Games changed that forever, and it was not real surprise that the games' venues and the improvements to the city contributed to Calgary looking at themselves as standing next to Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, just as Vancouver had stood up after Expo 86. Calgary's games were focused on the awesome Calgary Olympic Stadium, one of two stadiums completed in 1988 with solid retractacble roofs (the other was Toronto's famous SkyDome, which would go to Olympic glory of its own in 1996), was the centerpiece of the games alongside the equally-incredible Saddledome, whose fame grew after the Olympics through its primary tenant, the Calgary Flames NHL team, winning the Stanley Cup in 1989. Canada Olympic Park, built for the games, was one of the signature venues, and it would be used many, many times more in the years following the games for all kinds of international sporting events in both summer and winter, and four other venues, including the famed University of Calgary Olympic Oval (the 'Fastest Ice on Earth') were built for the games, at significant cost - though the cost of Calgary games, even accounting for the over $450 million spent on Calgary Olympic Stadium, would come in far below the cost of Expo 86.

Calgary easily, however, vanquished Vancouver in community involvement - over 250,000 Calgarians bought membership into the Calgary Olympic Development Organization, and over 40,000 of the bricks used to build Olympic Plaza were engraved with the names of sponsors who paid for the priviledge. The Calgary Stampede's tradition of volunteerism was carried over into the Olympics and quite a lot more besides, as over 26,000 people volunteered their time during the games to help them run smoothly, and the city's huge transit improvements for the games would prove a vast help in the future. The beginning of the Wildrose Express rail service between Calgary and Edmonton in January 1987 would be followed fifteen years later by the building of the full Wildrose Express high-speed rail system. The Calgary Metro, parts of which dated to the 1930s, was completely rebuilt for the games, and the five lines built for it at the time of the Games would hook all of the venues together and give rise to the "Transit Games" model of planning, which Toronto would use eight and a half years later to similar success. Calgarians in thousands of cases rented rooms and boarded visitors who couldn't find hotel rooms, acts of kindness that created more than a few friendships and relationships along the way. (Famed 2000s model Ariel Hill was one such result - her Irish-born mother met her Native Canadian father for the first time when she visited Calgary for the 1988 Olympics.) Calgary's Olympic Committee also changed the games in the ability to make money with the games - like Denver's Winter Olympics in 1976, the Calgary Committee focused on the development of commercial relationships to help raise money for the games, and the result was that the 1988 Games were only the second winter games to actually make money, which was put into both maintaining the facilities (all of which remain in use to this day) and developing winter sports in Canada, the latter proving highly successful - and in 1994, this led to an order for Canada's Olympic Athletes from 21-year-old American entrepreneur Kevin Plank, who moved to Canada to help develop his business, which became the sportswear giant Under Armour. (To this day, Under Armour supplies some goods to the Canadian Olympic team, and the company has been based in Canada since 1997.)

Expo 86 and the Calgary Olympics brought the world to Canada, and in both cases Canada answered every bit of their expectations and quite a lot more besides, with both events dramatically changing their respective cities. The huge success of Expo 86 and the response of Calgary to the Winter Olympics was instrumental in Toronto's scooping up the 1996 Summer Olympics, and it created a sense of confidence among Canadians of all stripes that for them, the sky really was the limit and that there was nothing that couldn't be done. Prime Minister Mulroney said it best being interviewed on the day of the Olympics closing ceremonies, saying "This is our time, and the world is before us, waiting for us to make our mark. Now its our duty to make that mark a good one." With money being little issue thanks to Canada's vast natural resource wealth and the country's industrial prowess obvious, Canada's governments, corporations and private citizens jumped into the changing world of the End of the Cold War with wide eyes and vast ambitions. Canada's natural resource funds began to shift away from conservative investments to more activist positions, and they began to seek out companies that could use Canadian money to do great things. From the building of the first nuclear-powered container ship [1], building of roads and infrastructure projects in Africa and Latin America (particularly the latter), rebuilding industry in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain and generally being as much of a help as possible when needed. Making an example of what could be, Petro-Canada, Hess and Neste announced the construction of four Fischer-Tropsch plants in Britain in December 1984, making the announcement as a not-particularly-subtle way of trying to intervene in the bitter 1984-85 British coal miners' strike. The call was even heard to some extent - and when UK Coal was privatized in 1994, British Synthetic Fuel (the company formed in 1984 by Petro-Canada, Hess and Neste) bought all of it, and kept some of the best mines for economy operating.

General Motors' announcements at Expo 86 were the beginning of what was to be an intense rivalry between GM of Canada and Westland-Reynard, and Canada's auto industry grew with this as well as with the re-organization of British Leyland into Austin Rover Triumph in the early 1980s led to the company being refocused on the Mini, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar and Land Rover brands, prodded by its Canadian and Australian shareholders. This in the affluent 1980s led to Triumph, Jaguar and Land Rover products being sold worldwide, and starting in 1989 Land Rovers began to be assembled in Moncton, New Brunswick, and Triumph and Mini cars began to be assembled there in 1992. Canada's auto industry by the 1980s was largely a fight between home-grown players Westland-Reynard and American rivals General Motors, Ford and American Motors-Renault, the latter becoming a triumph of transatlantic co-operation. By the mid-1980s, though, things were shifting, and Toyota's North American operations, which had begun in California in 1976, grew to the genesis of its huge Georgetown, Kentucky, plant in 1984 and the similarly-huge Cambridge, Ontario, facility, which began operations in 1988. Toyota Canada was quick to recognize the advantages of Canadian workers and the facilities that could be built in Canada, and as Cambridge grew into a big facility in the 1990s, Toyota's second Canadian plant, the Alberta Truck Plant, was built at Langdon, Alberta, and began making trucks in 1995. Toyota's early adoption was joined by Honda, Honda having more than any other diving into the North American car market in the 1990s (partly as a way of staving off multiple takeover attempts in Japan) and building cars to suit, with Honda's Alliston, Ontario, facility its first cars in 1994. The Japanese automakers' arrival in Canada was a sign that the world's car markets were global, but this suited Canada just fine.

Bombardier's ambition with aircraft design grew in the 1980s, and they took advantage of the higher Canadian dollar to buy Beechcraft and Learjet, aiming to get into the executive market. The Beechcraft Model 2000 'Starship', first sold in 1988 [2], was the first result of many as Bombardier sought to massively expand its aerospace involvement, an ambition that grew with the merger between Bombardier and De Havilland Canada in 1992. The De Havilland Dash-8 turboprop airliner, popular around North America, began to be sold around the world as a result, even as it as a result butted heads with Canadair, whose highly-popular Metroliner jetliner had been (along with the Boeing 737 and McDonnell-Douglas DC-9) the dominant players in the world of small jetliners for decades. But Bombardier, however, had its sights set on something much bigger, and in March 1996, they announced the development of the Bombardier Challenger, a 275-passenger brutus meant to fly at just below the speed of sound with Trans-Pacific range, its primary selling point being that it could shave hours off of long flights without having to go supersonic. Bombardier's ambitious proposal somewhat overshadowed Canadair's announcement of its 'New Metroliner' a month before, but regardless both projects came to fruition. The CL-275 'Metroliner II' first flew in May 1999 and entered active service with Canadian Airlines in January 2001. Bombardier's more-ambitious project, however, took longer to develop, but it first test flew in May 2001, and the Bombardier Challenger 275 first saw active service with Air Canada in December 2002, while a longer version, the Challenger 325, entered active service in May 2004.

The completion of Canada's Highway 101, the limited-access Trans-Canada Expressway, in 1986 coincided with the completion of the Interstate Highway System in the United States in making it easier to travel across the country, but the advent of high-speed rail in North America and concerns about both the comfort of air travel and the difficulty of driving was music to the ears of both Amtrak and Via Rail, and the two quasi-governmental agencies developed their 'Superliner' cars to suit this demand. Via Rail also chose to completely rebuild hundreds of older cars, most famously the stainless-steel The Canadian trainsets inheirited from Canadian Pacific and the black and light green Supercontinental train sets from Canadian National Railways. The result was that Via's long-distance trains got better and better as the 1980s went on, and the development of airliner-style AVOD systems in the late 1980s and ever-better amenities and facilities on all trains did a good job of putting passengers onto Via's long-distance routes. Like Amtrak, passenger trains in America got faster, more luxurious or both during the time, and the building of the high-speed systems in Canada drove similar improvements in the United States, particularly in the Northeast. This proved a problem in a way for both Toronto and Montreal - the huge Mirabel Airport in Montreal, opened in 1976, proved a white elephant until Dorval Airport was closed in 1990, and Toronto's Pickering Airport [3], opened in 1983, initially met a similar fate, a fate not helped by the high-speed train system that was then under construction - but in Toronto's case, the downgrading of Toronto's congested Pearson Airport in favor of Pickering proved highly beneficial, and both cities built express airport lines to the airports to improve access to those airports. The 1990s and 2000s, however, saw short-haul flights rapidly replaced in large number by international flights into both airports as Canadians appeared in places all over the world.

Canada's electronics industries were one of the areas where they got involved the most in chasing the future. Telecommunications behemoths Bell Canada, Shaw Telecommunications and Rogers Communications were joined by a fourth player, Telus Communication Systems, after Telus began to aggressively expand from its Prairie Province base in the 1980s, stretching across Canada by 2000, and the massive build-up of telecommunications infrastructure in Canada in the 1990s saw huge portions of the country see services switched from the traditional copper cables for communication to fiber-optic systems, and the development by Waterloo, Ontario-based glass cable maker Daniels-Walker of photonic crystal fibers in 1998 picked up the pace even more. Ottawa-based monster telecommunications companies Nortel Networks and Mitel Telecommunications were quick to jump into the market for devices and services meant to use this system, and by the end of the 1990s they were major players in the world of telecommunications not just in Canada but worldwide. The completion of Bell's Trunk Line 1 fiber-optic system through the United States from Nassau, Bahamas to Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1996 moved fiber-optic communications to the Caribbean, and the rapid development of the Internet in the 1990s opened new worlds for many companies, resulting in both Eastern Ontario and southwestern Quebec and much of Southwestern Ontario undergoing a major tech boom. The size of the Canadian tech boom became apparent when one of its major players, Newbridge Networks, effectively took over French telecom equipment provider Alcatel in 2002, with the resulting Alcatel Newbridge being based in Ottawa and with a majority-Canadian board.

As the 1980s went on, the entry of the 'Welfare Capitalism' and 'Business-Labor Alliance' into the public psyche during the decade became a sign of what was changing in the world of business. Investors still expected returns, but laying people off in numbers to do this became horribly frowned upon in the 1980s, as investors grew to expect strength as a virtue as well as profit. Aware of this, more than a few boards sought to deal with unprofitable assets by selling them to their workers and then doing alliances with the newly-independent companies, effectively keeping the benefits but getting the financial losses off of the balance sheets, as well as giving the employees of such facilities the ability to make their own fates. Unions in the English-speaking world took to this like a duck to water, helped by many unions and governments being plenty willing to provide financial support to companies which sought to make such firms survive. The Guild of Independent Steelmakers, established in 1987, was one of the signs that the little guys were ganging up, and they used their considerable political power to fight the dumping of steel into North American markets that other nations, particularly China, did in the 1980s. (growing use of steel in infrastructure projects also helped ease demand, and thus price and company profitability, issues.)

America by the 1980s looked up almost longingly at its neighboring country. America's 1950s to 1970s had been dominated by the fights among themselves, but as the 1980s went on, racism sank as more and more of the boomer generation began to regard it as stupidity and America's ever-growing population of visible minorities looked out for themselves, fought for others and made life noticably easier for white America all at the same time. Changes in drug policy under Presidents Carter and Kennedy made life easier for police and prosecutors while at the same time doing much to give drug users new chances at life. America's poorer classes by the mid-1980s were starting on an upward trajectory for their incomes and quality of life that would last decades, a situation mirrored in Canada, even as the central cities in practically every case got increasingly expensive for those of lower incomes to live - indeed, this would become a major issue in the civil politics of several cities in the 1990s and 2000s. Canada didn't really have such problems to worry about, and it showed clearly.

[1] That ship was NS Advance Atlantic, built for Canada Steamship Lines by Saint John Shipbuilding, which entered revenue service in 1991 on Halifax-Le Havre and Halifax-Rotterdam routes.

[2] The Starship here is recognized for being the innovation it is, and while it doesn't sell great in the United States, it does in Canada and Europe, and the RCAF, RAF, RAAF and JASDF all operate it in light-transport duties along with many police organizations and the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia, among others.

[3] Mirabel Airport became known as Robert Bourassa Mirabel International Airport in 1997 after Bourassa's death from melanoma the year before, and Pickering Airport was re-named William Davis International Airport in 1986 after the long-time Ontario Premier who had retired the year before.

TheMann · Jan 9, 2017

Part 16 - The Events of The New World, Part 1

By the end of the 1980s the world was shifting, and the events of the end of the era would prove it as clearly as sunlight, as between 1989 and 1992 the world's geopolitics, dominated since 1945 by the rivalry between the world's two largest superpowers and their supporters around the world, would be tossed in ways that few could have imagined. From the sudden collapse of the Iron Curtain to the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the resulting Hong Kong Crisis to the First Persian Gulf War and the Collapse of Apartheid would throw new challenges and surprises in ways that even that scant few years before would have been almost unimaginable. For the United States and the Commonwealth of Nations, it would result in a further understanding of their common viewpoints and objectives, and it would be the beginning of a new era for humanity.

1989 began with the death of Japan's Emperor Hirohito, who had been on Japan's Chyrsantheum Throne since 1926 and had achieved a truly remarkable feat - he had both been the symbol of the nation for its militaristic times and its disastrous involvement in World War II, and then had been the symbol for Japan's rebirth and the creation of its new identity and its new nation state that, by 1989, was one of the world's most prosperous. Hirohito, who had been more than willing in the post-war world to make clear his regret for the actions of Japan's actions before 1945, saw that respect more than fully returned at his funeral, as the Presidents of Korea and the Phillippines were among the visitors, among numerous heads of states - Queen Elizabeth II led the Commonwealth delegation, which included Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom, Brian Mulroney of Canada, Bob Hawke of Australia, David Lange of New Zealand and Rajiv Gandhi of India. American President Edward Kennedy was also among the visitors, along with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. What perhaps got the most attention during the State Funeral of Emperor Hirohito was when his son, Emperor-to-be Akihito, gave his eulogy, including a powerful statement that he was most proud of his father for his ability to recognize that Japan's past conduct had been so wrong, his pride that so many nations of the world had been willing to send such a quantity of dignitaries to his father's funeral and his own statement that Japan would never again allow militarism to do harm to any other member of the human species - and in an event that surprised a great many (not to mention being a sizable breach of previously-established protocol), Akihito asked for the first speaker at the funeral to be Korean President Roh Tae-Woo, who was only too happy to say that he was willing in accept the apologies of Japan and that Japan's decades of looking for the truth of what happened in its awful past had made Korea willing to let Hirohito's spirit go in peace, for he had earned it. Roh's surprisingly-conciliatory speech and Akihito's statement was the dawn of a new era of relations between Korea and Japan, which even despite Japan's efforts since the 1960s to discover its past had always been tinged with some suspicion, which both Akihito and Roh were willing to admit had been as much been about economic competition as Japan's past. In the years following, however, Korea and Japan would find themselves increasingly allies, partners and friends.

Within months of the first events of 1989, the focus of the world shifted from Asia to Europe, beginning in Poland, where the Communist government, realizing the problems that Gorbachev's unwillingness to intervene into the Warsaw Pact states as a result of the Soviet Union's immense financial problems of the late 1980s, began to negotiate in February 1989 with the Solidarity trade union movement, despite having been trying to suppress it since 1981. The resulting April 1989 elections in Poland were almost entirely swept by Solidarity, and the Iron Curtain melted away with almost unreal speed. But before that however, the world turned back to Asia briefly in May and June 1989, towards China this time.

China had begun reforms following the death of People's Republic Founder Mao Zedong in 1976 and the failure of the "Gang of Four" to maintain his power, resulting in the ascension into power of Deng Xiaopeng at the 14th Party Congress in 1978. Deng had almost immediately improved relations with the West and had begun the long process of opening China's economy, but by 1987-1988 economic problems were causing what the West would have called stagflation, as China's government had opened the money supply too fast and had made attempts to remove price controls, only to have cash withdrawals and hoarding of goods cause the government to backtrack within weeks. Despite this, the action, along with the rising problems with corruption and nepotism in China at the time made for real problems for China's central government, which came to a head after one of Deng's closest reformer allies, Hu Yaobeng, died of a heart attack on April 15, 1989. China attempted a mild crackdown with the People's Daily's April 26 editorial, but it blew up in their faces as the massive protests, enraged at what they considered a direct attack on their interests, grew vastly larger as a result. Gorbachev's visit to China on May 15 proved to be a catalyst - while General Secretary Zhao Ziyang attempted to make peace with the protesters, Premier Li Peng's demand for the use of force won out, and on June 2 the People's Liberation Army began its attempt to clear the city of protesters. Several PLA units, however, refused orders and instead attempted to defend the protesters, which wound up making matters far worse as the troops then, not knowing what they were facing, opened up on anything and everything. CNN Reporter Christopher Miller was shot dead on camera by a PLA soldier and CBC World Service journalist Casey Bennett and her videographer Kenneth Marshall were reporting from the square when they were racked by machine gun fire while they were live on air, resulting in CBC viewers actually seeing the face of the blood-covered, dying Bennett on camera. Bennett's death would end up being a world-changing event, even as the suppression of the protests resulted in body counts estimated anywhere from 2,500 to as high as 10,000.

To say the world was horrified was an understatement, and the images of the dying Casey Bennett would up being a cause celebre in Canada to those who were opposed to China. The protests at Tiananmen Square had been watched with interest by the Commonwealth, which had been mindful of the United Kingdom's 1984 deal which had resulted in the planned handover of Hong Kong to China in July 1997. Hong Kong had been watching more closely - and Tiananmen Square caused an immediate and monstrous political crisis in Hong Kong and real problems in the Commonwealth. Suddenly facing a handover to what suddenly seemed like a very hostile China, Hong Kong demanded that the deal with Beijing be scrapped. Mindful of the military problems that defending Hong Kong would cause, Britain refused to do this, pointing out a need to negotiate with China. Peng then made the Hong Kong Crisis far worse by loudly saying that if Britain ignored the deal, China would take Hong Kong back by force - an action that on June 14 caused over 300,000 people to flee Hong Kong in just two weeks and Hong Kong's stock market to lose over half of its value in just ten days, setting off market shocks all over the world. Thatcher, left with a sudden crisis, attempted to speak to the Chinese Government about the crisis, but got blunt refusals, loudly saying that Britain would try to re-negotiate the deal. All the while, Hong Kong was engulfed by panics - by July 1, anti-PRC riots were hard for anybody in the colony to control, and with economic chaos setting in, Thatcher on July 5 asked for help from Washington - and Washington, who had been more than a little shocked by the horrors coming out of Beijing, stood up with its long-time ally, announcing on July 11 that the United States would guarantee Hong Kong's position in negotiations with China, and that Britain and China needed to make it clear that the 1997 Agreement's provisions, including the 'One Country, Two Systems' provision, was still in force.

Beijing, however, had all along seen the protests as being against them, and they were in no mood to negotiate, telling Britain that the 1997 deal date was still in force, but that they would not abide by the provisions of the deal, and that they expected Hong Kong to immediately revert to being part of the People's Republic of China, with Li Peng directly contradicting Deng Xiaoping's actions on this front. This declaration on July 15, caused the largest riot in Hong Kong yet, and cause Hong Kong's stock exchange to bottom out at a level of just one-eighth of what it had been seven weeks before. Faced with this, Britain in July 1989 began quietly asking the Commonwealth whether they would be willing to assist Britain should they force the issue on Hong Kong with China. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square, this approval proved not terribly difficult to get, and Washington too was on board with Britain forcing the issue with the PRC - it seemed the only way to save Hong Kong from spending the next eight years destroying itself, and after the bloody end to the protests in the square it seemed impossible that China would change its mind on dealing with Britain.

Taking that into account, on August 19, 1989, London announced that it would not recognize the Sino-British Joint Declaration would not be recognized by Britain, and that Hong Kong would retain its status of crown colony with self-governance. It was a bold play that was sure to enrage China, but Beijing, recognizing that the Commonwealth and the United States were siding with the British and that further problems with the West were not in China's interest, they made their loud protests but by the end of September had backed off quite a lot, though China's sharp turn back towards socialist authoritarianism would be noticable both in Hong Kong and China for many years to come. Hong Kong's legislative assembly was reformed dramatically as a result, and in April 1990 passed the Hong Kong Basic Law, which was effectively the colony's constitution. As if to make the point, Hong Kong in the winter of 1989-90 would see one visit by foreign warships after another - USS Nimitz and USS Missouri were the first to visit, visiting in September 1989, while Royal Navy flagship HMS Vanguard and aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales visited in November 1989 and HMCS Terra Nova and her battle group spent Christmas and New Year's in Hong Kong, docking there on December 23 and departing on January 4, 1990. Between 1990 and 1997 Hong Kong enjoyed some improvement in its economy, but uncertainty over the former handover date remained - but July 1, 1997, came and went without incident.

1989 would go down as a disaster for the People's Republic of China, as it would later become obvious even to Beijing that its aggression against their own people and their bellicose actions towards Hong Kong and the Commonwealth over actions that could easily have been avoided if China had been willing to understand Western anger over Tiananmen Square and the sudden fear of Hong Kongers after the violence of June 1989. It would take many years for Hong Kong to economically recover from the events of the summer of 1989, but they would do that, and take of Hong Kong returning to Chinese jurisdiction would rarely be spoken of again, and indeed the appointment of Chris Patten as Governor of Hong Kong of 1992 would be a watershed moment for the colony, as Patten would prove an adept operator who was quite willing to help Hong Kong transition towards a democratic system of government, a transition which would pay huge dividends in the late 1990s and early 2000s. China's June 1989 violence and western sanctions that were almost immediately enacted proved devastating to China's economic growth, with the country in a steep recession from summer 1989 until spring 1993, and China would take nearly two decades before its economic performance matched its early 1989 results - and the swing out of China landed directly in the laps of the other Asian nations, India, the Philippines and Indonesia most of all.

Beyond China's huge geopolitical and economic damage done by Tiananmen Square, the Hong Kong Crisis showed the Commonwealth's willingness to stick together even in the face of a situation like Hong Kong's and in the face of anger by one of the world's most powerful nations. Facing the end of communism in Europe - a situation becoming obvious by the end of the summer in 1989, but how huge it would get was not yet known - and a growing crisis in South Africa, the Commonwealth was keen to gets its members on the same page, and this proved easier than expected, despite the wide ideological differences between the likes of Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi and Brian Mulroney and Margaret Thatcher. Military and diplomatically, the Commonwealth nations were finding themselves once again increasingly able to work with each other on their own projects and objectives, reducing their reliance on the United States, something the Commonwealth appreciated and President Kennedy increasingly approved of as it reduced America's security commitments to the world.

Japan had also noticed the Commonwealth's willingness to work on their projects, and in late 1989 Japan would do a rather big deal with the Commonwealth - Japan would trade the rights to the Kawasaki C-2 transport plane and P-1 maritime patrol plane design for the ability to license-build the Panavia Tornado, which the JASDF wanted to replace aging F-4 Phantoms used in attack roles and to complement the incoming Kawasaki F-2 fighters. As Britain, Canada and Australia all were looking at replacements for Short Belfast and Lockheed Hercules transport aircraft and Canada and Australia were looking to replace CP-126D Argus patrol aircraft, this was a good deal, and the RAF, RCAF and RAAF would introduce Bombardier-built Kawasaki C-2s in 1992 and Hawker Siddeley-built Kawasaki P-1s in 1993, while the Tornado entered JASDF service in 1994. Japan also put one over on Boeing when they chose the Vickers VC-16 airliners to base their aerial refueling fleet on in 1990, a big score for Vickers as they were at that point also seeking to sell the design to Commonwealth nations.

As the crises in Asia eased in September 1989, Europe suddenly fired back up in massive ways.

On August 23, the 'Baltic Way' undertook one of the largest protests against Soviet rule of the Baltic states, with two million people creating an unbroken human chain over 600 kilometres in length and gaining headlines around the world, but on the same day a much more noteworthy event happened seven hundred kilometres away in Hungary, as Hungary removed its border fortifications with Austria, and a month later special chartered trains carried over 7,000 East Germans to Prague, where they were allowed to leave for the West, all claiming asylum in West Germany and Austria. The move forced East Germany to close its borders in an attempt to prevent further emigration, but it was an attempt to stop what by then had become unstoppable. Multiple rounds of massive protests blew up in practically every Warsaw Pact nation, and on the night November 9, 1989, with the whole world watching, the Berlin Wall's first gates opened wide and people began streaming through, causing massive celebrations on the streets of Berlin.

The initial plan by East Germany had been to carefully manage the openings of the wall and allow those who wished to leave to do so, but the collapse of the wall overnight was partly a result of confusion over orders from East Germany's government. In any case it mattered little. East Germany's government collapsed within days, resulting in the new government being more than willing to make the deals that the West had sought for years. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl's 10-point plan for German reunification, announced on November 28, 1989, hadn't come with a timeline, but when East Germany's socialist parties were all but eradicated in elections in March 1990, and Kohl's Christian Democratic Union saw the Eastern wings of it demanding speedy unification, and they had the means to do it. The collapse of the East German mark in the spring of 1990 brought matters to a head, and recognizing that the economic collapse of the East was in nobody's best interest, Bonn quickly moved to unify Germany. The Deutsche Mark became the official currency of East Germany on July 1, 1990, and in the summer and fall of 1990 things worked quickly in Germany, with the legal setup being simple - East Germany's central government legislated itself out of existence and the five former states of East Germany simply joined the West German government. Germany was officially reunited on October 3, 1990, with one particularly emotional moment being the raising of the black-red-gold flag of the now-united Germany being raised over Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. While the events in Germany easily got the most attention, the Warsaw Pact collapsed with unreal speed. By January 1, 1990, the Communist governments from Albania to East Germany had collapsed or were collapsing, and the resulting new states had absolutely no desire to stay anywhere near the Soviet Union, resulting in the Warsaw Pact's dissolution in February 1991.

The Commonwealth actually saw a wedge driven into it on the matter of German unification - Thatcher was bitterly opposed and said so privately, to which Robert Stanfield, who was a Commonwealth adviser at the time, is known to have said "Germany was always going to be united one day, and in this way not only is Germany united but we drive a stake through the heart of the Warsaw Pact at the same time." This quote got leaked to the British Press in March 1990, causing a bit of a furor - but Stanfield, in his usual honest style, refused to budge an inch, and Ottawa's position, but public and private, was in complete agreement with him. The rest of Europe, however, sided closer to Thatcher, but Ottawa's Rolls-Royce class diplomacy helped smooth many of these elements over (particularly with Paris and Amsterdam, both of whom had immense respect for Canada), and in January 1991 got a big help from an unexpected source - Israel.

The Israelis, whose very existence had been the result of the actions of Nazi Germany, threw themselves into the debate by pointing out that Germany had no written constitution, and that one option available to help ease the world's concerns over Germany's unification was for the now-united Germany to have a new constitution drawn up by Germany with the world's assistance, proposing that articles among it say that Germany's 1990 borders would be the absolute limit of Germany's territorial expansion and that Germany constitutionally renounce the use of force for economic or political gains except in support of its allies. Bonn was already going out of its way to ease fears among their European neighbours, something to which Gorbachev (to everyone's surprise) approved of openly, as did Mulroney. Thatcher's last-ditch attempt at trying to rally the Commonwealth to her side fell flat on her face - Canada, Australia, India, Ireland, Israel (which joined the Commonwealth of Nations in 1989) and New Zealand all publicly supported German unification, and Kennedy's only real demand was that united Germany stay a member of NATO, which Germany did. Ultimately Bonn did pay substantial money to the Soviet Union for allowing the unification, but world approval sided rapidly with the Germans, and the final settlement for Germany was signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, and entered into force on March 15, 1991.

Germany, however, took the Israelis advice and began constitutional talks in April 1992, with additional representation granted to East Germans out of a desire to not alienate them and having already settled borders with their neighbours. Kohl also made headlines when, in response to hopes by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin about further economic rehabilitation for the Palestinians, he said "We invite the Israelis to send us a list of what they need. If we have it, or can make it for them, it will be done. We owe them that much." Kohl was held to this when he visited Jerusalem - the first by a German chancellor - in November 1991, and Berlin proved true to their word. Germany's new constitution borrowed liberally from those written for Canada in 1972 and Australia in 1981, and renounced use of force and established that its borders were both permanent and eternal. Happy at this, the Europeans, in the midst of the birth of the European union at the time, happily supported the action along with a vast majority of Germans, eager to get their past into the history books forever. With that, Germany's new constitution was ratified by the Bundestag in April 1993, and came into force on October 1, 1994.

While Europe had been focused for years on unification efforts of their own - the Masstricht Treaty, signed on March 7, 1992, was the genesis of the modern European Union - the unification of Germany and the sudden crash of the Communist states redoubled efforts, and for Canada, it was both an incredibly welcome thing and a great opportunity for them. Able to withdraw forces stationed there since 1945, the Canadian Army withdrew its last permanently-based units in Germany in May 1993, with a final farewell event in Frankfurt held on May 11, 1993, for the departing Canadian soldiers and airmen. At the same time, however, Canada's long-established policies of pluralism and government policies advocing cross-pollination between cultures was increasingly seen as a place to start by Europe. The European Union, founded primarily for economic reasons but over the years having morphed into a major way of uniting the many states and cultures of Europe in a way that allowed all of them to thrive. Having learned that lesson decades before, Canada was only too willing to help with this, and while proposals for Canadian EU membership never went anywhere for geographic and political reasons, Brussels and Ottawa found themselves seeing more and more of each other as mutual interests and desires mixed with Brussels' hopeful desires and Canada's first-class diplomatic corps to create a working relationship matched maybe only by the relationship between Ottawa and Washington. 1989 had proved that the sweeping changes that were racing through the world were indeed ones to be both proud and hopeful of, and much more was to come....

TheMann · Jan 16, 2017

Part 17 - The Events of the New World, Part 2

1989 ended with the world looking far different than it had even a year previously, with China having turned back inward in a dramatic way and with the Warsaw Pact on the verge of collapse. 1990's opening days would be focused on the unification of Germany and the changing situation in South Africa, but it was also easy to notice the increasing liberalization in Latin America, India and Iran advancing into the category of the nations of the future and those two nations assisting in the shifting in the sands of the Middle East, as well as the growth of the Long Boom in Africa that would be known as the African Renaissance before the end of the 1990s. But before that, much was to come....

1989 had finished in Europe but 1990 began in the Middle East, in the midst of a steadily-changing environment. Almost universally ruled by octagenarian dictators for decades, the Ottawa Treaty and the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983 had started something profound, particularly in the aftermath of the First Iran-Iraq War in the early 1980s. Iraq's Saddam Hussein had spent the 1980s building up a formidable military force, in effect doing what Iran had doen in the 1960s and 1970s in an attempt to keep the armed forces on the side of the ruling regime, and Saddam was helped in a way by having the powerful Iranians next door, even if Iran spent the 1980s moving towards democratic rule and substantial social reform. Having the Iranians next door was a useful tool in more ways than one to Saddam, even as the Ottawa Treaty (which Saddam refused to have anything to do with, even as Yasser Arafat spent the 1980s trying to get the other Arabs to support his nascent state and its allies) shifted the goalposts. By 1990, more-liberal interpretations of Islam were flourishing in North Africa, the Holy Land, Iran and Southeast Asia, even as the Arabian Peninsula and their supporters fought viciously against any form of political, social or economic reform. Saddam's Return to Faith Campaign, started in 1985, made matters worse - Saddam's open intention was to use faith to suppress opposition to his rule and support Shiites in Iran, but it didn't really work in Iraq and both angered Iran and caused more than a few pities from them, as Iranians openly commented that the 'backward' Arabs were going backwards while strong and proud Iran was moving forwards. (Indeed, the social conservatism in Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula ended up being a driver of modernization in Iran in the 1980s and 1990s, as Iran sought to distance themselves from their neighbours.)

By 1987, cheap oil prices were contributing to serious problems with Iraqi finances, and Saddam began his long series of tirades against Kuwait, claiming that it was meant to be Iraq's 19th province. Despite some alarm by this in Kuwait, relations between the rest of Gulf states and Baghdad remained cordial, and the seeds of trouble were planted firmly by the Al-Anfal campaign against rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988 which was most infamously marked by the nerve gas bombing of the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, where Iraqi Air Force units bombed the town with mustard gas and multiple kinds of nerve agents, killing over 3,500 people, most of them civilians. Saddam's campaign was looked upon with horror by the Iranians and western-aligned Arabs but mostly ignored by others, though Kuwait took Saddam's actions as terrifying. After multiple rounds of talks in 1988 and 1989 amongst the Arab League proved useless, Kuwait in July 1989 began talking with Iran and Israel for protection, something which infuriated Saddam, and the non-response of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia angered him even further. By 1990, Saddam's accusations of Kuwaiti slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields was causing all kinds of diplomatic headaches, and on March 25, 1990, Kuwait and Iran announced that they had completed a mutual-defense deal, which would go into effect on June 1. The Saudis were shocked but the Iraqis infuriated, and on May 28, 1990, Saddam's massive army invaded Kuwait to annex the province before the mutual-defense deal came into place.

The Kuwaitis fought bravely, but outnumbered better than twenty to one their chances of success were just about nil, and the Iraqis had taken all of small Kuwait within 36 Hours. The Iranians rapidly mobilized, which led to a series of massive air battles between the Iraqi and Iranian Air Forces over the several days after the invasion, battles the Iranians more often than not came out on top of. Saddam, however, didn't know where to stop. Having successfully taken Kuwait, Saddam began threatening the Saudis, raging at their 'betrayal' of the Palestinians with regards to the Ottawa Treaty and for not stopping Iranian 'advancement' by stopping Kuwait's defense deal. Fahd angrily pointed out that Saddam had caused that deal, and the summer of 1990 was marked by a rapid decline of relations between Baghdad and Riyadh. Aware of the threat Saddam posed, Fahd asked for Western help, and had little difficulty getting it. American, Commonwealth, European and several other non-allied nations (including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Korea) sent military units to the Middle East. For the first time, the Israelis were in on the act, mobilizing their own forces and air defense units so that American and Commonwealth units deployed to Israel could be sent to defend Saudi Arabia, and after Saddam's sabre-rattling began to thrown at the Jordanians, the Israelis deployed air defense units to eastern Jordan to cover the Jordanians under their own air-defense umbrella, as well as providing defense in depty against Saddam's weapons.

The deployments quite massive. Over 1.2 million troops, airmen and sailors were sent to the region, of which half were American and another three-tenths Commonwealth. Eight aircraft carriers, three battleships and their combined battle groups were dispatched to the region, while the American XVIII Airborne Corps, including the famed 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne Divisions and 24th Mechanized Infantry, as well as their VII Corps, including the crack 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions, were the lynchpin of the American Ground Effort, while the Commonwealth Corps, led by the British 4th, 7th and 11th Armored Brigades, the 7th Brigade of the Australian Army and the Canadian Army's 2nd Division, were part of the fight as well. The air power assigned to the region was massive as well, with over 1,500 fighters and fighter bombers and better than 150 heavy bombers, American B-52Hs, British Vulcan B.4s and Canadian Victor B.3s loaded with heavy ordinance. The UN gave Saddam until January 15, 1991, to get his forces out of Kuwait or the coalition assembled in Saudi Arabia would use force to remove them. Saddam, however, didn't wait until then, however.

On January 2, 1991, the war began with a Saddam's army firing off better than 300 Scud missiles at targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Israel, the latter a tactic aimed at splitting the coalition forces - a tactic that didn't work in the slightest. The war began immediately, but the West got a horrifying surprise on January 5 when the Commonwealth Corps was bombed by Iraqi units firing chemical weapons. The Commonwealth units suffered minimal casualties thanks to NBC-equipped vehicles and momentarily pulled back, but the Iraqi success was short lived as the now-livid Commonwealth forces sent their entire air forces in the region - 75 bombers and better than 600 fighters and attack aircraft - after the Iraqi Air Force, and the Israeli Air Force co-operated with the Commonwealth forces by attacking bases in Western Iraq over Jordan, which knew and approved of the operations. To many's surprise, the Palestinians took off after the Israelis, guarding the Israelis and getting into one large dogfight with Iraqi MiG-23s, the Palestinians' F-4E Phantom IIs scoring eleven kills against two losses. The second time the Palestinians went out, they went out with heavily bomb-laden F-4s....and Israeli F-15s riding shotgun on them, with Jordanian Mirage F1s not far behind. The Commonwealth air attacks devastated nearly every Iraqi air base south of Baghdad, while Canadian and British bombers unloaded better than 300 cruise missiles at the Iraqis, gunning for command and control targets of the Iraqi Air Force. The strike on Baghdad was also the first actual Canadian combat use of its legendary Avro Arrow, as RCAF CF-105H Arrows engaged Iraqi interceptors, particularly MiG-25s, scoring eight kills against no losses for the Arrows. While the Commonwealth units savaged the Iraqi Air Force, the Americans made do with destroying front-line units and adding to the destruction of the Iraqi Army.

What befell the Iraqi Air Force was awful, but what befell Saddam's land army was worse. American units, supported by French and Arab units, tore into Kuwait from the south with the Arabs coming in from the West on February 11, 1991, encountering a handful of attempts to attack armored units with chemical weapons but that rapidly stopping - third-party messages informed the Iraqis that both the American, Commonwealth nations and French would answer such actions with nuclear weapons of their own if the use of chemicals kept up - and several tank battles where Iraqi tanks engaged their enemies, usually to little effect - the Iraqis' T-72s and Type 69s had little chance of punching though the armor on an American M1 Abrams or Commonwealth Challenger 2 - and the Iraqis melted away when faced with Western units, which had far greater esprit de corps and far better equipment. The Kuwaitis got the job of liberating their own capital city and, despite stiff opposition from the Iraqis, achieved the goal just 72 Hours after the initial liberation of Kuwait began on February 24. It took less than 96 Hours for Kuwait to be cleared of the Iraqi Army, and they ran straight up the Highway 80, which ran from Basra, Iraq, to Kuwait City, running with everything they could, including hundreds of stolen civilian vehicles. That column was bombed and strafed repeatedly by American, French and Saudi attack aircraft, which absolutely savaged the convoys. Worse still for Saddam, his elite Republican Guards raced out of Kuwait only to be flanked by the Commonwealth Corps, whose Challenger 2s absolutely savaged the Iraqi tanks, and the few infantry units that stayed and fought ended up being harder to dig out than the Commonwealth commanders initially expected, though Canadian M198TA truck-mounted artillery guns and their devastating G8-52 203mm heavy guns and their bursting shells proved instrumental in digging out the Iraqis who chose to fight on.

The coalition chose not to fight all the way to Baghdad - the Saudis still felt Iran was the bigger threat than a weakened Saddam, something that angered the Commonwealth countries - causing the war to directly end on March 10 for the Americans. This decision, however, led to massive uprisings among the Shiite and Kurdish populations of Iraq in the summer of 1991. Recognizing Saddam's weakness and the hope that the problem could be dealt with internally, the Iranians supported the Kurds with finances, logistics and air power, in the process destroying much of what was left of the Iraqi Air Force in the summer of 1991. The Israelis, Palestinians and Commonwealth did the same in northern Iraq, and both situations put a halt to Iraqi attempts to take back the territories. The problems exploding in Russia by that point, however, all but ended the ability for Western military intervention, but by that point it didn't matter. Iraq's Shiite population largely worked with Iran while the Kurds, now having control over their own destiny thanks to the Commonwealth and the Israelis, began developing plans for actual nationhood in the winter of 1991-92. By early 1992, Iraq was still on paper a unified states, but Iraq's army had their hands full simply maintaining order. In June 1993, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq declared independence as the nation of Kurdistan, with the West largely accepting the independence immediately and through the 1990s steadily accepting it as real. Iraq, by contrast, became an ideological battle ground between the Sunni government and Shiite population as Iran and Saudi Arabia would face each other down over the years to come.

1990 saw the massive cracks that had opened in apartheid's facade over the previous five years bust wide open. The African National Congress, banned in South Africa since 1960, was legalized by the apartheid state in January 1990, and on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison near Cape Town a free man for the first time in 27 years. South Africa was by this time, however, a racial tinderbox - two decades of economic sanctions had caused economic pain in vast quantities for South Africa, and the second half of the 1980s had seen Pretoria resort to ever-uglier tactics to suppress anti-apartheid protests, culminating in the downright-ugly Koevoet units in Namibia and the infamous Civil Co-operation Bureau. Mandela, however, was able to convince much of the ANC to work towards peace, even as South Africa's civil society was badly burned by violent protests in 1990 and 1991. Mandela and the ANC, however, were most concerned by the violence between Zulu and Xhosa South Africans which had been rampant since 1986, but in 1992 Mandela and Inaktha Freedom Front leader Mangosothu Buthelezi stunned the apartheid government in Pretoria by announcing the creation of an alliance to both reduce the violence and confront the apartheid government's policies both at negotiating tables and civil disobedience. This came weeks before a whites-only referendum on whether to continue negotiations to end apartheid, which South African President F.W. de Klerk used in an attempt to end the rising white opposition to the negotiations.

De Klerk won his referendum, but not by much (55-45), and it caused a massive rift within the white minority. On April 25, 1992, units of the South African Defense Force occupied the houses of Parliament in Cape Town - parliament was not in session and no hostages were taken by this - and units of the SADF, along with a sizable number of the white minority in South Africa, publicly said that they would not support majority rule and instead preferred to turn the Western Cape regions of South Africa into a home for the white minority, the Cape Town region chosen because of its smallest numbers of black South Africans - and despite the fact that it was a left-wing bastion that had been the center of anti-apartheid forces for over a decade. Large swaths of the SADF moved against De Klerk's government, not undertaking any physical actions against that government but ignoring their orders en masse, causing the country's escalating political chaos to get much, much worse - a situation made worse still when the ANC Youth League's charismatic leader, Chris Hani, was gunned down by an assassin in Johannesburg on May 16, 1992. De Klerk was forced in this case to rely on Mandela to try to tone down the violence, and Mandela, recognizing that a chaotic multi-sided civil war was a very likely result if he failed, spoke eloquently to the people of South Africa during a televised speech on May 19, 1992, urging South Africans of all colours to stay away from violence, that whites were not going to be left out of the government of their homeland - indeed, Mandela's explicitly referring to South Africa as the Afrikaner homeland raised a great many eyebrows, including that of De Klerk and the apartheid government - and to not throw away the progress being made towards freedom, saying "We have freedom in sight. We can see it, taste it and picture ourselves living in it, and we cannot throw it all away now by an unwillingness to look at our differences."

Mandela's speech got the job done, and the country's violence noticeably subsided in the following days. De Klerk helped this by publicly sacking his defense minister (whom he distrusted, and would later be found to have been involved in the planning for the actions in Cape Town) and offering amnesty for those who had not committed violence against others during the Cape Town takeover. These offers, however, were denied loudly by those running the shadow government in Cape Town, and Cape Town by early June was racked with daily protests against the continuation of apartheid in the Cape regions, and when police units in Cape Town attempted to put down one of the largest protests yet on June 14, resulting in 11 people killed and over 200 injured, it forced the South Africans' hand - both Mandela and De Klerk went to the Commonwealth to ask for help in dealing with the renegades, and the Commonwealth, which had been a vocal opponent of apartheid for decades and had been strongly supporting attempts at negotiating a multiracial, democratically-governed South Africa, was only too happy to say yes to the deployment of peacekeepers. All knew, however, that this had the potential to turn ugly - so when the British and Canadians came to begin the job, they didn't mess around.

For Canada, Operation Springbok, which would be known as the Cape Town Mission, began on July 27, 1992, when the recently-formed (1986) 2 Commando Royal Canadian Marine Corps joined 40 Commando of the Royal Marines in landing at the Simonstown Naval Base south of Cape Town, meeting very little resistance at Simonstown. The South African defense had been centered on artillery guns built into Table Mountain firing on attackers, but the Commonwealth had expected that, and HMS Vanguard was on hand to deal with that, along with USS Missouri, sent by the Americans to back up the Commonwealth forces. After pounding the guns to hell and gone, the battleships watched as two battalions apiece of the Royal Marines and the Royal Canadian Marine Corps landed in Cape Town, along with the Canadian Army's two Airborne Regiments, one of which was assigned to land directly on top of Table Mountain, supported by attack aircraft and attack helicopters. The South African Air Force's attempt to stop the landings saw twenty-one fighters shot down by carrier aircraft from HMCS Resurrection and HMS Queen Elizabeth II, and after one organized assault on the forces at Simonstown by mechanized units ate a pile of 16" shells from Missouri and hundreds of 155mm shells from Canadian destroyers along with bombs and rockets from British Harriers, the forces at Cape Town quickly retreated out of the city, intent on causing trouble - but it didn't take long for the renegade SADF units to realize what they were up against and back down, with only a handful of units fighting to the end, the last such units defeated in March 1993.

The events of 1992 in South Africa had two strategic results - De Klerk's comments that he would be the man to close the book on apartheid would indeed be fulfilled, and Mandela got the sign that white South African concerns needed to be accommodated, even if that meant wholesale changes to the strategies of the ANC in aiming for a majority government. De Klerk's desire for a bicameral government was accepted by the ANC, but in return the ANC got its desire for a single-stage movement to democracy. The upper house would have a disproportionate number of seats for South Africans of minorities, a demand of De Klerk, while the bottom house would be the starter of all legislation. The negotiations went remarkably smoothly after the Cape Town Mission, helped by the ANC's senior leaders, particularly Mandela, Joe Slovo and Cyril Ramaphosa, being able to be adept negotiators who struck up excellent rapports with their National Party counterparts. The end result was South Africa's first multiracial elections, held on April 27, 1994.

These elections were a triumph - the ANC won a dominant victory as expected, but turnout was high across all of South Africa's racial groups and violence was nearly non-existent. Famed SADF general Constand Viljoen (who had not been a part of the military rebellion and loudly argued against it) had initially prepared a sizable paramilitary force as a way of ensuring white South Africans' safety, but in January 1994 he began his own legitimate election campaign, all but ensuring that right-wing violence was off of the table - and indeed, Viljoen was elected to parliament and was, to the surprise of many, appointed as South Africa's first post-apartheid Defense Minister, an act which is said to have surprised even him. One of the new parliament's first acts was to elect Mandela as South Africa's President, a position he dutifully accepted, appointing De Klerk and Thabo Mbeki as his Vice-Presidents and including large numbers of National Party and Inaktha members in his government, as well as Viljoen and famed anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman. This government, despite a sizable number of political and personal differences, proved remarkably effective, and established in South Africa the idea of multiparty alliances based on the competency of their leaders and their intelligence, both getting the best people available for the job and gaining wide, multiracial support for policies.

The competency and the progress of the new government proved to a watershed in a way few expected. South Africa's new constitution, passed with near-unanimous support in October 1996, explicitly outlawed any form of racial discrimination, and while the ANC had a dominant position in South African politics following 1994, Mandela and his successors proved remarkably good at negotiations and his political opponents proved effective critics, and the multiparty alliance system formed in 1994 proved permanent. It also re-established South Africa as a critical member of the Commonwealth, and between South African investors (a great many of whom white) diving into the rest of the continent, trade with Africa coming back to South Africa after decades of isolation and the Commonwealth diving into South Africa, the country's economy exploded in size, growing at an average rate of 8.1% a year between 1995 and 2007, despite a backoff after the 9/11 attacks, and the governments made vast efforts to direct wealth down to the poorer members of society. Taking a page from the Canadians' book, South Africa established its own natural resource wealth fund, the Rand Fund, in 1997 in order to profit off of mineral wealth windfalls. South Africa's new government was not only welcomed into the Commonwealth it rejoined it with wide enthusiasm - Canadian and Australian investors in particular wanted into the country's vast mineral wealth, and Pretoria didn't take long to figure out that their own economic advancement could be hugely-boosted by relations with the rich nations of the Commonwealth. South Africa proved an industrial paradise in the years to come, as the country explicitly sought several forms of heavy industry, particularly steel and aluminum production, shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing and textile making, as a way of employing the millions of unemployed and underemployed the country had to deal with, along with vast adult education programs to improve the education levels of those who had abandoned educations to fight apartheid or as a result of school costs. Progress in these regards was mixed, but South Africa was able to draw more than enough skilled workers to make this less of an issue.

Europe had been shaken to the bone by the events of late 1989, shaking the foundations of post-war Europe to powder and making the Warsaw Pact and the Helsinki Declaration all but worthless. Making matters worse was the state of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev's ascension to Premier of the Soviet Union in 1985 had come at a time when it was becoming clear at long last in the USSR that competing militarily with the United States and Commonwealth of Nations was all but impossible, even as the Soviet Union sought to repair the long-damaged relations between the Soviet Union and China, a relationship repair brought on in large part by India's effective departure in the 1980s from the non-aligned sphere as they sought closer-ties with the Commonwealth, two of whose leading nations were members of NATO. By the mid-1980s, the economic size of Japan and India had eclipsed the USSR, and Germany, Canada, Brazil and Mexico were on the way by that point as well. While the Commonwealth hadn't built the vast nuclear arsenal the United States and Soviet Union had, they possessed huge economic power, unimaginable natural resources and sizable military capabilities, and making matters worse for the USSR in the last regard was that the European and Commonwealth military projects of the 1970s and 1980s produced many excellent and in many cases ground-breaking products, from the British Harrier jump-jet and the Canadian Vampire attack tiltwing and the European Panavia Tornado attack aircraft to the world-class Western tanks - the German Leopard 2 and Anglo-Canadian Challenger 2 were both a match for anything the USSR had, and the several series of wheeled armored personnel carriers, the Canadian Tyrannus series being the most equal of the equals, outmatched anything the Soviets had. Even as both sides recognized the dangers posed by nuclear annihalation and reduced nuclear arsenals accordingly, the Soviets were well aware that they were hopelessly outmatched in terms of conventional force quality and ease of rapid deployment, a severe problem for their plans.

Economic issues were at the heart of the problems, but social problems were also present, and Gorbachev's plan was to use the pride of the country's accomplishments and hopes for the future that lay ahead to allow the rigid control of previous times to be walked back to allow the people greater freedom - Gorbachev had been a keen observer of what had happened in Poland in the early 1980s, and he feared such a situation in a Soviet SSR could lead to the destruction of the Union. His policies of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) were the result, seeking to restructure the economy and open up society at the same time, effectively trying to do what China was trying to do economically while opening up society in a way reminiscent of several nations that spent the 1980s destroying tyranny such as Korea, Iran, the Philippines and South Africa. It was a bold play that saw considerable initial successes, but by the late 1980s the problems with it were accelerating. Perestroika made some economic reforms possible but caused many other serious ones, and Glasnost went far too fast for the Soviet Union to control at its core. The problems of the Soviet Union were made worse by the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear accident on April 25, 1986, where one of the nuclear power station's reactors effectively self-destructed, spreading massive amounts of radioactive contamination and forcing the permanent evacuation of over 130,000 people.

Glasnost proved the straw that broke the camel's back. Soviet citizens by the 1980s were by and large simply wanting their lives to get better but had little expectation of it, and the Glasnost-era media exposed countless problems that the state-run media had been desperate to avoid talking about - from the injustices of the past to the numerous social problems of the Soviet Union (alcoholism, drug abuse, often-terrible housing, awful working conditions, endemic corruption) and the raising of nationalism, which by 1989 had come to a head in the Baltics and the Caucasus regions. Making matters worse, while Perestroika had been successful in modifying many economic elements of the Soviet Union, many of the core problems remained unchanged, and the end of central control over production decisions created more problems instead of reducing existing ones.

1990 saw the Baltics declare their independence and the ethnic tensions between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Caucasus boil over, forcing the Red Army to retake the region by force. Despite this, Gorbachev attempted to reform the USSR, creating the post of President of the SSRs (now named the Soviet Federal Socialist Republics) and developing the New Union Treaty, which was endorsed by a large majority of voters in a March 1991 referendum across the Union, aside from the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus regions. Gorbachev and the Supreme Soviet moved to enshrine this, but on August 16, 1991, the Soviet hardliners struck back with a massive coup attempt across the Union. Russian SFSR President Boris Yeltsin was shot dead on that day as he tried to speak to protesters, causing a massive popular uprising in the city which rapidly spread across the country, as units of the Soviet Army turned on one another in August and September 1991, causing multiple rounds of horrendous ugliness.

Red Army units in Russia ended up fighting with everything they could get their hands on - up to complete battles involving tank divisions, short-range ballistic missiles and strategic bombers - with rebels in Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine and the Baltics, who fought with their own weapons and units. The Red Army committed multiple rounds of horrors when they proved unable to move resistance in the Baltics and resorted to terrorizing them with thousands of Scud missiles, five of which struck the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Lithuania, causing a major loss of coolant incident at the facility. Eastern Ukraine became a battleground between the Soviet Army and ethnic Russians in the region against ethnic Ukrainians, resulting in over 40,000 military casualties and massive destruction of the region. Both sides used their own missiles and bombers to attempt to demoralize the other sides, and in Ukraine the two sides both resorted to the use of chemical weapons, particularly VX and Sarin nerve agents, to break the deadlocked situation between them.

The single worst event of the violent breakup of the USSR broke out in the Caucasus regions, after in February 1992 Azerbaijan and Turkey turned on Armenia, causing one of the ugliest events of modern times as the Turkish and Azerbaijani armed forces turned on the Armenians in numbers, both destroying the Armenians' armed forces and then murdering over 300,000 Armenian civilians before television news of the massacres in July 1992 saw the Iranians get involved, sending their own armed forces into Armenia in an attempt at peacekeeping. After the Turks fired on these forces, Iran committed its huge army to a full-scale invasion of Armenia and asking for the Russians to get involved. The Iranians swept aside the Azerbaijanis and Turkish units in Azerbaijan, as well as the Iranians openly instigating the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey to fight for their own independence, to be assisted by the Iranians - Tehran justifying this by pointing out the Turks actions towards the Kurds and Armenians in history had been awful of epic proportions and stuck to their guns despite Turkish fury at the points. The Iranians occupied the entirety of Armenia by January 1993, restoring the Armenian leaders to their posts and making it clear to the Turks and Azerbaijanis that any further attacks on the Armenians would be treated as an attack on Iran. Azerbaijan attempted to force the issue with Scud attacks on Tehran and other cities in northern Iran in February and March 1993, with the Iranians responding with massive airstrikes in response on military facilities and directly bombing Azerbaijan's parliament building with laser-guided bombs from F-16 fighters.

The Soviet Union's civil war lasted until final peace treaties were signed in November 1993, and while it had not stretched all the way across the USSR as many feared - violence in the Central Asian republics had been close to non-existent - the result of the two years of war were catastrophic - an estimated 320,000 soldiers and five million civilians were dead, there was now a second sizable portion of radioactive contamination in Lithuania, Belarus and Russia, vast chemical contamination in areas of the Donetsk Basin and large portions of the Baltic states, much of the eastern half of Ukraine, a sizable portion of Belarus and nearly all of the Caucasus regions lay in ruins. Turkey's decision to get involved in the war supporting Azerbaijan so infuriated the Armenians that they seriously considered joining Iran outright as a counterweight to the seemingly extremely-hostile nations to their west and east, and Azerbaijan and Turkey had made themselves pariahs in the world. The industrial infrastructure of much of the USSR, as so much of it had been concentrated in European Russia, was almost completely destroyed. As if to make matters worse, the severe damage to infrastructure resulted in a massive famine hammering much of the region in the winter of 1993-94, and the loss of economic infrastructure resulted in an economic contraction of monumental proportions - Russia's GDP per capita fell an astounding 81% between 1989 and 1994 - effectively forcing Russia and all of the former post-Soviet states to start over from the ground up with regards to economic rebuilding. Having to do this with the majority of the country's skilled labor having fled to other nations - and very few wanted to come back - made matters worse. But it was managed, as Russia began the long process of rebuilding early in 1994 and began the tasking of healing and rebuilding from the war.

If there was a world effect of the Soviet Civil War it was that totalitarianism simply created the inevitable likelihood of massive violence, and that ethnic nationalism was a recipe for massive violence. This ethnic nationalism, a common sight across Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, saw the violence in the former USSR, Yugoslavia and Rwanda make it seen as horribly unpopular. Turkey's involvement with the Azerbaijanis ended their aspirations of being involved in Europe - Brussels loudly expelled them from any involvement in European Union working groups in August 1992, and they were thrown out of NATO in December 1992 - and forced them into years of economic stagnation which coincided with much soul-searching, and Turkey's relations with its other neighbors, particularly Israel and Greece, would not soon recover. Having been so victimized by communism, the ex-Soviet states began a long process to seek to join European institutions in the spring of 1994. The Baltic states, in particular, wanted nothing at all to do with Russia - diplomatic relations with Moscow would not be re-established until 2013 for Latvia and Estonia and 2016 for Lithuania - and sought immediately to join NATO and the European Union, while loudly blasting Russia at every chance they got over the next few decades. Iran, having stopped a genocide by intervening in Armenia, earned themselves vast respect in the world, and Iran's suggestion of a NATO force to replace the Iranians in Armenia was approved, at Iran's urging, in September 1994 and first deployed to Armenia in February 1995, and Armenia spent every nickel they could to reduce involvement with Turkey and Azerbaijan, including funding major road and rail network reworks and getting approval to rebuild the Metsamor Nuclear Power Station to modern standards.

Recognizing their inability to get involved in the madness in the former Soviet Union, the United States, Commonwealth and European Union organized huge shipments of aid and supplies into Russia in 1991, and the shipments kept coming, going on as late as 1996, and forces and operations to ensure the fates of the Soviet Union's vast nuclear arsenals went on without interference by any of the competing sides - both sides had nuclear weapons, and none of them had any illusions what making the war go nuclear would do to both sides - and the Soviet Navy, after initially getting into the act particularly in the Baltics and Black Sea, mostly sat out the mayhem. After the war, however, there was little resources for their use, and the Russian Navy saw its strength drop dramatically, and Russia sold off what it could from the Navy in the 1990s - one result being nuclear-powered battlecruisers Kirov, Frunze and Kalinin were sold to the Indian Navy in 1996, becoming the Indian Navy's heavy surface fleet. Russia's economic chaos also resulted in the Russians quickly adapting their better aircraft designs for NATO standards, a fact that Germany (which had inheirited a sizable number of MiG-29s from the East German Air Force and Soviet Air Force units left behind in Germany during its Civil War) and India (which was rapidly moving towards NATO-standard equipment).

The Soviet Union's self-destruction forced Europe into a monumental bind. Already faced with the monumental task of rebuilding the economies of Eastern Europe, the horrors of the Soviet Civil War made that problem considerably worse, but it also dramatically shifted the goalposts for what Europe felt was necessary. The ugliness of the 1990s in Europe had been overwhelmingly been a result of rivalries between ethnic groups that in some cases had gone from nearly non-existent to being things worthy of committing truly despicable crimes for in what seemed like an instant, and it made the Maastricht Treaty an ever-bigger way of sorting out differences. The idea of a federal Europe never truly came into being, but amendments to the Treaty in the 1990s ratified it as a supra-governmental body meant to sort out differences between European member states in economic, legal, criminal justice and foreign policy co-operation, along with the creation of the Euro, the currency created primarily to allow the multiple weak currencies of Europe to combine into one stronger body - and for its stronger members, namely Germany and the Netherlands, to use their high wealth to advance their economic muscle in Europe. After the total lack of any sort of stability other than fear, the states of Eastern Europe were loud supporters of the idea, and so while the Maastricht Treaty had been signed by what was then twelve members of the new European Union, it wouldn't stay that way for long.

TheMann · Jan 28, 2017

Part 18 - Messiahs, Marines, New Carriers and New Games To Play

For Canada, the world changed dramatically between the prosperity of the 1980s (the Globe and Mail called it 'Canada's Decade' after the Expo 86, the 1988 Calgary Olympics and after the Plaza Accords allowed Canadians to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of American assets in the second half of the 1980s) and the uncertain world that began in the spring of 1989. No fan of the Soviet Union or communism in general, Canada was genuinely horrified by the actions of the Chinese armed forces during Tiananmen Square, amazed by the collapse of the Iron Curtain, tough as nails during the Hong Kong Crisis and Operation Desert Storm, truly aghast when seeing what the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the coup attempt to stop it in May 1991 unleashed and massively hopeful for what the Cape Town Mission could (and ultimately did) create. It was a three-year period in which the Canadian Armed Forces' usefulness was proven over and over again, as the Commonwealth of Nations rapidly and out of the necessity of the Hong Kong Crisis changed into an organization that had more backbone and more teeth. By the time Margaret Thatcher resigned from being British Prime Minister after a challenge to her leadership in November 1990 the Commonwealth she was a key figure in what had grown to have vast influence in the politics of all of the nations involved, so much so that by the 1990s an appointment by Canada to the ambassadorships of the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand or Australia marked one as a real player to watch in politics, and indeed it would also soon be the case for ambassadorships to France, the Netherlands, India and eventually South Africa as well. The Canadian Navy, having been focused for fourty years on supporting NATO in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean, suddenly as a result of these few years was a global player, so much so that despite the 'peace dividend' of the 1990s, while the Canadian Army shrunk as a result of its withdrawal from Europe, the Canadian Navy and Air Force grew, so much so that the Navy got a third aircraft carrier and the Air Force got its own AWACS aircraft, in both cases a huge investment.

The third carrier came about as a result of the 1993 elections in Canada. By the 1980s Canada's elections were a four-party affair, and the government of Brian Mulroney found themselves being attacked on military grounds both by the Western Canada-based upstart Reform Party and the Progressives with its traditional bases in industrial Ontario and the Caribbean. As the Progressives' popularity exploded into Quebec (a stronghold for Mulroney but long regarded as a straight fight between the Liberals and Conservatives) Mulroney found himself in an intense three-way fight between himself, Liberal leader Brian Tobin and Progressive leader Ed Broadbent, Broadbent both having the best hand as he had very good wingmen in Toronto MP Jack Layton and Quebec Senator Thomas Mulcair, while Mulroney himself found his Quebec parliamentarians, particularly Jean Charest and Lucien Bouchard, challenging his leadership -and all of that in addition to Preston Manning and Stephen Harper's challenge from out west and the Liberals. Mulroney won the election, but lost his majority massively, and both the Progressives and Reform considered improving the Navy and Air Force a priority. Mulroney sided with the Progressives to get his parliamentary majority, but the Progressives had a number of demands - in addition to a number of Progressive cabinet ministers (including Broadbent as Deputy PM), they wanted certain economic policies followed through, more investment in the Caribbean and a growth of the Canadian Navy. Following through on the last point, Mulroney announced on November 16, 1993, that Canada would seek a third aircraft carrier for its Navy, and that the fleet would get a complete overhaul, and that all three carriers would get complete overhauls in both the ships and their air wings to allow all three to last into the 2020s.

Before that would go anywhere, Canada would dive headlong into one of the proudest moments in its history, and completely because it had the courage to do what nobody else was willing to. The tiny nation of Rwanda in Central Africa was a tiny nation that, until April of 1994, few could have found on a map if they looked, but after 1994, that changed forever, and it changed Canada and the world.

Rwanda, ruled by the Belgians until 1962, was one of a bunch of cases where the Europeans had played divide and conquer with colonial populations, and in the case of Rwanda tensions between the majority Hutu and minority (but politically powerful) Tutsi tribes had been a fact of life for decades, boiling over into a civil war in 1990. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the country's government had come to a ceasefire in 1993, but one of the results of the civil war was the growth of the extremist Hutu Power movement, including the infamous RTLM radio station. While violence between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups had been sporadic throughout the country's existence, the peace agreements resulting from the Arusha Accords of 1993 had brought hope that peace would indeed prevail, and a UN force, led by Canadian Major-General Romeo Dallaire, was deployed to Rwanda to make sure that peace reigned. But that peace was completely shattered when the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were both killed when their airplane was shot down on April 6, 1994, over the Rwandan capital, Kigali. The provisional government of Rwanda refused to recognize the authority of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and when she was being escorted to the Radio Rwanda building to make her succession speech, she was murdered by members of Rwanda's Presidental Guard, along with her Belgian peacekeeper escorts. The genocide plotters killed nearly all moderate Hutu government members and their families within hours and set about systematically murdering Tutsis, forcing the UN mission to have to move to save lives. After Dallaire led one resuce mission on his own and was shot in the chest in the process, he made a panicked call for backup on April 11, but the response was the French and Belgian troops pulling out, making Dallaire's job harder still. But on April 18, after information of the genocide had made it back to Ottawa - it would later be discovered that this had been delayed by the Belgians, which caused a massive rift between Ottawa and Brussels - Ottawa responded, initiating Operation Messiah and sending the Airborne Regiment, the Sherbrooke Armored Regiment, a battalion of the Royal 22nd Regiment (the famed VanDoos), the Blue Mountain Regiment and the Canadian Special Air Service, all on RCAF aircraft, which staged out of the Beersheba air base in Israel before heading south to Rwanda, arriving during the night of April 20-21. Knowing what was coming, Dallaire and his officers fought to take back the Kigali airport to allow their forces to arrive, so when they did they wouldn't have to jump in. Slow on the draw, the Rwandan Army didn't make a charge at the airport until the Canadians, their units including night-vision gear, anti-tank weapons and lighter armored vehicles, were on the ground at the airport. The Sherbrooke Armored didn't arrive until Canada's four C-17 Globemaster IIIs (which were less than six months old at that point) could deliver the Challenger 1 tanks of the Sherbrooke Armored, and with the airport open, both CA-200 Vampire tiltwings and CA-187 attack aircraft of the RCAF showed up. The combination of this proved far more than the Rwandans could handle.

The equipment of the intervention came from Canadian units in Israel, but replacements were soon sent out, and it took just hours for the Canadians to push back two Rwandan attempts at taking the airport back and start blasting the genocidal forces, escorted by CBC journalists whose harrowing tales of being next to units in the middle of the battle lines made headlines around the world. American airlift units, namely the huge C-5 Galaxies capable of lifting two Challenger 1s at one time, were quick to race to CFB Trenton and Mirabel Airport in Montreal to gather equipment and supplies for the Canadians in Rwandans, and the Africans, initially incredulous at the move, quickly threw their support to the operation. The Canadians, unable to stop the horrendous early loss of life, were particularly vengeful towards those involved in the genocide, and they were only too happy to support UNAMIR soldiers who were rescuing others, among others famed Senegalese officers Brigadier General Henry Kwami Anyidoho and Captain Mbaye Diagne, American missionary Carl Wilkens, Italian diplomat Pierantonio Costa and Rwandan good samaritans Paul Rusesabagina and Andre Sibomana. (Captain Diagne was ultimately killed leading a rescue mission and, with the approval of the Senegalese, awarded an honorary Canadian Victoria Cross for his six weeks of constant efforts.) Despite the desire of the RPF to finish off the genocide with a military victory, the Canadians did that for him, and by the time the French deployed paratroopers to the area in June under a UN guise, the genocide was all but over, as the Canadians, who had by that time taken most of the leaders of the genocide into custody (or had killed a few, including the operators of the RTLM Radio station and Interahamwe leader Tharcisse Renzaho), had effectively put a stop to it, though it had come at a truly ghastly cost.

Over 300,000 people were dead, and the number of survivors was better than 400,000. Many of the survivors were women who had been raped, and HIV rates had exploded throughout the country as rape had been used as a tool of fear and intimidation. Over a million and a half Hutus had fled Rwanda, fearing retaliation. The RPF was the best effective government in the country, but its governmental, justice and social systems were all but eradicated, and the Canadians simply couldn't turn the country over the RPF. 27 Canadians had died and 338 had been wounded or injured, and Canadian veterans of Rwanda would ultimately see better than 3,500 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder - many described the scenes of Rwanda as being worse than hell itself. UNAMIR II, deployed in late June 1994, was almost immediately accused by Tutsi survivors as sheltering those responsible for the violence, and it was clear that Rwanda's wounds needed to be settled by many years of peace and diplomacy. UNAMIR II was initially to be led by the French, something with Dallaire angry demanded be changed - and having taken no less than four bullets saving lives, when he made that demand, Ottawa and Paris both listened, and Australian Major General Derek McQuarrie took over the mission instead. The Canadians established a permanent base in Rwanda, CFB Kanombe, south of Kigali's airport, and began working to sort out power sharing between the sides involved in the conflict.

Rwanda proved a world changer for Canada. Being willing to dive straight in and end a horrible event in human history in a country far from Canada that had very little influence on the day to day lives of Canadians, accepting 27 Canadian soldiers killed and so many wounded both physically and psychologically even for such a goal, was in the minds of many seen as unthinkable - before Operation Messiah began, the West's primary concern in Rwanda was saving the lives of their own citizens with little regard paid to the lives of Rwandans - and the vast logistical difficulties involved in such an action made it seem even less likely, but it was indeed done and done shockingly well. The United States and Europe were both shocked stupid, as was the entire Commonwealth - which Rwanda subsequently joined in 2000 - was absolutely stunned by the actions of Canada and indeed the peacekeepers, while having ultimately violated their orders in a big way by paving the way for the Canadians' arrival, were seen as part of the heroes and the Argentine, Senegalese, Ghanian and Tunisian peacekeepers involved openly helped the Canadians with their actions, a number of them dying trying to save Tutsis during the genocide. The Canadians proved downright vengeful on the Hutu murderers but much better to others, and there were many cases of incredible bravery by them - no less than eight Canadian Victoria Crosses, not including the honorary one awarded to Captain Diagne, and four Cross of Valours were awarded in Rwanda - and the Canadians quickly forced the UN to adapt its peacekeeping missions. From Rwanda on, no mission with a genocide risk was viewed as one where troops would not be armed, a fact that would become abundantly clear in Bosnia just over a year later. The Americans, whose rapid mobilization of logistical help had in large part because of the CBC's unbelievable reporting on the scene - CBC journalist Alison Smith and videographer Michael Shannon both arrived with the incoming troops, covered the Rwandan counterattack and were part of the Canadian rescue mission to the horrible massacre at Nyarubuye, the latter earning Shannon the Cross of Valour - were sufficiently both indebted and thankful for the Canadians that they made the Canadians wouldn't lack for lift capacity again - the four Canadian C-17s bought were joined by no less than fourteen others, enough for two complete heavy airlift squadrons, at American expense. The Commonwealth, pushed by Canada and India, in March 1996 announced that they would take any genocide anywhere in the world as a causus belli against the entire Commonwealth, something that France (who smarted from their involvement in arming the Hutu rebels) and the Netherlands rapidly signed on to as well.

The Rwanda intervention came just as Canada's new carrier acquisition program, which had been in the works long before Mulroney's 1993 declaration of a third carrier for Canada, got kicked into high gear. The options at first were divided between acquiring an older one from Britain or America - Britain considered offering Canada the HMS Warspite but ultimately went against it, with Whitehall wanting the additional capability, and rumors about HMAS Australia being sold also came to nothing - or building a third to a new or improved existing design. The latter plan was initially the front runner, but US Navy's experience with the life-extension of USS Constellation was such that they before the end of 1993 offered Canada USS America, a Kitty Hawk-class supercarrier which was due for an overhaul. While Constellation, Kitty Hawk and John F. Kennedy were sent for life extensions, America was offered to Canada for a bargain price, a price which became zilch when Canada dove into Rwanda and made headlines around the world in doing so. Washington initially proposed that the America be refitted to Canadian specifications in Norfolk before being delivered to them. Canada respectfully turned down this offer and instead asked that America be delivered to the Canadians as it was then, so that Canada could modify the ship in a way that served them best. Washington had little objection to this, and on July 25, 1994, after visiting New York for the Fourth of July and plenty of other celebrations, America was sailed to Halifax to its crew and was decommissioned there, with the Canadians discovering that America's condition wasn't particularly good. That didn't matter all that much, however, and Canadian sailors sailed the carrier to Saint John Shipbuilding in New Brunswick, arriving on September 23, 1994, for the start of the overhaul.

USS America became HMCS Canada - it just seemed appropriate considering its previous name, and nobody from the previous HMCS Canada seemed to mind - and got a complete overhaul. Her boilers and steam turbines were removed, replaced by a completely new power system, with eight General Electric gas turbines providing power - four LM6000s and four LM2500 units - with the massive LM6000s driving shafts directly and the four LM2500s driving AC power generators, which fed geared electric motors alongside the turbines to drive the shafts. The result was the ship's power output rose from 280,000 shp when new with the boilers to 314,000 shp while nearly halving the ship's projected fuel consumption. The gas turbines used their hot exhaust to desalinize and demineralize water, water which would be injected into the gas turbines to increase power when necessary as well as give the ship a practically limitless supply of fresh water. The LM2500s gave the ship the ability to give the ship both full rated propulsion power as well as a stunning 40 MW of electric power at full propulsion, done so that the aged steam catapults on the carrier could be replaced with electromagnetic ones, which both allowed the launching of considerably heavier aircraft, reduced maintenance requirements, reduced stress on the airframes of the launching aircraft and were lighter in weight. To accommodate this, the overhaul included complete rebuilds of the elevators using electric motors rather than hydraulics, allowing the elevators to lift up to 125 tons at one time, again designed to allow larger and heavier aircraft in the future. The hangar bay also got massive overhead cranes to move heavy objects around for the crew to use in the maintenance and operation of the vessel, as well as three automatic fire doors to divide the main hangar, an idea stolen from the Nimitz class. The America had its sonar array, taken out in the 1980s, re-installed using a Canadian sonar system, and the latest in electronics were installed in the vessel. The tower was rebuilt, and the exhaust stack for the ship was designed to be the like the Americans' USS John F. Kennedy, tilting fumes away from the flight deck, and the self-defense suite was impressive - four sets of Mark 48 VLS missile launchers replaced the aging Sea Sparrow launchers (these would be replaced again down the road) and Goalkeeper CIWS systems were installed, and both radar and infrared detection systems were part of the overhaul. Able to handle considerably more aircraft than the Terra Nova-class nuclear carriers it was joining, the ship's fuel bunkers remained the same size, giving the vessel a range estimated at 30,000 kilometres, enough to get two thirds of the way around the world without refueling, a range designed to allow the vessels to do the jobs of its nuclear-powered brothers in arms. Helping with this was that the Canadian Navy had always been rather more manpower-efficient than its American counterparts and the reduced engineering needs resulted in there being some 850 crewmen less needed for the ship, allowing Canada to nearly equal the crew requirements of the Terra Novas.

Built and ready to go, HMCS Canada went through extensive testing in the fall and winter of 1996-97, with plenty of others - particularly the British and Americans - watching, and all liked what they saw. The new carrier could do everything its brothers could and in many cases do them better. The gas turbine propulsion resulted in the carrier having remarkably fast response to the ship's helm, and new rudders gave the ship a great response, which in one case nearly resulted in disaster when Canada came close to sideswiping HMCS Edmonton when the frigate, surprised at the carrier's responsiveness, had to undertake evasive maneuvers to not have a collision. The electromagnetic launchers proved easily capable of flinging off a CF-184C Tomcat with a full load of weapons, an improvement on its nuclear-powered brothers. The carrier's improvements over those of its brothers ultimately proved a watershed for the United States, which chose to incorporate some of the improvements into its own future vessels. Ready to go, HMCS Canada reported for duty and was commissioned on March 19, 1997, taking over the position of flagship of the Royal Canadian Navy in Halifax and allowing HMCS Terra Nova to sail to Saint John for a rebuild of its own which included many of the same improvements. The carrier's first tour of duty included a visit to all of the Navy's ports and many major locations in the Canadian Caribbean before sailing to India, making a high-profile visit to Cape Town along the way, before sailing back around the Arabian Peninsula to the Suez Canal and visiting Haifa before touring the Mediterranean before a visit to Portsmouth and then home to Halifax. Terra Nova finished its refit in the fall of 1999 and headed to the Pacific before Resurrection had the refit of its own, the last Canadian carrier finishing its overhaul in the winter of 2001.

Indeed, Canada's Navy went through a lot of changes during the time period, as the Halifax-class frigates, first commissioned in 1992, allowed the replacement of the older vessels, and the aging Iroquois class destroyers, which had been life-extended in the late 1980s, saw their replacements built in the forms of the Province-class cruisers and the Eagle-class destroyers, both of which arrived in the early 2000s, the latter another example of co-operation between Japan and Canada as the Eagle-class was originally based on the Japanese Atago-class destroyer, and with Canada's interest known, the Atago had been designed with Canadian subsystems (particularly its helicopters and 155mm guns) in mind. Meanwhile, Canada and Britain's rebuilding of their amphibious fleet, culminating in the Cyprus/Albion class of landing platform docks and the Columbia-class littoral combat ships, finished in the 1990s and the Corsair class of nuclear submarines finished with the tenth and last, Razorback, commissioning in 1997. The overall result of these and the Vimy Ridge class of amphbious assault ships in the early 2000s was a fleet capable of landing and supporting troops anywhere in the world.

Canada's Air Force was much the same in terms of gradual improvements. While Canada's fighter fleet has finished its improvements in the 1980s with the introduction of Grumman F-14 Tomcat and Panavia Tornado (both had completely replaced the Spey Phantoms and Blackburn Buccaneer by late 1991), the fleet also sought to replace the aging Handley-Page Victor bombers in the 1990s, the first priority was Canada's introduction of its own airborne radar aircraft. Long users of the NATO E-3 Sentrys in its European missions, the RCAF had begun looking at its own AWACS aircraft in the mid-1980s, and in 1991 had announced its desires for new such aircraft, focusing on the E-3 Sentry which by that point was in both NATO service as well as American, British, French, Iranian and Saudi air forces. But with the Boeing 707 airframes out of production by that point, the RCAF was forced to shift its plans....but in 1992, Boeing and Israel Aerospace Industries came to the RCAF with an astounding offer, to build the RCAF's airborne radar fleet on the Boeing 747SP airframe, using a modern development of Israel's Phalcon airborne radar system, and with the aircraft having more powerful engines and large additional fuel tanks, nearly doubling the range of the NATO E-3 Sentry aircraft while providing additional capability. Boeing even offered to have the aircraft assembled entirely in Canada and with mostly-Canadian components. Impressed, and despite a counter-offer of E-3s built on Boeing 767 airframes (that were somewhat cheaper to buy and operate but not as capable), the RCAF ordered ten CE-180 'Vision' aircraft in 1994, and the first such aircraft was delivered to the RCAF in the summer of 1997. After performing well (though not flawlessly, it has to be said), the remaining nine were delivered between 1998 and 2003.

Rwanda's situation was to be a sign of what was to come. After the mess in Rwanda, the situation in the Balkans - which had been deteriorating since the summer of 1993 - came to a head in the town of Srebrenica. After supply convoys began to be held up by the Serbs of the Republika Srpska in the spring of 1994, the situation in the Srebrenica enclave deteriorated badly, and by early 1995 was reaching crisis point. At the same time, the Serbs began the taking of French and Dutch military hostages, and systematically trying to starve out those remaining in the enclave. When the Serbs attacked the enclave in earnest on July 6, 1995, the Dutch forces acting as peacekeepers fought back, seeing what had happened in Rwanda with the Belgian peacekeepers and knowing of the starvation of Bosniak Muslims in the enclaves. Unable to do so, the Dutch retreated to their compounds, resulting in the Serbs killing hundreds of Bosniaks. That news got to the UN air units, who attacked the Serbs on July 9, 1995, suffering two Dutch F-16s and a French Mirage 2000 shot down from SAMs. That news got out rapidly, and witnessing of gross crimes - murdering men and boys, raping of women and countless others - got out from the encircled encampment. That, however, got action. The Serbs, who had taken relatively muted reaction as encouragement, got a shocking surprise on July 13, 1995, when four companies of the United States Marine Corps showed up in Srebrenica, and American F-16s attacked SAM units and artillery, before one of the main Serb bases in the area was visited by four American B-52H bombers, who bombed it flat. The Marines relieved the Dutchbat forces, and the next day CH-53 and CH-47 helicopters delivered ammunition, before C-130s delivered food and supplies. This action resulted in the Serbs fighting back harder, resulting in multiple rounds of attacks by American, Dutch and French forces against the Serbs. Massively outgunned, the Serbs retreated, and knowing of the awful positions, the UN forces escorted the survivors of Srebrenica to other Bosniak territory, though the massacres had resulted in over 3,500 people killed, along with 27 Dutch and French soldiers killed (it would later be found out that the Serbs had executed 55 other UN troops).

The American response to the action resulted in the Serbs initially walking away from the peace tables, but it was obvious from the start that that was a counter-instuitive measure, but after Srebrenica, both the Americans and Dutch, who had been relatively docile during the mission, stopped being so - and on May 5, 1996, the United States Army Special Forces executed a raid that picked up Ratko Mladic, the butch of Srebrenica, north of Banja Luka. Whether the Americans and Dutch actions were influenced by the Canadians in Rwanda would be a topic of debate for many years to come as neither country said so and few ever asked. But what was obvious in the Balkans from 1994 onward was that genocide was now totally unacceptable - and on May 10, 1996, American President Howard Baker admitted that it had been an all-American operation to capute Mladic, and spoke forcefully that as with the Commonwealth, the United States would consider genocidal actions as an automatic casus belli, and offering to set up immediate connections with the Commonwealth nations in order for America to either lead or assist in actions against genocide. It was a powerful response to the Canadians' actions in Rwanda, and while both Rwanda and the Balkans would be a mess for many years to come, what the mid-1990s actions made absolutely clear was that there would be no more repeats of what had been once upon a time tolerated against minorities.

While the world was changing dramatically, Canada at home in September 1990 got its newest moment to be proud of when, in a decision that surprised few after Expo 86 and the 1988 Winter Olympics, saw Toronto selected to be the host of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Just as with Montreal in 1967, Vancouver in 1986 and Calgary in 1988, Toronto was ready to take its place in the world, and while Toronto was by a margin the largest city in the country (the 1991 Census put Metro Toronto's population at 7,365,552) the city had, despite the presence of events like the Toronto International Film Festival and numerous well-known-in-Canada events, never made itself a cultural capital or an event city, at least not before the Olympics. But with the Olympics, that changed - and with the Toronto Raptors new to the city for 1993 (and in September 1990 in the process of building their home, the Toronto Fieldhouse, on the site of the old Exhibition Stadium), the Maple Leafs building their new home in the early 1990s and Canada's first high-speed rail line beginning operations, the time was simply as right as it could get for the city to host the Olympics and show off its new face to the world.

And that, pretty much, is exactly what happened. The SkyDome, opened in 1989, was to be only the first of the new sports venues in the city, with the Westland Toronto Fieldhouse opening in August 1993, the Air Canada Centre (built over the trainshed at Union Station) opening in September 1994 in time for the 1994-95 NHL season and Toronto's monumental, architectural-marvel 92,000-seat Olympic Stadium opening in March 1996. All of these facilities were built along the waterfront of the city, and connecting them was done both with Toronto's famed streetcar system, the extension of the Yonge and University-Spadina-Vaughan subway lines south to Queens Quay and the building of the Toronto Harbourfront Monorail, which initially was built from Ontario Place on the west end past the Fieldhouse, Exhibition GO station, Fort York, Skydome, Air Canada Centre/Union Station, Olympic Village, MetroNome and Olympic Stadium stations, with its second-branch, approved in the summer of 1992 and finished just in time for the Olympics, running straight up Jarvis Street from the main line at Lake Shore Boulevard to the old Maple Leaf Gardens at Carleton and Church Streets. The rebuilding of the city's streetcar fleet with modern trains was sped up, the last of the new subway lines in the central city, GO electrification and countless facility improvements were done, and the dedicated airport line between Toronto's airports and its center city, the Toronto AirLine, was opened in April 1996. The Olympic Natatorium was built on a former industrial site at the foot of the Don River adjacent to Olympic Stadium (and with a new GO stop, Leslieville, built as an adjunct to the building) and the Velodrome across from Fort York and the Archery and Shooting Centres on Spadina Avenue and the Sailing and Regatta Centres on the east side of the harbour across from Olympic Stadium. The Maple Leaf Gardens, Ricoh Coliseum, the Toronto International Trade Centre, Molson Amphitheatre and Ashbridges Bay Park were all going to be used for Olympic venues.

The result was that the city's close-quarters plans for the games, with all of the venues near the downtown core, was cited by the IOC as a very good idea and the monorail, which hooked up to just about all of them (as well as the Harbourfront streetcar, which also did, and three GO stations and four subway stations nearby as well) made traveling between them easily done. The area west of St. Lawrence Market and the Lower Don Lands saw the media centres built (including the massive 56-story Front-Parliament Tower and the 36-story Esplanade Centre) and the Olympic Village, built along Queens Quay between Yonge and Parliament (with more Athletes' Housing being built in the CityPlace neighbourhood adjacent to Harbour City), built in the early to mid-1990s for the games. The city's other huge 1990s projects, including the Toronto Opera House on Avenue Road, were finished in time for the games, while the city's developers built thousands of units of hotel rooms to help with this. The area around Olympic Stadium got one of the biggest re-works of all - the massive Richard Hearn Generating Station, closed in 1971, had been the subject of numerous proposals - but the year before the Games announcement, movie studio Lionsgate bought it with the intent of turning the giant facility into one of the world's largest movie studios. The resulting Studio Powerstation opened in May 1993, and the area around it by then, along devoted to light and medium industrial uses, became a dense nest of prop makers, stylists, studios, arts workshops, sound recording studios and other boutique industries and shops meant to support the movie industry. By the summer of 1996, a second studio, Pinewood Studios Toronto, was also operating in the region at Leslie and Commissioners Streets, and many visitors during the Olympics would find it to be an experience just wandering through what had by then become known as Studio City and discovering what was there. As if that wasn't enough, Toronto's entertainment scene officials worked hard in the summer of 1995 to co-ordinate events so that there was always something for visitors and locals alike to see and do when and if they'd had their fill of the Olympic events. Toronto's local involvement wasn't quite to the level of Calgary eight years before, but it was still massive and substantial, and as with what was usual for Canada, it was done with the utmost of class and style.

The medals themselves showed Canada's style - all of the gold, silver and other metals involved came from Canadian mines, and all were cast the Royal Canadian Mint in London, styled by Native Canadian and Caribbean artists. The Olympic Flame itself traveled from Greece to Canada via an Air Canada Concorde, making its first trip in Canada across Newfoundland from Gander to St. John's and then back across Newfoundland to Corner Brook, where an RCAF helicopter carried it to Goose Bay, then another RCAF aircraft - this time a Vickers VC-16 - took it to Trinidad, where the relay began. The Caribbean leg of the tour involved numerous legs in the islands as well as multiple tours by powerboats, ferries, hovercraft, two trips on famed schooner Bluenose II and one trip abaord destroyer HMCS Fraser before arriving in Nassau, the Bahamas, where a specially-painted Caribbean Airlines Boeing 747-400 took it to Vancouver. From there, on top of another helicopter ride to Vancouver and thousands of miles of relays, the flame went over Rogers Pass on a special train hauled by Canadian Pacific steam locomotives 2860 and 5935, was brought across a portion of its trip through Saskatchewan in a 1952 Westland flatbed truck, stopped at numerous Canadian landmarks (hockey legend Gordie Howe had the honor of carrying it to the famed Chateau Lake Louise in British Columbia) and over 10,000 people carried it on the 91-day journey across Canada, with some incredible scenes along the way - Terry Fox's mother Betty carrying it past the point where her son's Marathon of Hope ended in Thunder Bay, Ontario in 1980 and Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, the hero of Rwanda, carry it past the Canadian War Memorial in Ottawa were pretty close to the top of the list for these.

Visitors just ate it up. The completion of the high-speed rail line from Buffalo to New York in 1993 made it possible for people on America's Eastern Seaboard to take a fast train to Toronto and step off of the train in the middle of the action, and locals loved it just as much. Tons of additional flights to both the Pearson and William Davis international airports didn't find the AirLine lacking for capacity, while Amtrak quickly built up tons of capacity from Midwestern American cities to Detroit, where the High-Speed Line would take them to Toronto with ease. Toronto's police forces were ably assisted by the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and what additional congestion resulted elicited few complaints - indeed, more than a few visitors found themselves on packed trains or subways striking up conversations with friendly locals - and the tickets to the events in many cases sold out within hours of them going on sale. The hotels did price-gouge but not to the insane degree many expected, Toronto's great restaurants worked overtime for the visitors, the nightclub and movie scenes were wild all the time and in many cases athletes and visitors alike found themselves able to go out and enjoy themselves when not competing or preparing to. A need for 70,000 volunteers garnered 325,000 applications, and there were very few incidents involving visitors or athletes at all. The Games ended up making money after operational costs, but the huge costs of venue, facility and transport building didn't factor into this....but just as in Calgary eight years prior, nobody cared to any great degree, and it meant that the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Blue Jays, Argonauts and Toronto FC all had new venues to play in, and the city's already-good transit system got that much better. In the years to come, the Toronto Games would be seen as the point where the big city, long happy to stay inside of its wealthy, considerate shell, instead blasted the shell to pieces and began living for everything they could, though just as industrious, intelligent, polite and considerate as always, just with more pride and more desire to show off to the world.

Indeed, kind of like what their country was becoming....

TheMann · Mar 7, 2017

Part 19 - Race To The Millenium

The Toronto Olympics was, as with Expo 67 and Expo 86 and the Montreal and Calgary Olympics, yet another sign of what the country was rapidly becoming. Years after changes in society had allowed Toronto to make its way alongside Montreal as one of Canada's premier cities, it was clear that indeed the fast-moving, hardworking city on Lake Ontario had done the customary Canadian job of hosting a big event - beautifully conceived, planned, detailed, laid out and executed - and had for the second time proven a point to the IOC about the Olympic Games being events. Toronto had worked overtime to make sure the Olympics were merely the centerpoint for a million and one other events, a point which the IOC had initially been none too impressed about - they wanted the focus on them and them alone - but had rapidly come to learn was a huge benefit to all of the people involved in the Olympics, and which had made the games to both the host city and the IOC a bigger event still. As with Calgary in 1988, Toronto in 1996 had showed the creators of the Olympics what they could do better at, and as one would expect, they took the lesson to heart.

It was no surprise to anyone by the mid-1990s that Canada was one of the world's premiere destinations for immigrants, and as if that wasn't enough, Canada's major cities were by the 1990s undergoing something of a baby boom. While it was nothing compared to the vast booms of the 1940s and 1950s, it was demographically noticeable, and research into this in the 1990s quickly proved that it was not limited to any one race or ethnic background but was most strongly seen in the areas which were seeing ever-greater prosperity, a sign that confidence about the future was the most likely cause. And it wasn't as if there was no reason for confidence, either - with one of the world's most prosperous economies and a society that had been working for three quarters of a century to make ethnic, racial, sexual, cultural and language divisions less important, it was simply good to be a Canadian, whether one was born in Canada or became one through immigration, and it wasn't hard to see that more and more people were doing the latter, giving Canada its pick of the best skilled immigrants from many backgrounds.

And as with a society full of those from abroad, with a love of entrepreneurship and vast financial assets at the disposal of both governments and private banks (thus allowing loans at rock-bottom interest rates), it was only natural that Canada, even more than in the 1980s, took advantage of vast financial muscle to go out and make investments abroad, chasing dreams large and small. From the Canadian big seven banks and government management funds to huge corporations and tens of thousands of ambitious entrepreneurs chasing dreams, Canadians in the 1990s began to undertake some of the most incredible deals seen in recent history, particularly in the United States, Western Europe, the Commonwealth and Japan.

The kings of the mountains here were the auto industry deals - Westland-Reynard had allied with Subaru in 1986, and following the financial problems of parent company Fuji Heavy Industries after the collapse of Japan's asset price bubble in 1990-1991, Subaru was sold to Westland-Reynard in 1993, shortly after the company negotiated its way into a three-way deal between PSA Peugeot Citroen and Chrysler Corporation in 1991-92. The complex arrangement initially was meant to allow each company to use each others' assets to fill in holes in their existing lineups, but in the true spirit of ambition and not a little bit of welfare capitalism ideals thrown in, it proved to be much more than that - the first of the companies' set of engineering complexes in Lansing, Michigan and Le Mans, France, began operations in 1995, and the use of each others' assets - whether it was Subaru's highly-advanced four-wheel-drive systems, Chrysler's powerful gasoline engines and PSA's excellent diesel ones or Westland-Reynard's modern electronic prowess and long-standing relationship with Alcan for aluminum-bodied cars, all of which would see use in multiple forms on everyone's cars. But perhaps even more notable came a few years later, with the alliance between Renault and American Motors buying into the nearly-bankrupt Nissan in 1999, a move which led in 2001 to the establishment of the 'Alliance Automakers' group between the three companies to co-ordinate their activities, and hoping (successfully as it turned out) for a Canadian investment, the Alliance established their operations in Toronto. Westland-Reynard, also based in Toronto, would contribute to the city being a major center for auto industry decisions in the 2000s.

As big as Westland-Reynard was, it was chicken feed compared to the most massive involvement of a Canadian bank in the era - that being the privatization of Societe Generale in 1988, Almost immediately, the cash-rich Royal Bank of Canada was a shareholder in the firm, and RBC, aware that RBC and Societe Generale were both gunning for the same goals (namely growing their commercial banking businesses and investment services for private customers) and almost never touched in their territories, RBC and Societe Generale in August 1996 announced plans to merge into RBC Generale, a truly global bank which would take advantage of its huge capital and common goals to expand operations all around. The company would maintain two headquarters, one in Canada and one in France, and the slightly larger size of Societe Generale in terms of market capitalization meant that the former shareholders of Societe Generale would get 53% of the shares of the new company, while Royal Bank of Canada shareholders would get 47%. The merger proposal included remarkably-detailed proposals for streamlining the operations of the two banking giants as well as future growth opportunities. Shareholders were impressed on both sides of the deal, and approval on both sides of the Atlantic from shareholders was quick, and the relationship between Canada and France was such that neither country had much in the way of objections. Montreal scored a coup in the deal as the Canadian HQ of the new bank would be based in Montreal, a decision made out of a desire to allow an easier transition for French employees of the new bank in Canada. The merger was approved by Paris and Ottawa in September 1997, and RBC Generale came into being (and was listed on both the Toronto and Paris stock exchanges) on March 1, 1998. RBC Generale was the largest non-American financial merger ever at that point and by far the largest corporate merger in Canadian history, and in the interests of maintaining peace, the combined firm kept to Canadian laws on financial transactions, a move which initially caused some irritation on the part of the Europeans but would prove to be highly beneficial to the company in the future. None of the others of the Big Seven would be involved in anything that size, though the Canadian banks did expand their operations throughout the period, particularly getting involved in many different financial institutions in Britain, South Africa (where Scotiabank facilitated the creation of FirstRand in 1998 and was from the start its largest shareholder, a position which would prove incredibly lucrative for them), India, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Japan found itself a place of interest for Canadian investors. Japanese companies had in a great many cases made vast investments in North America during the height of its 1980s bubble economy, but after the bubble burst they could be easily divided into those who sold off their operations to cover immense losses in Japan (usually taking considerable losses themselves in the process) or those who sought to turn their North American operations into assets. The latter frequently proved the beneficiaries of the action, particularly as they could (and did) access North American capital as a result. Some interesting results came out of this - Honda's huge North American expansions in the 1990s, including their Alliston, Ontario and Selkirk, Manitoba, assembly plants (along with several others in the United States) brought Honda to the point by the 2000s where they imported more cars to Japan from Canada and the United States than went the other way, an odd situation to say the least for a Japanese auto manufacturer. The companies that stayed in Canada frequently got boosts from Canada, with Sony, Toray, Pioneer, Subaru and Kubota being notable beneficiaries. Sony's Playstation proved to be one such example of Trans-Pacific co-operation - after Sony and Nintendo had gone to considerable efforts to develop a CD variant of the latter's Super Nintendo until the latter broke a deal with them in 1991, resulting in a furious Sony seeking to rival Nintendo. This led to Canadian electronics firm Bennett Technologies arranging a meeting between Sony and Atari, which was working on its own new system at the time. Deals between the three firms resulted in the creation of the internally-similar, though very differently marketed, Sony Playstation and Atari Jaguar, which entered the market in late 1994 and early 1995. The two systems' ability to use each others' games and peripherals proved a monstrous boon to both Atari, who saw their position in the video game world hugely improved as a result, and to Bennett, which made huge profits both from making parts and peripherals for the systems and their investments in Atari. Toray in the 1990s became allied with Petro-Canada, the latter seeking entrance into the world of carbonfibre production and the former desiring the coal breakdown technologies the latter owned, which manifested itself into TPC Carbon Technologies, which began the production of carbon fibre from anthracite at its facility near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 1995.

Beyond the Japanese investments, both Japanese and Canadian investment groups were quite stunned when George Weston Limited made a sudden - and quite substantial - buy-in into AEon Group, Japan's second-largest retailer, in 1992. The Japanese firm was one of many which had taken a beating from the collapse of the asset price bubble, but the move came as the company was pulling out of the American market and was in the midst of building its monumental Whittington Place complex in Toronto, so it was quite a surprise to most - but it worked, as AEon's rebranding, meant to allow easier marketing of itself outside of Japan in Asia, proved successful, and AEon in what was initially a goodwill measure expanded across the Pacific for the first time, opening its first North American stores in Vancouver in 1995 and Toronto and Calgary in 1996 - but that move proved more successful than the company anticipated, and they moved into Seattle, Edmonton and Montreal in 1997, followed by over a dozen more stores across Canada in the 1990s and 2000s. The action - of a Canadian firm buying into a distressed counterpart abroad, providing capital initially and benefitting when it returned to profitability - would be proven again a decade later, when Parmalat's Canadian operations were able to take over the vast majority of its parent firm after the monstrous accounting scandals that began in the fall of 2002.

The investments abroad made sure the world began to pay attention to went on in Toronto just as much as they did in many other places in the world, to the point where the 'Trillium Service' high-speed trains that ran between Toronto and New York which began operations in June 1997 were almost always packed, as businessmen raced between the financial capitals of the two neighboring nations, and Air Canada's Boeing 747-400s began making even the short hop between those two cities in 1997 as well, even as the high-speed trains gobbled much of the market. There was money to be made in these markets, and the rich Canadian market was one that, even with the vast number of powerful competitors involved in many fields, other firms simply couldn't resist diving into. American retail behemoths Walmart and Target both entered the market in the 1990s only to have their efforts fail (in Target Canada's case, spectacularly so) against both the Hudson's Bay Company, Eaton's and Simpson's on the higher ends of their market and against George Weston, Sobey's and Metro Stores on the lower end of the market. Despite the Americans' failures, others succeeded - AEon was one of a few, as Carrefour (which had begun Canadian operations in Quebec in 1982) had a steady growth and American big-box retailer Costco also did reasonably well. British retailers Marks and Spencer and Harrods also entered the Canadian market in the 1970s, to mixed results. Multiple attempts by American grocery firms met similar fates, though Canadians attempts to do the same in the American market also didn't tend to go as well.

In other areas, however, things were very different. Canada's adoption of the European Union's vehicle safety regulations in 1996 allowed for easy entries into the market to any European automaker, and while all of the big players were already operating in Canada (aside from Fiat, which re-entered the Canadian market in 1998 as a result), many smaller players leapt on the bandwagon, and Canadian cars began to be sold more in Europe, adding yet another help to Canada's already-huge trade surplus. As Canadian cars tended to be smaller than American counterparts (higher fuel prices in Canada were the single largest contributor to this), this led to less of a size imbalance when compared to other portions of the world. Renault and Peugeot-Citroen had better results in Quebec than just about anywhere else in North America, and European automakers, who in many cases quickly began building cars in Canada from kits imported from Europe (namely to deal with Canadian driving conditions and weather), came to have good reputations. It was a similar story with style items - clothes and shoes, watches, jewelry and accessories and furniture - and Canada's high income, combined with cheap food prices, relatively low taxes and lower costs of living (though this was certainly not the case in Canada's expensive major cities, particularly Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Calgary) made sure the market for luxury goods was considerable - and this was not only a huge benefit to very high end retailers such as Holt Renfrew, Bowring, La Maison and Michael Daniels, but also to the massive department store chains of the Hudson's Bay Company, Eaton's and Simpson's. It also meant the basis of a vast number of fashion houses and design studios in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, aimed at styling for these markets, and a growth (particularly in affluent Toronto and Ottawa) of custom-tailored clothing for both men and women. It was all markets the Europeans could sink their teeth into, and many did, particularly in Britain, France and the Netherlands.

The tech boom of the 1990s didn't see Canada immune, but there were a number of noticeable key difference in Canada - Canadian law didn't allow many of the sorts of rapid IPOs and other tactics used to make money by many dot-com entrepreneurs, and the National Securities Commission (NSC) took a very dim view of many of these, even as companies like Nortel Networks, Mitel Telecommunications and Alcatel Newbridge expanded massively into the fields. Several others, including Bennett Technologies, Townson Systems (which became Corning Townson in 2002), Pacific Alliance, Dalsa Technologies, Alienware, Daniels-Walker, Research in Motion and Futuras Engineering, also built to suit, though none got to nearly the level of exuberance of the American boom. Despite that, the huge growth in data carrying capacity that resulted, while gross overkill for the early 2000s, did prove to be beneficial to all in the years after the boom. The massive growth in dot-com stocks did, however, burn more than a few Canadian investors, a fact that few liked. Despite the desire to be exuberant like many others, Canadian investors did far better out of the boom than many others.

The tech world in Canada was indeed a source of energy in terms of what was by then something of a Canadian tradition - new innovation. A very high-wage country with an extraordinarily high standard of living and expensive products that nonetheless believed in the ideals of trade and cross-border commerce meant that keeping an advantage, and thus keeping jobs in the country in value-added fields, meant finding the next new big thing and capitalizing on it. In the tech industry, Research in Motion was a boss in this field starting with the release of the first BlackBerry in January 1997, widely considered the first smartphone. Despite later rivals proving plenty able to rival them (particularly the Apple iPhone, which launched in June 2005 and rapidly gained a leading position in the market), RIM and the Blackberry series of smartphones proved capable competitors. Likewise, Bennett's hooking up Sony and Atari became a boon for them, as Bennett not only made peripherals, but they also developed the EyeToy for Sony, and was heavily involved in the development of the Playstation 2/Atari Panther systems. (As Bennett and Atari were both instrumental in convincing numerous game designers to work with Sony on games for the Playstation and both companies' work helped with Sony's development, the Sony/Atari pairing remains to this day.) IMAX Corporation and Dalsa Technologies both proved revolutionary in their fields, and an alliance between IMAX and Pioneer in 1994 to create multi-dimensional sound to match IMAX movies' picture quality proved an incredible benefit to both companies, particularly after James Cameron shot his 1997 blockbuster Titanic using IMAX cameras and using Pioneer SoundCore audio technology. The famed Department of Computer Science at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, was by the 1970s and 1980s the equal of any tech institute on Earth, comparing even with the famed Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, and thousands of its graduates were among those who shaped the field for the world, not just Canada. Even as Silicon Valley grew to prominence in California, one of its great rivals was (and is) what is called the Silicon Forests of Eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, and the 1980s and 1990s would see the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia - Seattle prove worthy rivals to Queens University's fame. As with just about everything from Canada, it cost money, but if you paid the money you got the best there was - period. Dalsa Technologies had by the 1990s given up on rivalling its Japanese competitors in smaller cameras and had instead focused on the needs and desires of professional photographers and those who wanted to be, while consumer electronics maker Daniels-Walker introduced full-colour Plasma televisions to the consumer market in the fall of 1990, and the while early models were plagued by burn-in issues, the company's lower-end Challenger and higher-end Insignia television lines would come to be one of the larger players in the field in North America and Europe.

As the steady economic growth of the post-war era in most places worldwide reached a point by the 1990s where wealth was growing worldwide. Having hit a point beyond which wealth was hard to grow in the affluent West, the 1990s onward would see vast economic growth in a number of what had been third-world countries, with Latin America, India, parts of the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and much of East Asia being beneficiaries. The collapse of the Soviet Union did result in America being the single most powerful nation on Earth, but Washington found itself little bothered by the growth in the world, as the growth in many places reduced their problems with extremism. With the Soviet Union's collapse and China having shot off a few toes with Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis, communism collapsed in much of the world, but having seen moderate socialism work in Europe and Welfare Capitalism work in the Commonwealth, the path of the world seemed obvious - capitalism and free markets were the way to go, but with democratically-elected governments and laws and trade policies that made sure that while business was free to conduct itself, it would do so inside of a set of laws that regulated their conduct. Work within those laws and you will benefit enormously, break those laws and you will deal with the consequences. It was easy enough to understand, and did well crossing even the most vast of cultural differences. Countries like India, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, Iran, Thailand and Eastern Europe were where one could make money if they took the risk and reaped the rewards.

And in a country where nearly a third of the population was visible minorities and nearly a quarter hadn't been born in Canada, it was a situation where one could get the skills and the money in Canada and go do the business in these countries, benefiting both sides.

And more than a few people did just that.

Having started becoming a real player in the world of association football in the 1970s (first qualifying for the World Cup in 1978) and having gone on a Cinderella-esque run in the 1986 World Cup, Canada matched its 1986 quarter-final performance in 1994, though they drew the bad luck of facing eventual champions Brazil in the quarter-finals. Despite that, Canada again matched that performance in the 1998 Cup in France (again losing to a European power, in this case Germany, in the quarter-finals), making it clear that football of the European form was not something that Canada couldn't do and do well. Indeed, one of the conditions for the 1994 World Cup in the United States was the formation of a top class league in North America, and this came to pass with Major League Soccer playing its first season in 1994 - and doing so with six Canadian founding teams in Toronto FC, Vancouver Whitecaps, Montreal Impact, Olympique de Quebec, Seattle Sounders FC and Jamaica United. Thanks to sizable support and plenty of teams proving competitive from day one (the immediate membership in MLS of the famed New York Cosmos and Chicago Fire didn't hurt), MLS got off to a good start, and thanks to intelligent management it stayed that way, and it didn't hurt that with Canada competitive and the United States beginning a steady rise in the ranks of world football, the sport got plenty of views on its greatest of stages. In Canada, having lost all but the famed Saturday Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts in 1995 (thanks to a massive bid on the NHL's TV rights by Rogers), CBC Sports bid for and won the rights to be the broadcasters of MLS in Canada. This turned out to be a good move as the CBC, whose high-minded management at times proved to be problematic to some, absolutely adored the idea of expanding football's popularity in America and did everything possible to push MLS, a tactic that didn't always work at first but would prove very lucrative later on. D.C. United beat the Cosmos to be the first MLS champions in 1994, but the Cosmos returned the favor in 1995 and in 1996 the high-flying Toronto FC became the first Canadian champions by beating the Cosmos in the MLS Cup, and doing so in front of 90,000 fans at a sold-out Toronto Olympic Stadium.

Even as MLS got started, the 1990s saw Toronto's sporting luck go just insane, to the point it drove pretty much every other city in North America nuts. Having scored a monster coup by drawing Wayne Gretzky to Toronto in 1988, the Toronto Maple Leafs improved steadily until they were powerhouses in the 1990s, winning Stanley Cups in 1993 and 1995, losing in the Cup final in 1994 (to the New York Rangers) and 1997 (to the Philadelphia Flyers) before a reload of the team saw them champs again in 2000 and 2001 as one of the "Four Horsemen" teams along with Detroit, Ottawa and Vancouver. The Leafs were joined by the Toronto Blue Jays being World Series champions in 1992 and 1993 (and then the Montreal Expos being World Series champs in 1994), just in time for the NBA's Toronto Raptors to begin play in 1995 - and courtesy of good ownership and astounding drafting (including drafting Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Tracy McGrady and Manu Ginobili) and acquiring through trades Dikembe Mutombo and Vince Carter, the Raptors fought a vicious rivalry with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1999-2002, with four straight NBA Finals being between the two teams, and the Raptors winning the first three in a row. THAT combined with the 1996 MLS title and the Toronto Argonauts' victory in Super Bowl XXXII in 1998 over the Denver Broncos. Hockey was still clearly the top dog in Canada, with even rinks and players from the Caribbean (Montreal's Jamaican-born, 6'10", 270-pound sixth-round draft pick from 1992, defenseman Sean Davale, was to be one of the first of many Caribbean players to be drafted into the NHL) rising to the highest ranks of hockey, the competition was fierce for sport, and it wasn't just in Toronto - by the end of the 1990s the NBA was also playing in Vancouver and Montreal, with Calgary joining in 2000 and Ottawa and The Bahamas joining in 2004.

Beyond the development of the Canadian businesses abroad, the country's social advancements were notable on many fronts, as Canada was in line with the Europeans on the advancement of LGBT rights and its passionate advocacy against racism and in favor of societies that were multi-ethnic but shared symbols and past times, as indeed Canada did this better than just about any country in the world. Part of the reasons for this were indeed constitutional - Canada's 1972 Constitution and its embedded Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be the basis of multiple rounds of court cases against government policies or private actions seen as discriminatory, with the infamous "Operation Soap" cases of the 1980s being the point where gay rights activism began pushing through the court. (Operation Soap was the Toronto Police's name for the city's infamous bathhouse raids in May 1981, a situation made worse when members of the Toronto Police leaked the names of those arrested to the Toronto Sun, who promptly dumped the names en masse into the public. This caused at least ten known suicides, dozens of lost jobs and hundreds of lawsuits against the paper and the Toronto Police Service. Ultimately the Supreme Court of Canada rendered a $621 million judgement against the Toronto Sun in 1989 and a $450 million judgement against the Toronto Police Service in 1991, as well as public apologies for their actions by Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington and Toronto Police Chief William McCormack.) Pierre Trudeau's famed 1967 comment "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" was one that was followed even by the string of Conservative governments that followed, as the Prime Ministers involved (first Robert Stanfield, then Brian Mulroney and ultimately Jean Charest) felt the same way and few among their cabinets disagreed. Canada's reputation for being among the world's friendliest places to be a member of the LGBT community was no myth even by the infamous actions of the early 1980s (The Toronto Sun took a vast quantity of heat for its racially-biased and anti-LGBT actions in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the point they suffered readership losses for it and Mulroney famously commented "I don't waste my time with hatemongering fools" when asked about them), and it was to few surprises that Canada became the first country in the world (beating the Netherlands by nine weeks) to completely legalize same-sex marriage in June 1997. By that point, homosexuality had been a non-issue in all government forces (including police forces, including the RCMP, and the Canadian Armed Forces) for over a decade, and it was to nobody's surprise that the rulings were happily accepted by a vast majority of the nation's population.

TBC....

Go North, Young Man: The Great Canada

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