Canada's "Crime Without A Name"
Like their neighbors to the South, Canadian national identity was forged in political strife and bloodshed. In 1890, Canada's first major military conflict was to send a large expeditionary force to Brazil, to fight in the six-year long Brazilian Civil War on behalf of the British. The Brazilian Civil War was interestingly not that actually very bloody - each side was light on heavy artillery and emplacements, preferring to flank and destroy each other in a war of maneuver. This never actually happened, because most of the conflict took place in the interior of the country (each side's respective coastal redoubts was simply too defensible from land due to the famous Brazilian escarpment - which separated the coast from the interior - and too defensible from the sea because of friendly foreign navies). This made heavy artillery too logistically difficult - and the war was largely fought in jungle skirmishes, where disease was a greater threat than enemy forces. This was absolutely traumatic to foreign Canadian soldiers, often coming from cold regions. Canadian newspapers filled with invectives against Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier for leading Canada into "Britain's wars".
This would have been politically surviable, if not for the crisis to hit at the start of Laurier's first term as Prime Minister (having served as Secretary of State from 1889-1893) - the First World War. Immediately, with large swaths of the Canadian stranded across the world in the jungles of Brazil, Canada found itself as war with the United States. Canadian militias served directly under the British Army in its grand confrontations against the United States, in both Buffalo and Toledo. In addition, Canada was threatened by the American Autumn Offensive, which saw American troops burst into Quebec before just being barely repulsed south of Montreal, the American seizure of the Transcanadian Railroad, and most remembered of all, the Vancouver Massacre. Although Canadian soldiers and civilians suffered in the First World War far more than any other region of the British Empire, the peace conference infuriated Canadians. Canada was not invited to the conference - and the British quickly dropped the demand of war reparations against the United States for the Vancouver Massacre in exchange for more concessions in East Asia.
At the end of the war, America saw a change of government, but so did Canada. In the 1897 elections, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier's Liberal Party was totally eviscerated. French voters turned against the party for the Brazilian War - while Anglophone voters had become similarly alienated from the British Empire. Amusingly, Canadian troops and American troops were essentially on the same side of the Brazilian Civil War (before the collapse of the Federalists) - which further damned the Brazilian War in the eyes of Canadians. Furthermore, Laurier had come into power originally on a platform of liberalizing trade with the United States, which was now seen as verboten. The only issue stronger than anti-British sentiment was anti-American sentiment. The Liberal Party was completely wiped out of Parliament, as first-past-the-post system elected the Conservatives in a landslide victory, propelling Mackenzie Bowell into power, an ardent pro-British Conservative. Enough "Independent Liberals" opposed to Laurier stood in races, enough to throw the election to the Conservatives. However, Bowell was loathed as "England's lapdog" by most Liberals, especially Francophones.
Traditionally, Canadian political parties chose their leaders in an internal vote of the caucus. However, the Liberal Party only had four MPs remaining in Parliament, which meant that this was not really possible, as they clearly split into factions of two each. Eventually, it was agreed that a leadership convention would be held in Quebec City, where registered dues-paying Liberal Party members could vote on their next leader. The surprise winner of the convention was a Western Independent MP by the name of Frank Oliver, who blamed the disastrous war on "British transracialism." Campaigning on a platform of "Canada for Pure Canadians", Oliver electrified the convention and was also supported by many businessmen in both Toronto and Montreal who believed that he was a "modern, forward-thinking leader." Quickly reuniting the Liberals, they easily swamped the Conservatives in the 1901 elections, who fumbled around confused, unable to both satisfy their pro-British impulses and keep Quebec not enraged.
At home, Oliver quickly reshaped the Canadian political spectrum, describing him as a "progressive pragmatic nationalist." His ethnic animus was distinctly pointed away from Quebecoise, but namely at the British, Americans, and ethnic minorities (from First Nations to Asian immigrants to blacks). In the same breath as their racist eugenics advocacy, the Canadian Liberals would also implement a variety of good government reforms, basic social services, regulations (such as a minimum wage and 8-hour workweek). In this sense, Canada quickly became a model for intellectuals in the Confederate States, especially because their brand of progressivism treated religious minorities (namely Catholics) with a degree of pragmatism that Protestant American Moralism largely did not. Especially for Catholics, Canadian Progressivism seemed like a model for intra-faith relations, driven partly by the fact that the Quebecoise had loathed the Brazilian War - but had gladly flocked to the Red Ensign in defense of Canada during World War I during the American Autumn Offensive. In contrast to what seemed like hopelessly dysfunctional politics in the United Kingdom itself, a variety of British lauded the "Canadian model." Not only were parties advocating "annexation" into Canada growing in strength in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick to seize local majorities, but parties advocating annexation into Canada even broke onto the political scene in far-away reigons like Queensland, New South Wales, and even the Cape Colony in Southern Africa.
Canadian and Confederate inellectuals similarly bonded over their historical treatment of indigenous peoples - Oliver and the Liberal Party celebrated the Indian Removals as a model for Canada. Oliver, a Westerner himself, was particularly interested in "culling" indigenous peoples which he called an "inferior race doomed by the inexorable laws of biological science and morality." The 1902 Amendments to the Indian Acts gave any white settler (including immigrants from abroad, so a serious number of poor white Confederates moved to Canada) homesteader rights over indigenous lands outside of an even narrower band (roughly only 17% of the original reservations) as long as they could "reorient the land towards productive force". Massacres in Western Canada of indigenous peoples (as well as deaths from being driven from their lands into the harsh Canadian winter) became a regular occurrence as the Canadian government openly incentivized private corporations to simply hire private armies to ethnically cleanse indigenous Canadians and establish massive agricultural corporations, promising them protection courtesy of the newly formed Royal Canadian Army if any indigenous people's existed. Winston Churchill, the highest ranking surviving British officer in the Vancouver garrison of the First World War famously described Oliver's policies as the "crime without a name", judging that "massacre" and "atrocity" were insufficient terms, despite sharing many racial prejudices against the victims.
Oliver's next target might not have been immigration from East Asia, but an event in global history was to send his priorities immediately spiraling in that direction...