AHC: Canada with 100,000,000 population in 2013

As of 2013, Canada's population stands at about 35,000,000. What events in the last century could induce a much higher population growth to get it up to 100,000,000. If that's unfeasible, what population could Canada achieve assuming growth is as high as possible.

The only caveat: Canada's borders must stay the same as they are today
 
As of 2013, Canada's population stands at about 35,000,000. What events in the last century could induce a much higher population growth to get it up to 100,000,000. If that's unfeasible, what population could Canada achieve assuming growth is as high as possible.

The only caveat: Canada's borders must stay the same as they are today

I think we already had a thread on this.
 
Let's start with no WWI, and a goodly percentage of a generation of young men are not lost.

I remembering reading about the UK that after WWI, a fair number of young women emigrated to Australia, the U.S., and other areas of the world so that they'd have some kind of decent chance of finding husbands. And the same may have been true with Canada.
 

Martynn

Banned
Tunguska meteor hits the US - millions of people flee to Canada - much of the OTL immigration that went to the US go to Canada instead.
 
As of 2013, Canada's population stands at about 35,000,000. What events in the last century could induce a much higher population growth to get it up to 100,000,000. If that's unfeasible, what population could Canada achieve assuming growth is as high as possible.

The only caveat: Canada's borders must stay the same as they are today

I'm afraid you might need a POD before 1900 for 100 mill., but 50 isn't at all hard to achieve and 75 mill. could be doable if Canada ends up being seen as a "second Mecca", as it were, for immigrants.
 
I'm afraid you might need a POD before 1900 for 100 mill., but 50 isn't at all hard to achieve and 75 mill. could be doable if Canada ends up being seen as a "second Mecca", as it were, for immigrants.

US only had 76,000,000 in 1900.

What if Canada was less worried about demographics, given the OTL racism that may not be possible but if they were more receptive to East/South Asian, Jewish and African migrants would they be able to do it?
 
Post 1900, this is close to ASB without changing border. With a pre-1900 POD, its easy.

But going for the biggest population possible:

Canada's Government, acting on the wishes of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier (he of "This is Canada's Century" fame) uses the Manitoba Schools Question as a call for equal religious rights among others, and demands that Canada make its own decisions with regards to domestic policies. The decision sets a precedent of Canada making its own choices, and Canada chooses with this to massively open immigration policies, aiming to expand its population base in the Western Provinces. Alberta and Saskatchewan become provinces in 1901 as a result of this, and the open borders policy applies not just to those from the British Empire but also other parts of Europe. At the same time, policies with regards to Native Canadians are modified in the early 1900s to change the status of Native Canadians with regards to Ottawa - this decision is as first a problem as it causes more than a few skirmishes at first. Canada sends only a volunteer force to the Boer War, but that volunteer force proves highly effective against the Boers and gains Canada a reputation as a strong country. One result of this was that population growth per annum, which had been steady at about 1% since 1882, accelerates rapidly, reaching a peak of 7.4% in 1907 and seeing Canada's population grow from 5.1 million in 1896 to 9.8 million in 1914 (OTL: 7.9 million).

Canada's national identity was very much a creature by 1910, but the creation of the Royal Canadian Navy in 1911 (the name chosen by Laurier with the approval of King George V) was done with the goal of establishing a Canadian identity. The divisions between English and French Canada remained, but World War I completely settled the situation, as all-Canadian units deployed in the war in Europe and on multiple occasions fought with distinction, most famously at Vimy Ridge. There were many other notable situations there, one of them being the Royal Northland Warriors, a nearly all-Native Canadian unit which served in the assault on Vimy Ridge and many others and ended the war as one of the most-decorated units among the entire Allied armies. Canada's better treatment of Native Canadians results in tens of thousands of them moving from the United States to Canada. One of the events of these times was the Komagata Maru incident, which was settled by the allowing of the Indians who had sailed all the way to Vancouver to stay in Canada - in a brave move, Borden argued that Canada needed control of its own immigation laws, and saw the Komagata Maru incident as a way of getting this control. (The fact that the Indians in questions proved to be capable in most cases of speaking English and had decent education didn't hurt their case.) Canada, along with Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, argued for and got a seat at the table at the conferences that ended World War I. Then-Prime Minister Robert Borden argued alongside Woodrow Wilson that punishing Germany for World War I would sow the seeds of future conflicts, but that hope came to nothing.

After World War I, Canada kept its doors open, at a time when the United States' Immigration Act of 1924 massively limited immigration into the United States, thus causing hundreds of thousands of would-be arrivals to head to Canada instead. Canada's population grew from 10.7 million in 1918 to 19.1 million in 1935 (OTL: 10.8 million) in large part as a result of this, and many of the new arrivals spread beyond the well-established areas of Ontario and Quebec, and the discovery of oil in Alberta in 1928 (IOTL this happened in 1947) added to the growth of population there. Immigration also shifted here in other ways, as Canada's immigration laws after the Komagata Maru incident focused on education rather than class, and it allowed a sizable number of Indian arrivals to Canada, Sikhs most of all. Native Americans, mostly of tribes which had members in Canada, also proved a substantial immigration source. Canada's push for greater autonomy came good with the 1931 Statute of Westminister, which delegated nearly all elements of decision making to the colonies, effectively allowing Canada to become fully independent. After America's restrictions, Canada became the single largest taker of immigrants in the world by the mid-1930s, and while the Great Depression slowed this some, it didn't stop it. Perhaps the most famous move Canada made during this time period came after Nazi persecution began in Germany, where Canada openly said that they would allow those Jews who brought assets with them to come to Canada. Over 150,000 of these Jews did just that between 1933 and 1939, including the passengers of the famed MS St. Louis. This would prove an astute move in several regards - over 30,000 of these Jewish arrivals volunteered for the Canadian Army in World War II, and they brought with them tens of millions of dollars in assets which contributed to Canada's economy, and the nearly all-Jewish 2nd Royal Toronto Armored Regiment in the war proved among the most capable units of the 1st Canadian Army, famously being the armored unit that supported the II Canadian Corps infantry units in their liberation of Amsterdam in April 1945. Canada was perhaps more than any other nation absolutely appalled by the Holocaust, and more than a few Holocaust survivors ended up heading across the Atlantic.

After the war, Canada's multicultural nature began to grow massively, helped both of the large and increasingly-powerful French-Canadian bloc in federal politics and society as a whole as well as other groups. Having built up a strong foothold in Canada over the preceding decades, the Indo-Canadian community by the end of the war had its own power, and Canada would be among the first to recognize the independence of India in 1947 and Israel in 1948. The huge baby boom that swelled Canada after the war pushed the country's population from 22.2 million in 1945 (OTL: 12.1 million) to 36.3 million in 1960, while Canada's increasingly-politically-powerful indigenous population also began to push their own power forward. The Baby Boom created a whole new generation of Canadians, and through the 1950s the arrivals began to come to Canada both from India and from the West Indies, most notably from Jamaica. Canada's demobilization from World War II hurt them when they had to get involved in Korea in 1950, a mistake that was not repeated as the Canadian armed forces built up a powerful force in the 1950s and 1960s, which as Britain withdrew from the world after the Suez Crisis and NATO came into being to counteract the issue presented by the Soviet Union in Europe. Canada was one of the first nuclear-armed nations (having been involved in the Manhattan Project and the Tube Alloys projects during WWII) and in the 1950s to 1970s built a massive infrastructure to support a rapidly-growing economy. Canada's aerospace industry creates one of the first commercial airliners in the Avro Canada C-102 JetLiner in 1953, while the country's aerospace, shipbuilding, steel and metals, automotive and research industries rapidly turn a country that had been primarily a resource producer into an advanced industrial one. It also resulted in Canada developing its own independent foreign policy, this first shown widely in Lester B. Pearson's proposal for peacekeeping forces.

Britain proposed several plans in the 1950s to various territories of the British West Indies made parts of Canada, and while Canada was in favor of these for the most part, local populations were not in favor of it and as a result they came to nothing concrete, though by this point there were socially and economically intertwined with Canada. Likewise, several European nations (particularly the Netherlands and Ireland) became good allies with Canada in the post-war era. The rise of Quebec Separatism in the 1960s was largely counteracted by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who was elected in 1968 and created the idea of Canadian Nationalism and Federalism as a distinctly separate identity from the United Kingdom. Trudeau was defeated in elections in 1974 but returned to power in 1981 (staying in power until 1985), and Trudeau and his arch-rival Robert Stanfield (PM 1974-1981) both agreed on many elements of Canadian nationalism - most famously, Stanfield both publicly and privately supported Trudeau's efforts to defeat Quebec's 1980 independence referendum and the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982, many of the social changes that Trudeau codified into law were also supported by Stanfield, and Stanfield's wishes to expand the power of the Canadian armed forces, diplomatic corps, national champion companies and infrastructure were supported by Trudeau. (Indeed, the two both publicly admitted after their times in power that they didn't mind working with the other, because the other was open to pragmatic decision making.) Canada's own Constitution, signed into law by Queen Elizabeth II in Ottawa on September 19, 1982, formally removed any link between Canada's government and Britain's Houses of Parliament. Canada's new constitution also reformed Canada's federal government by turning Canada's Senate into an elected body, but one elected by each province by proportional representation, creating what amounted to a brake on Parliament's power, which along with the push for greater provincial power by the likes of Premiers Rene Levesque, Peter Lougheed and Bill Davis, caused Canada's once-centralized government structure to become increasingly a negotiator's game, particularly with the fracturing of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada after its defeat in the 1993 elections.

Canada's population growth stayed rapid during this timeframe, the 36.3 million of 1960 become 45.4 million in 1970, 52.7 million in 1980 and 60.9 million in 1990. The largest sources of immigration from Europe had by and large leveled off by the 1970s, replaced by ever-increasing arrivals from Asia, both the Indian subcontinent and from East Asia, with Japan and Korea being replaced by the largest sources of Asian immigrants by China by 1980. Canada's source of arrivals from the West Indies was joined by smaller numbers of Latin American arrivals through the 1970s. The Native Canadian Status and Authority Act, signed into law by Trudeau in May 1984, which dramatically re-wrote the relationship between Native Canadian tribes and Ottawa and entirely scrapped the 19th Century Indian Act, was another watershed moment, as it established measures for the 2.4 million-strong Native Canadian community to improve their own lot with less involvement from Ottawa, opportunities that most took the federal government up on. Stanfield's push to expand Canada's diplomatic influence in the world was one of the driving pushes behind the 1980 Ottawa Treaty, in which Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan settled their respective state of war with each other and paved the way for Palestine to proclaim its independence in May 1981. That treaty was the driving force for Canada being one of the five new nations to get permanent United Nations Security Council seats (joining Germany, Japan, India and Brazil) in the organization's 1985 reform. Canada's global influence saw more points given when the country was one of those who led the first against Apartheid in South Africa, and was the scene of the first meetings between the exiled ANC leaders and South African government officials in Toronto in June 1985.

The 1993 Canadian elections saw the ruling Liberal and Conservative parties have their power comprehensively broken by the left-wing New Democratic Party and charismatic leader Jack Layton and Western-touting right-wing leader Preston Manning and his Reform Party of Canada, along with the Bloc Quebecois, led by former Conservative cabinet member Lucien Bouchard. The combination of this and the arrival of the Green Party into federal politics in the 1997 elections forced Canada's government to find compromise positions, but within months of the elections would show the world what had not changed in its resolve, when what Canada called Operation Messiah began on April 19, 1994, in Rwanda.

Rwanda had the year before settled a peace treaty between its government and armed rebel groups, but a century of differences among the population exploded into open genocide on April 6, 1994, when the airplane carrying the heads of state of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down by an surface-to-air missile. This proved to be a catalyst to a genocide of the minority Tutsi and Twa populations by the Hutu-dominated interim government, and when the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda attempted to escort the interim President for her inauguration, they were attacked by Hutu militias, who had been largely organized by many among Rwanda's political elite. As the violence exploded, the Canadian leader of the UN mission to Rwanda, Major General Romeo Dallaire, attempted to protect Tutsis, leading to over two dozen of his troops being killed and himself being wounded, and he made a desperate call for help, saying that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die if he didn't get help. When the UN elected to not intervene on April 11, Ottawa took matters into their own hands, rapidly calling up the Canadian Airborne Regiment and the Royal 22nd Regiment of Canada (the famous 'Van Doos') to provide reinforcements to Dallaire. They landed in Kigali on April 19, and after beating back an attempt by the Rwandan Army to destroy them, massively reinforced their positions and called in reinforcements. The deployment, which was a very risky operation which many nations and planners figured was impossible, proved to be a political gold mine, and the Canadian Army units in Rwanda quickly moved to stop the genocide. The Hutu Power radio station was destroyed by bombs dropped by Canadian CF-210 attack aircraft, helicopter-borne units and heavily-armed troops all but eradicated the Rwandan Army and treated the Interahamwe militias roughly, but the TV pictures sent by young CBC reporters Saheena Alisyani and Anne-Marie Mediwake (the former was seriously wounded covering the genocide) and the news of the brutality not only ended domestic opposition but galvanized international support. By the middle of May, the violence was largely over. The Canadian Army had taken 28 dead and 316 injured, but the mission had been successful at saving hundreds of thousands of lives, though the outbreak of violence had still claimed the lives of over 250,000 Tutsi and Twa Rwandans. Canada's actions also created a massive rift between them and both France and Belgium, who Canada claimed (correctly, as it would turn out) had armed the militias. Dallaire's own UN operatives had technically violated orders in helping the Canadians, but not a single nation ever game them any grief for it. Dallaire was awarded the Canadian Victoria Cross for his efforts (he was one of five awards) and two of his officers, Senegalese Captain Mbaye Diagne and Tunisian Lieutenant Shukri Nabir al-Hosein, were offered honorary awards for their own bravery.

Canada's move gave them perhaps the best reputation in the world of any nation for their actions, as they had selflessly decided to go help people would have otherwise almost certainly have been killed. 15,000 Rwandan refugees came to Canada in 1994-96, and Canada's peacekeepers were soon in more than a little demand for conflicts, and in case after case afterwards - Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Balkans - the Canadian Army was involved and did their jobs with distinction. Dallaire returned to Canada as a hero, and would ultimately be appointed as the first Canadian to hold the position as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, appointed there by Ottawa (with NATO's approval) in May 2000. (The SACEUR position had been explicitly American until NATO changed this in the early 1980s. The first non-American was British General Sir Nigel Bagnall, appointed to the position in 1983.) Canada's 21st Century was occupied by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the deployment to Afghanistan as a response to it.

Growing energy and resource prices, combined with sound fiscal management, allowed Canada's economic situation to improve markedly by the end of the 1980s, and by 2000 the country's economic position was a source of power and influence in itself. The development of a global advisory body for securities regulation in the early 2010s was pushed by Canada, and was headquartered in Toronto upon its formation in 2011. Canada's trade policy has been pragmatic, helped by a government agency - the Ministry of International Trade and Industry - designed specifically to help with this. Canada gained its first domestically-based car maker in 2010 when General Motors sold its Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Hummer brands, along with its struggling European divisions, to Ontario-based auto parts giant Magna as part of its reorganization. By this point, it joined a long list of international companies based in Canada, providing employment to armies of workers and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy, as well as giving the country further still economic clout. Canada's population cleared the 75 million mark in 2015, with growth continuing....
 
Canada's population in 1900 was only about 5 million. We've grown 7 fold in that time.

If you grow MUCH faster than that (especially if by immigration) Canada won't bear a whole lot of resemblance to today's country.

I see two possibilities for a larger (if not quite that large) Canada with a 1900 PoD.

1) WWI doesn't happen. There are far more people left in Europe in 1918 than OTL (and since iOTL it was disporportionately young men who died, who otherwise would have been starting families), and no more land. Millions of second sons, etc., move to Canada where there's more opportunity.

2) WWI happens and is worse. Millions flee Europe to escape abject poverty.

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OTOH, the Dust Bowl of the Thirties is a real problem. Even if there isn't a Great Depression at the same time (which made things far worse), the hugely productive (agriculturally) Prairies had to IMPORT food in the worst years, and so wouldn't be able to support either millions of new settlers there, nor feed millions new come to e.g. Ontario.

Even when the rains come again, people will be scared off for a good while.

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Also. More people will want to go to the US than to Canada. If we get 50 million immigrants (say), how many does the US get?

You might well have to have a combination of massive nativism in the US blocking immigration there, plus a great desire for emigration from (probably Europe), plus finances to PAY for all those people to move.

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Hmm... OK, what if a lot of the immigration is from Asia, not Europe, say. The US is unlikely to want a massive influx of Asians. (Nor would Canada, realistically, but, hey, it's a scenario, right?) So... After WWI thousands of demobbed Indian soldiers are encouraged to move to Canada, rather than e.g. stay in Britain. Over the decades, they bring relatives from home, and they bring more, etc.

In addition, in the aftermath of WWII, Hong Kong is overrun or is threatened to be, by the PRC, and half the population there tries moving to Canada, together with an equal number from Canton.

Perhaps Hong Kong never falls, but is constantly threatened, so people keep streaming over the border INTO Hong Kong from the rest of China, while Hong Kongers who can flee to Britain or Canada.

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Still don't see how we're going to get 100 million, but you could get a population rather larger than today's.
 
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