I think I will do more of these (maps and boxes). I'm thinking Suffolk County, NY next since a) that's where my mother's side of the family is from and b) I'll be able to mess around with wacky NY fusion voting.
Don't the counties already have elected councils/boards in nearly all cases? The idea of formally making them legislatures instead of just expanding them and giving them a few new powers is so very Anglo-American.
True. The very smallest of them all - Kalawo County, Hawaii - literally doesn't have a county government IOTL and is administered directly by the state health department because it was founded as a leper colony. Although I imagine if they were forced to adopt this system they'd just have some kind of consensus government setup aimed at assisting the health department's efforts.
Don't the counties already have elected councils/boards in nearly all cases? The idea of formally making them legislatures instead of just expanding them and giving them a few new powers is so very Anglo-American.
They do; Deborah Kafoury is the chair of the five-member County Commission IOTL. I actually got the idea from looking at UK council elections and wondering what it would be like if American counties had larger, more partisan, and higher-profile councils, but I soon realized that the absurdly granular democracy that would come out of that is as American as can be.
Imagine the turnout in the primary for a county assembly seat. Shudder.
I tried to imagine how much of a bureaucratic mess it would be if every county had an executive, legislative, and judicial branch, and reported to every state, with an executive, legislative, and judicial branch, up to the country’s executive, legislative, and judicial branch and anyway I just died of a massive cerebral hemhorrage.
X-in-Canada continues its slow march to wearing out its welcome, just like I'm wearing out the keyboard on my laptop. Having to copy+paste every "s" is getting kind of old
Sitting Bull was a leader and holy man of the Lakota First Nation who led his people through most of the Lakota Wars and was a signatory to the controversial Treaty of Wounded Knee Creek (also known as Treaty 8). Born on the banks of the Grand River in what was then Rupert's Land, Sitting Bull was nicknamed "Slow" as a child and grew up in his people's traditional, semi-nomadic lifestyle. "Slow" would become "Sitting Bull" after counting coup by touching a Crow warrior and escaping unharmed as a teenager, and his stature quickly rose within his tribe in part because of his reputation for fearlessness in battle. With the westward expansion of Europeans encroaching upon Lakota territory by the 1850s, Sitting Bull became an important figure to Lakota who were opposed to British entreaties to cede most of their traditional land to the British Crown to allow for white settlement and an eventual railway to be built that would unite the British territories in North America. As the push for Confederation grew and more settlers from neighboring Minnesota began to evade British Army soldiers and attempt to settle on Lakota land, Lakota bands centralized more authority and made Sitting Bull the paramount chief of the allied bands.
Despite his increased stature, Sitting Bull could not persuade most of his fellow chiefs against signing the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. The first treaty signed between the Canadian crown and a First Nations group, so-called Treaty 0 because of its later invalidation by the Treaty of Wounded Knee Creek, it created a large reserve for the Lakota in what is now southwestern Dakota that would allow most of the traditional ways to continue and a railroad to eventually be built to connect Oregon and British Columbia to the rest of Canada. But the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in the 1870s resulted in a flood of prospectors encroaching on Lakota land, and a swelling of white settlers on the border of the reserve. The conflict boiled over after repeated skirmishes between the Lakota and prospectors in 1875, fueled in part by the limited resources of Canadian and British forces in the region as well as the government attempting to use the gold prospectors to coerce the Lakota into selling mining rights to the Black Hills, which they adamantly refused to do.
The return to power of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1878 changed the conflict's dynamic, as Macdonald began a policy of willful violations of several sections of the Treaty of Fort Laramie to weaken the Lakota and force them to the bargaining table. The Lakota's protests resulted in little change, and the frontier war continued sporadically, with Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders like Crazy Horse (until the latter's death in a skirmish against prospective settlers in 1885) fighting an increasingly difficult fight against a seemingly endless wave of white settlers. The Lakota population, decimated by deaths from battles with white settlers (many of whom had secretly been supplied weapons by the Canadian militia), disease and starvation owing to the inadequate food rations that had become necessary with the decimation of the buffalo herds by white hunters in the United States and Canada, was not enough to repel the white invasion and by 1890, Sitting Bull was forced to the bargaining table.
The Canadian government, exploiting the precarious state of the Lakota, forced the great warrior and other chiefs to concede to a replacement of the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The new treaty, signed at Wounded Knee Creek near the American border, broke up the reserve, curtailed or weakened several land-use rights that had previously been granted to the Lakota and gave the Canadian Crown "trusteeship" of the Black Hills. Although having saved his people from starvation and having become legendary for his wartime leadership, even among white Canadians, Sitting Bull spent the remainder of his life in a state of semi-isolation, abandoning his role as leader of his nation, until his death in 1909.
Today, Sitting Bull is widely considered to be one of the greatest indigenous Canadians in Canadian history and has become a symbol of the native rights movement. In 2004, Prime Minister Les AuCoin formally apologized to the Lakota and other First Nations leaders for the conduct of the Canadian government during the Lakota Wars. AuCoin's negotiations with the provincial governments of Dakota and Montana to impose a moratorium on further development outside of existing cities and towns in non-protected parts of the Black Hills did not come to a conclusion before he was replaced by Stephen Harper, who did not continue negotiations.
Ted Bundy is a convicted murder and serial killer who assaulted, raped and murdered over 30 women in Canada in the 1970s. Notorious for his multiple escapes from police custody, ability to frustrate law enforcement with forensic countermeasures, and utter lack of remorse, Bundy is one of the most famous serial killers in history. Born Theodore Cowell to a single mother in Vermont (Bundy's father has never been identified), Bundy was originally raised to believe that his young, unmarried mother was his older sister while his American grandparents were his mother and father. Bundy's mother Louise Cowell moved from her parent's home in Philadelphia to Tacoma, Oregon in 1950, married a hospital cook named John Bundy, who formally adopted Ted. Bundy graduated high school in 1965, having exhibited signs of his later behavior after multiple arrests upon suspicion of vehicle theft and burglary, although he was never charged and the incidents expunged on his 18th birthday. Bundy then began his university career, initially at the University of Puget Sound, and then the University of Oregon (OU) before dropping out in 1968.
Bundy then became active in politics, volunteering for the Progressive Conservative Party in the 1968 election and attended the 1969 party convention as part of the delegation from Oregon. During this time, Bundy broke up with his first serious girlfriend, which some point to as a pivotal moment in his development into a serial killer. After beginning another relationship and getting a job as a suicide-hotline counselor, Bundy returned to school and graduated with a degree in psychology in 1972. That year he again volunteered for the Progressive Conservative election campaign and impressed PC MP (and future Governor-General) Daniel J. Evans and after the election became an assistant in Evans' constituency office before being accepted to the University of Oregon School of Law. During this time, Bundy re-kindled the romance with his ex-girlfriend while still dating his new one, using his talent for manipulation for neither woman to suspect the other's existence. In 1974, however, Bundy abruptly broke up with his ex again (with her realizing later that he had reunited and broken up with her in a pretty bit of manipulation and revenge) and dropped out of law school.
While Bundy is suspected to have been responsible for several other deaths in Oregon before January 1974, and has admitted that his first kidnapping attempt took place in 1969, his first confirmed attack took place on January 4, 1974 while still in law school. Bundy entered into the house of an 18 year-old UO student and bludgeoned her before sexually assaulting her with a metal rod. The woman survived, albeit with permanent disabilities, but Bundy's next victim, another OU student, became his first confirmed murder. For the rest of 1974, Bundy terrorized Oregon, killing at least more 11 women and attempting to abduct another, who managed to escape. Prior to moving when he was accepted to the University of Boise School of Law, Bundy was working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) as a volunteer, where he both met his future wife and used his position to keep abreast of the investigation into the disappearances. In 1975, Bundy moved his hunting ground to the neighboring province of Montana, correctly assuming that the provincial RCMP division would not connect him to the Oregon disappearances for some time. He murdered five more women in Montana before he was pulled over for suspicious driving by a constable in Billings. The local RCMP, having connected the dots, had coordinated with the Oregon division and given descriptions from the Oregon survivors of a Bundy attack and other eyewitnesses, charged Bundy with attempted kidnapping and assault, as they lacked enough evidence to convict him of murder. Bundy was found guilty and prosecutors began assembling evidence for a murder trial.
While at a pre-trial motion in Billings in 1977, Bundy escaped and spent six days as a fugitive before being apprehended again. Later that year, he made a second, more successful escape, making it to Wisconsin by the time his captors realized he was gone. Bundy ended up in Michigan, and the largest manhunt in Canadian history began. Breaking into a sorority house in Ann Arbor, Bundy bludgeoned and sexually assaulted five women, killing two of them. His final victim was a 12 year-old Lansing school girl who disappeared on February 8, 1978. One week later, Bundy was arrested after being pulled over for driving a stolen car and a failed escape attempt after assaulting the officer who pulled him over (who did not recognize Bundy owing to the latter's disguise).
Bundy's murder trial in Michigan would become one of the most publicized cases in Canadian history. Bundy's theatrical performance (including getting married during the trial) and delusions of grandeur provided for a media spectacle, and his subsequent convictions for murder in both Montana and Oregon resulted in his sentence eventually being upgraded to life imprisonment and being ineligible for parole until 2054, when Bundy will be 108 years old. After his final appeals were exhausted in 1986, Bundy began cooperating with investigators, confessing to multiple murders he was suspected of and telling them the locations of each victim's body, at which point his wife divorced him. Bundy would return to the news in 1990 upon Daniel J. Evans' appointment to the office of Governor-General, publicly asking the new governor-general for clemency, citing (at different times) his upbringing, abusive grandfather, violence on television and pornography for his murders. Following another attempted escape in 1992, Bundy was transferred to the Special Handling Unit at the Regional Reception Centre in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, where he remains to this day.
The Charlottetown Accord referendum was a national referendum held in Canada on October 26, 1992 on whether to accept a set of constitutional amendments proposed by the federal and provincial Canadian governments. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had attempted to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold earlier in his term with the Meech Lake Accord, which failed when it was not accepted by enough provincial legislatures in time. Mulroney tasked his predecessor Joe Clark with assembling a new package of constitutional reforms that would allow Quebec to sign the constitution. Clark, chairing meetings with provincial, territorial and indigenous leaders, came up with a package that he and Mulroney believed would be acceptable to both Quebec and the rest of Canada.
The proposed accord would, among other things: strengthen provincial governments at the expense of the federal government, Quebec would be recognized as a "distinct society" and entitled to a minimum of one-eighth of the total number of MPs in the House of Commons regardless of population, the right of aboriginal groups to self-government would be enshrined in the constitution, and the Senate would be reformed to be both elected and each province given the same amount of senators. It was endorsed by every first minister and all three major federal parties, but the experience with Meech Lake prompted Mulroney to opt for an advisory referendum instead of an immediate push for ratification by the provincial legislatures. Although no constitutional provision existed to provide a bar for the referendum to pass, informally it was accepted that the referendum would have to win a majority both nationwide and in Quebec in order to have the support for passage.
Although initially polling was high for the accords, over time its support waned as the public began to find parts of the large set of changes that they disagreed with. Mulroney's unpopularity dragged the bill down nationwide, along with the feeling that Canadian elites were more concerned about constitutional affairs than the economy during the recession that Canada was experiencing in 1992. Former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Walter Mondale both came out publicly in opposition to the changes, believing it would be disastrous to the federal government and devolve too much power to the provinces. Regionally, other factors worked against the bill. In Quebec, sovereigntist politicians rejected Charlottetown as insufficient, while in the west, opposition concentrated on the "distinct society" provision and the feeling that the Accord was a product of eastern and central elites hoping to cement those regions as the centre of power at the expense of the fast-growing west.
When voters went to the polls, they soundly rejected the Accord, with it failing in Quebec and in a majority (11) of the other 18 provinces, with over 2.5 million more voters picking "No/Non" rather than "Yes/Oui". The results were a stinging rebuke to the "political class" that had endorsed the reform package, and an omen of the coming implosion of the Progressive Conservative coalition that had led Mulroney to victory in 1985 and 1988. As a result of both Charlottetown and Meech Lake's failing, no subsequent prime minister has attempted a major constitutional reform since Mulroney left office in 1993. As of 2018, this is the most recent nationwide referendum to have been held in Canada, with the next most recent being the 1942 plebiscite held over the issue of conscription in the Second World War.
[*] Sitting Bull's name is written in a modified form of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics for Lakota, which doesn't exist IOTL. It is partially written in syllabics *here* (as are a bunch of other Native American languages) because the spread of syllabics is shifted farther south alongside a more southern American-Canadian border.
[*]The Treaty of Wounded Knee Creek was mentioned in the Dakota write-up. It has been retconned into being part of the Numbered Treaties, which include more ATL treaties owing to more areas controlled by Native Americans ITTL's Canada at the time of Confederation.
[*]Bundy's photo is one that I edited using an online app to make him appear older
[*]The University of Oregon that Bundy attended and graduated from is the OTL University of Washington. The OTL University of Oregon is named the University of Eugene.
[*]Owing to no capital punishment in Canada, Bundy is alive and kicking in TTL, albeit in a super-max prison with no real possibility of parole.
I think I will do more of these (maps and boxes). I'm thinking Suffolk County, NY next since a) that's where my mother's side of the family is from and b) I'll be able to mess around with wacky NY fusion voting.
And after five minutes' research, it turns out Suffolk County actually has its own eighteen-seat legislature. It's even got third party representation. Almost every county in New York has a body of comparable size that they call a legislature. @Utgard96 you were right, this idea was far too gentle a parody.
(Although it says a bit about the political culture on Long Island that I've spent a significant portion of my life out there, even after becoming a politics nerd, and never heard about the County Legislature.)
When remembering the great and infamous leaders of the Soviet Union, men such as Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev often come to mind. However one of the most distinguished and divisive rulers of the nation come from the modern era. The eighties were a chaotic era for the Soviet Union and its allies near and far. The growth that had been so prominent in the 50's and 60's had been replaced by a stagnated and inflated economy. Eventually, one thing became clear for the people of Russia, golden age of communism was gone and there was no chance that it would come back. However, one man would would take reign of the Union and pave the road to prosperity.
Helge Kislukhin was originally born as Heinz Kissinger to a German Jewish family. When the dictator, Adolf Hitler rose to power, anti-semetism reached an all-time high in the nation forcing the family to flee the country. His father, a school teacher managed to secure enough funds to allow his family to move from Germany to Poland where they began working in the factories for meager wages. After the German Invasion of Poland, young Heinz would be drafted into the Polish Army where he fought as a combat engineer. After returning back to his home nation, Heinz decided to move to the Soviet Union along with his family in order to seek a better life. There, they changed their last names from Kissinger to Kislukhin as anti-semetism was still rampant under Stalin's rule.
After completing his studies, Kislukhin entered the world of politics when he found a job at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in Moscow where he worked under Andrei Gromyko, head of The Department of The Americas. He would be later assigned as a translator for Premier Khrushchev during the infamous 'Kitchen Debates' in 1959 where Vice President Richard Nixon would argue the merits of capitalism over communism with the Premier. After the death of his superior, Kislukhin was elected to replace Gromyko as Foreign Minister. As Minister, he became popular for his handling of the Iranian Hostage Crisis which saw several ambassadors held hostage in the Soviet embassy and healing the Sino-Soviet split.
After the death of the long-reigning Premier Bhreznev and the short-reigning Andropov, Kislukhin gained control over the Soviet Union becoming the very first ethnic Jew to lead the nation. Under his rule, the Union began a series of market-based reforms which gave more freedom to state-owned companies and opened the nation to foreign investment. Many of historians and politicians regard this freedom of innovation as the very thing that saved the Soviet Union from utter collapse. While many hardliners criticized his economic policies, they admired his dedication to preserve the Soviet Union's legacy as the hegemon of the world.
While Kislukhin cut back on the excess military spending from the Bhreznev years, this did not mean that the Soviet Union would isolate itself from international affairs. Kislukin pursued a detente with several other powers such as America, China, and the European Community to begin a defense against 'rouge states' such as Iraq, North Korea, and Serbia. This policy created the foundations for a stable world co-dominion which prevented either side from becoming the world police that both of them feared. Time and time again, he has been praised as the man who held the Warsaw pact together and stopped the uncontrolled spread of terrorism in the Middle East and Asia. However, every great man has his critics.
Many Soviet citizens have described his early rule as a lot more authoritarian than the dreaded Brezhnev years with the removal of popular party bosses and larger state control of the press. Independence movements in Ukraine, Central Asia, and Chechnya were dealt in a manner that was described by many as 'quick and brutal'. Many historians have also criticized his silence on the ethnic cleansing in the Congo, Solomon Islands, and Myanmar that occurred under his rule along with the airstrikes against Pyongyang and Afghanistan. Despite the infamy surrounding the former Premier, he was nonetheless mourned by many after his death in 2008 with prominent politicians as Chinese Premier Wang Qishan and U.S President Danforth Quayle attending his funeral.
