Alternate Wikipedia Infoboxes V (Do Not Post Current Politics Here)

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Another one...

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I like this a lot. What states are encompassed in each new "country"?
 
I like this a lot. What states are encompassed in each new "country"?
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Red is Canada, green is California, orange is Deseret, grey is the CSA, blue is the USA, light purple is Texas, and purple is New England. POD is 1863. The UK intervened in the Civil War on the Confederacy's side.
 
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Red is Canada, green is California, orange is Deseret, grey is the CSA, blue is the USA, light purple is Texas, and purple is New England. POD is 1863. The UK intervened in the Civil War on the Confederacy's side.
I have to be that guy and ask something: with a POD in the mid 19th century, why do the state borders perfectly line up with the OTL borders?
 
I have to be that guy and ask something: with a POD in the mid 19th century, why do the state borders perfectly line up with the OTL borders?
Well, I can't show it using that website, but the only borders that changed anyway are Oregon, Idaho, and Washington being one big province (Cascadia).
 
Now, if you can find a way for their opponent to be Pound/Foolish, then I'll be impressed.

(I will also accept Losers/Club, Derry/Maine, or the only one that I imagine might actually be possible, Stephen/King)

How's this?:

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(Eh, close enough.)

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And finally...

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…though this one does require some explaining as it sort of is a stretch. Here, the parents of OTL Hong Kong -born actor Alexander Fu Sheng (lived 1954-1983 IOTL) move to the US a month before his birth, and is last name is Anglicized to “Foo,” which apparently really is a real name in OTL, and Sheng accidentally becomes his middle name. Foo then goes on to marry OTL bodybuilder Rachel McLish, and in a move similar to what Antonio Villaraigosa (born Antonio Villar) did IOTL, Foo merges his last name with his wife’s last name, making his new last name be Foolish (Foo-Lish). Also, UK politician Stephen Pound was also born in the US ITTL, I guess.
 
POD: Hillary Clinton enrolls in the University of Chicago instead of Wellesley College. She never meets Bill Clinton, and remains in Illinois where she gets into local politics and is eventually elected President in 1992 over incumbent George H. W. Bush.

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Although only 5 years passed between the Canadian elections of 1988 and 1993, it is not a huge exaggeration to say that the Canada that existed on election day 1988 no longer did by the election of '93. Firstly, the governing Progressive Conservative led by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed off on the Canada-United States Free Trade agreement, signalling the end of Canada's traditional opposition to full economic integration with it's Southern Neighbour. Secondly, and much more importantly, in February 1990, the Meech Lake Accord was passed, greatly decentralizing Canadian confederation, effectively killing the Quebec sovereignty movement, ensuring Quebec would remain the PC stronghold it had been for the last 2 elections for some time yet, and ascending Brian Mulroney to deity levels of popularity in Quebec. However, the increased popularity for Mulroney and his party in Quebec came at the price of alienating the PCs traditional heartland of Western Canada. Many Westerners had already viewed Mulroney and his Government as too focused on Quebec at the detriment of the rest of the country; the passage of Meech Lake (and the special powers for Quebec contained within it) solidified this view. This alienation, combined with the dire economic conditions that would develop, gave rise to the new Western Populist Reform Party, founded by Preston Manning, son of longtime Alberta Premier Ernest Manning. The party won it's first seat in the House of Commons in a by-election held in May 1989, tripling their vote compared to the election held only months prior. Reform would eventually gain the votes of many Western former PCs who saw the party as too far gone from Conservatism and only marginally better then the Liberals.

Despite the accomplishment that was the passage of Meech Lake, the PCs were unable to bask in the greatness of the moment and had to soon turn their attention to other matters. In particular, they had to pass the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the face of huge amounts of resistance from both the other parties in Parliament and the General Public. Eventually, the tax was forced through and became law on January 1, 1991, but the unpopularity of the tax, combined with the Liberal opposition to a tax (and newly elected Liberal Leader Jean Chretien promising to abolish the tax should he win the next election) greatly hurt the PCs standing in opinion polls. Not helping was the increasing rate of unemployment, with 10% of Canadians out of work by February 1991. It was under these circumstances that, on February 16, 1991, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced to a stunned nation that he would resign as PC leader and Prime Minister as soon as a successor was elected. Immediately, questions began to fly as to why exactly Mulroney was resigning. Was he bored with political life? Did he not want to deal with the scrutiny of being Prime Minister? Was this all a plot to overthrow the government and install himself as Dictator? The answer was much more personal than all of that. Mulroney had secretly planned to retire after the passage of Meech Lake, having achieved what had been his ultimate goal since he became PC leader; however he opted to stay on through the introduction of the GST because he knew the frontrunner to replace him would be Lucien Bouchard, and he did not want his old friend from law school's first act in office to be the introduction of a hated tax.

Soon, the July leadership convention arrived. As had been widely expected and predicted, Bouchard triumphed on the first ballot, beating back candidates including Minister of Finance Michael Wilson, and the Western "Blue Tory" Otto Jelinek. Bouchard's charisma, roots in Quebec, and close comradery with Mulroney all made him the most likely winner, and he rode this expectation to a win.

As new leaders often do, Bouchard experienced a leadership bounce. However, this bounce was rather short-lived, as the unemployment rate was still above 10%, and inflation was still above 6%. While the rate of inflation would trickle downwards by the end of the year, the unemployment rate would not. Indeed the economy would eventually doom Bouchard, for while the passage of Meech was enough to gain the loyalty of Quebec, most Canadians outside that province simply didn't care anymore. What they cared about was that the unemployment was high, and only getting higher. In addition, the large deficits run by the government angered many Fiscal Conservatives who had expected better. Thus, by the time the writ was dropped for the 1993 election, the PCs were trailing the Liberals, and, even worse, polling showed Reform was easily beating out the Tories west of the Ontario-Manitoba border.

The Liberals had prepared well for the campaign. Soon after the election call, the Liberals released their 112 page platform; "Creating Opportunity: The Liberal Plan for Canada", nicknamed "the Red Book" by the media. The platform allowed the Liberals to attack the Tories on specific policy positions in ways that hadn't happened before in Canada. In addition, the Liberal messaging during the campaign was well oiled and on point; The PCs were arrogant and incompetent, and had ignored the concerns of the "average Canadian" for far too long. The Liberals also exploited the "time for change" feeling that existed after 9 years of Tory Governance. The Liberal Party knew that, with the popularity of the PCs in Quebec and Jean Chretien's history of being a major architect of the hated 1982 constitution, their hopes of winning back their former heartland was slim. Therefore, they pinned their election hopes on Ontario. Not only were the Liberals polling head and shoulders clear of both Reform and the PCs in the province, but massive vote splitting between the 2 right-of-centre parties meant the Liberals could dominate the province's seat count with a less then spectacular showing in the actual votes.

The PCs emphasized the huge win for national unity that was the passage of Meech, and attacked Jean Chretien as "yesterday's man", unfit and unsuited to modern times. They also made sure to attack Chretien for his chief role in the writing of the 1982 constitution in Quebec, although this was rather like preaching to the choir, what with Quebec already being a PC stronghold. In truth, there wasn't a huge amount the PCs could run on, what with the terrible state of the economy at the time.

Reform ran an unabashedly populist campaign, constantly attacking both Chretien and Bouchard as "elites" who didn't understand the pain ordinary people had to suffer through due to their lack of fiscal conservatism. Of course, most of Reform's campaign and message was tailored to the west.

As for the NDP, the NDP accused all 3 of the other parties of being too harsh on working Canadians, and advocated higher taxes on higher income Canadians, on top of higher social spending and in particular, on anti-poverty programs. However, in truth, the NDP knew that the election was going to end rather badly for them. They had elected Audrey McLaughlin as their leader in 1989 on the hopes of breaking through in Quebec, but the passage of Meech Lake a mere few months later ensured this was not to be. On top of this, the NDP was facing the prospect of losing much of its Western support from 1988 (when the party had won 32 seats in the West), with many people going from the NDP over to Reform.
Soon enough, election night was upon the nation. The Liberals had led in the polls for the whole campaign, it was not a question that they would be the largest party. The question was if they would get their Majority or not. The country would soon get the answer.

The Liberals did very well in Atlantic Canada, going from 20 seats to 27. These gains came at the expense of the Tories, who were cut down to just 5 seats, compared to the 12 the party had won 5 years prior. Reform was, as expected, shut out of the region. They had been expected to do poorly due to the region's history of preferring the Red Tory brand of Conservatism to more ideological strains, and this was what ended up happening. The NDP too, were shut out.

In Quebec, the PCs held their fortress with only very minor dents. The pattern of heavy losses in Atlantic Canada stopped, with the Tories holding 60 of their 63 seats from 1988. The breakthrough the NDP had dreamed of when McLaughlin was elected hadn't even come close to happening, in fact the New Democrats failed to elect even a single MP. One of the three PCs losses was Beauce, which voted for Gilles Bernier, a former PC MP who had not been allowed to run under the party banner thanks to a fraud investigation.

With Atlantic Canada and Quebec having more or less split the difference (with Atlantic Canada seeing a major swing the Liberals and Quebec very little), everyone knew that it was Ontario that would decide the fate of the election, and Ontario decided that it was in the mood for a Liberal Majority. The Liberals won 95 of the province's 99 seats, with the PCs suffering a major collapse, going from 46 seats to just 3. Perhaps the most impressive thing for the was that the Liberals managed to do this with just 49% of the vote. The vote splits broke very favorably for the Liberals, many candidates in the province won election with less than 40% of the vote thanks to the split in the right-of-centre vote. Reform won a single seat in the province, and the NDP were shut out once more, ensuring the party would have no MPs from Eastern Canada.

With the PCs having done so poorly in Ontario, and winning only 68 seats nationwide, it was possible, if difficult, for Reform to come 2nd. They would need to win massively in BC and Alberta, and to win by fair margins in SK and MB. As it so happened, Reform didn't win Opposition despite their very strong performances in British Colombia and Alberta, but they could still be proud of their result. They had gone from 1 seat to 61, and were less then 10 seats behind the hated Progressive Conservatives. The Tories themselves meanwhile, couldn't be proud of their result, having lost 95 seats (coincidentally, the same amount the Liberals had lost in 1984), they were reduced to a Quebec based rump, and now they were faced with an existential threat in the form of the Reform Party.

Bad as the election went for the Tories, it was nothing compared to the New Democrats. Only one election ago there were talks of the NPD replacing the Liberals as the opposition to the Conservatives, and now the NDP had fallen far short of official party status, with only 6 seats. The party not only failed to break through in Quebec, but much of their western support transferred to Reform, with the NDP going from 32 seats in the West in 1988 to a mere 5 in 1993.

The Liberals now, having won their majority, had to set about getting the Canadian economy in good health from a very poor starting point. Only time could tell how successful they would be...

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Can I just point out to you, dear reader, that in this universe, the PCs went from a Western based party dead in Quebec to a Quebec based party dead in the West in just over a decade?

Also, shoutout to CT, TrueGrit, and Oppo. I first came up with the idea for this infobox in a Canadian Politics group chat we have going, so without them it's unlikely this would exist.
 
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What do the colors to the left of each leader signify?
Party colors. Jerry Brown is a member of the California Democratic Party, Mike Huckabee is a member of the Democratic Party of the Confederate States, Diaz-Canel is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba, Hunsman is a member of the People's Party of Deseret, Baker is a member of the Conservative Party of New England, and Julian Castro is a member of the Labour Party of Texas.

1 thing you might've noticed is that there's the Democratic Party of the CSA, USA, and California. The CSA is pretty much a 1 party state and most politicians are part of the Democratic Party, so the real elections there are the Democratic primary elections. Yes, both Doug Jones and Roy Moore are members. Jones is the Senate majority leader and the leader of the Moderate wing of the party while Moore sits on the Supreme Court of the Confederate States. In the USA, the Democratic Party still has the reputation of being the party of the Confederacy, so most Moderates and even a few center-left politicians like Hillary Rodham Weld are Republicans ITTL. The Republican Party has never lost an election since 1960. In California the Democratic Party is a left wing party and is actually facing a leadership election very soon because of the resignation of Prime Minister Brown. Click the link in my sig to learn more.
 
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