alternatehistory.com

Epilogue Post #5

Shareholder Democracy and the HBC:
The Hudson Bay Company had long operated in the northwestern wilderness of North America, often with impunity, but the turn of the 20th century and the Great War marked a significant shift in the Company's role. During the closing decades of the 19th century, the influence of the HBC board members exerted more and more influence in the Dominion of Caledonia's government, with board members entrenching themselves in high ranking government roles. By the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company had almost entirely divested itself from finance by London. Wilfrid Laurier, the HBC's governor, had also maneuvered himself into the position of colonial governor of New Caledonia with other board members in similarly high offices in the dominion. With the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company made the final push for independence from Great Britain. Wilfrid Laurier's first sovereign action as President of the Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company was negotiating a treaty of trade and neutrality with President Theodore Roosevelt as the United States entered war with Great Britain. While there were brief raids along the HBC-United States border[1], the treaty held, and trade continued with investments by American companies in the resource rich area owned by the Hudson Bay Company. Following the Great War, the Hudson Bay Company formally reincorporated as a sovereign and independent state, fully integrating the political and corporate structures of the former Dominion of New Caledonia and the Hudson Bay Company with Wilfrid Laurier as President and Chief Executive Officer.

The move from de facto governance by the Hudson Bay Company to de jure governance brought an opportunity to greatly restructure the government of the former dominion. Wilfrid Laurier, Clifford Sifton, Alexander Duncan McRae, and others all met in 1913 to craft the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation of the Hudson Bay Company that would become the nation's constitution. The broad structure of the Hudson Bay Company's board of directors and CEO were transferred to better suit national governance, with the CEO effectively becoming the head of state and government and the board acting as a check on the CEO's power, while other officers served as a sort of cabinet. As well as the corporate government structure, Laurier brought in economist Cliff H. Douglas from Great Britain[2] to help devise the Hudson Bay Company's currency system in one of Douglas's most influential projects prior to his work with the Keynes regime. The currency system the Hudson Bay Company devised forms one of the bases of the corporate sovereigntist ideology that pervades much of the country, known as shareholder democracy. Under shareholder democracy, the currency issued by the Hudson Bay Company acts just as much as shares in the company as it does a national currency. Each citizen of the HBC is a shareholder, and each share amounts to one vote in any local or national elections. To ensure some semblance of a representational democracy, the Sovereign Charter stipulates that the board of directors is only allowed to collectively own 15% of the total issued shares in the Hudson Bay Company, and upon election the CEO must divest interests down to a maximum of five percent of the company's total shares[3]. The consensus among Laurier and the Hudson Bay board was that under this system, as the citizens' incomes and savings were tied to the prosperity of the country, the citizenry would be more invested (in this case literally) in the future of the country. Similarly, by limiting the amount of wealth the leaders of the HBC could accrue, it would allow enough of that prosperity to reach the common people in good times as well as encourage the HBC's leaders to invest in the population as a whole and not just hoard wealth for themselves.

Wilfrid Laurier served as the CEO and President of the Hudson Bay Company for over a decade after its incorporation alongside his prior service as leader of the Dominion of New Caledonia. Laurier is widely considered the single most important founding father of the sovereign Hudson Bay Company and remained in office until his death in 1922. Following Laurier's death, the factionalism among the HBC's board began to show itself and develop into a more formalised party system. During the 1920s, two men emerged as the leaders of the two major parties in the Hudson Bay Company; Clifford Sifton and Alexander Duncan McRae. Sifton and McRae differed on several positions, but the main issue of the time was settlement of the sparse interior of the country and the issue of immigration and foreign investments. Sifton, forming what would become the Liberal Party of the HBC, encouraged immigration to the interior from all across Europe. Sifton tried to encourage Croatians, Ukrainians, and Jews as well as Canadians moving west to settle the eastern plains of the country with cheap land and government grants of shares in the company for homesteading. In a controversial move, Sifton and later Liberals also wanted to raise or even remove quotas for immigration from Asia. However, this immigration and investment in the rail network to the areas east of the Rocky Mountains was considered by Sifton and other Liberals to be the best way to encourage settlement in the area, especially in bringing much needed investment into the Hudson Bay Company after the Great War to get the new sovereign state on its feet financially. Opposing Sifton's policies, Alexander Duncan McRae founded the National Trust Party and opposed Sifton in the first real election for President and CEO of the Hudson Bay Company in 1922. McRae's National Trust Party supported drawing settlers west from Canada and the increasingly troubled Great Britain, but opposed immigration from Eastern Europe or Asia in order to settle the plains. Additionally, McRae advocated a stricter policy on foreign investment in the Hudson Bay Company, especially from American companies. Under the ideology of the shareholder democracy, foreign investment meant a danger of diluting the native voter base. In a similar vein, McRae also opposed a "company income tax" proposed by Sifton, saying that money and votes earned by the hard working farmers and such that built the country should be kept in their hands, not needlessly taken away by the bankers and those issuing the currency. In the 1922 election, the National Trust Party with its emphasis on supporting the smaller working class shareholders and his promise to support a meritocratic promotion system rather than patronage of the board and their friends won the presidential election and made Alexander Duncan McRae the first Chief Executive of the Hudson Bay Company following Wilfrid Laurier. Soon the Liberal and National Trust parties became the core political parties of the unique cross of business and government that would steer the Hudson Bay Company through the 20th century.


The Land of The Young:
As the Hudson Bay Company looked to prosper as it stepped out from under the British shadow after the Great War, so did the land on the land to the north of the United States on the other side of the continent. Long a promised home for the Irish diaspora, Acadia-Tirnanog finally gained true independence from Great Britain after the Great War with the help from American intervention in the war and the covert and overt support from many Irish-Americans. The period shortly after the end of the Great War saw much turmoil in Acadia-Tirnanog as the political vacuum of what would replace the British dominion had not quite been established. After a series of short-lived governments, the country stabilized at least in 1915 when James Michael Curley, the mayor of Halifax, took over leadership of the country after escalating riots ousted the government of Gordon Cunard[4]. Cunard fled to Canada where he had business and family connections, and Curley effectively declared himself the new president of Acadia after securing Halifax and much of the eastern half of the country. Curley exploited the Irish Catholic nationalism that had created the new Acadian identity to quickly cement his presidency, and used his control over the Halifax police and his comradely with many other urban working class communities in Acadia to stabilize the country.

The Curley regime quickly established a friendly relationship with the United States and the Warfield administration. Curley stated he would recognize the 1912 settlement of the border dispute over the Grand Banks, and with the influence of Baltimore in Edwin Warfield's political rise in Maryland, found a friend in the United States during much of the 1910s that helped establish Curley's legitimacy and power. James Michael Curley presented himself as the working man's ruler in Acadia-Tirnanog for both the urban and rural classes. He directed the building of schools in both urban and rural areas, mandated the learning of Gaelic for all schoolchildren in the country up through primary school, established a subsidy for local fishermen during for when stocks were low, and established a strong political machine throughout the country. Curley also couched his regime in the language of Irish and Catholic nationalism. One of his first acts was to append the "Tirnanog" or "land of the young" name to the official name of Acadia becoming Acadia-Tirnanog, and in speeches Curley consistently talked up the idea of Acadia-Tirnanog as a "new home" for the Irish people after the British brutally wiped out their old home. Curley would remain in power in Acadia-Tirnanog for over four decades before his death in 1955[5]. While he always presented a friendly demeanor toward the United States, Curley frequently antagonized neighboring British Canada and later the independent Quebec.

In 1938 shortly after the Quebec War of Independence from Canada, Curley made his most provocative move by seizing the Magdalen Islands and expelling all native French speakers from Acadia-Tirnanog. The justification was not only that the French speakers were from neighboring Quebec, but they were also mainly affiliated with the Pueblan Catholic Church, while most Catholics of Irish descent in Acadia-Tirnanog and the United States followed the Roman Catholic Church. Quebecois leader Andre Laurendeau responded with a declaration of war after an altercation at the international border bridge in Matapedia, resulting in the Restigouche War[6]. With Quebec weary after just winning their independence and more isolated diplomatically, Acadia-Tirnanog won several victories in the brief war. Acadia-Tirnanog soon occupied nearly the entire Gaspe Peninsula and began to advance on the city of Quebec itself after blockading the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. Curley's forces were finally turned back at the some say miraculous victory at Riviere du Loup, and the United States offered to mediate a treaty between the two nations. Curley ended victorious in the Restigouche War, not only winning the Magdalen Islands in the Curley-Laurendeau Treaty but also the area around Lake Temiscouata and the entire region of Bonaventure, giving Acadia-Tirnanog nearly the southern half of the Gaspe Peninsula. The Restigouche War is now seen as James Michael Curley's greatest triumph in establishing the Acadian identity, and his near half cenutry regime in Acadia-Tirnanog shaped the country for decades after his death, not just because he was succeeded by his son James Curley Jr.

[1] The Hudson Bay Company or the HBC becomes the official name of the country after the Great War and the Charter of Sovereign Incorporation, and New Caledonia falls largely out of use in the following decades.
[2] Douglas (in OTL C. H. Douglas) was the main theorist behind the Social Credit movement in OTL.
[3] Corporate nationhood, but with a for all intents and purposes wealth cap! I wanted to try and do a sort of different take on corporate nationhood, and the idea of a "shareholder democracy" came to mind as a really interesting idea that I have no clue how well it would work in practice.
[4] Gordon Cunard was an OTL 4th Baronet Cunard, grandson of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard who founded the Cunard Line.
[5] James Michael Curley died in 1958 in OTL, but he did stay active in Boston politics right up until his death. He finally ended his career in elected politics after being defeated for reelection as mayor of Boston in 1949 and losing a rematch for mayor in 1951.
[6] The name comes from the Restigouche River, which flows through OTL New Brunswick and forms the New Brunswick-Quebec border briefly before it empties into Chaleur Bay.