I've got a new chapter mostly done, but my life is kinda nuts right now so I have no idea when I'll be able to finish and post it. I haven't forgotten, but work is swamping me right now.
Go North, Young Man: The Great Canada
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I've got a new chapter mostly done, but my life is kinda nuts right now so I have no idea when I'll be able to finish and post it. I haven't forgotten, but work is swamping me right now.
Part 21 - Brave New World, Stage Two
Part 21 - Brave New World, Part 2
If September 11 and Afghanistan and the world of the early 21st Century proved anything clearly, it was that by 2004 the after effects of cold war politics and colonial pasts that had dominated the 1990s - Russia's Civil War, Rwanda, China's rocky decade, the birth of the European Union - were giving way to the creation of a totally new world, one where the rules would indeed be very different. The long boom in many of the world's developing nations that had begun in earnest in the 1980s had by the mid-2000s elevated a number of large nations - India, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Iran, Turkey and South Africa leading the way - into countries of influence. When combined with Russia's steady rebirth from the devastating end of the Soviet Union and China spending the 2000s trying to regain its lost momentum with some success, it resulted in the post-1992 talk of the West being back in control of the world's destiny being pretty much completely shattered.
The 2000s also saw shifts in the balance of power in Asia as Japan's relationship with Korea, steadily improving since Japan's beginning of its investigations of its past in the 1960s, began a source of strength for both countries, particularly as Japan and Korea found themselves on parallel paths with regards to social and economic development. Japan found themselves more than a little envious of Korea's development of the Korean Wave phenomenon, even as Japan's own cultural exports gained popularity in the 2000s across other parts of the world, and as Korea's industries reformed themselves from the Chaebol era in the 2000s they became natural rivals in many ways to Japan's industrial firms. But rather than fight them, in many cases Japan's vast keiretsu groups invited the Koreans to join the Keiretsu as partners - a move that initially surprised the Koreans, but which by the 2000s many saw as highly appropriate. This was first seen in the alliances between the remnants of the fallen Daewoo Group in the early 2000s as many of the surviving portions of the vast Daewoo conglomorate found Japanese benefactors, but it got the shock of a lifetime when, in March 2004, a number of the directors of the Fuyo Keiretsu made a highly-publicized visit to Seoul and announced, to the surprise of many, that LG Group had been invited to join the Keiretsu and would be able, and encouraged, to work with the group, including access to vast funds from the Mizuho Financial Group, which anchored the Fuyo Keiretsu. It was a sign to come, and over the decade the great corporations of Korea and Japan forged stronger links, alliances that would be joined by those of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the Philippines as time went on. (China, however, sought to outlaw such corporate alliances unless the Chinese had much greater access to the companies' technical information, something the Japanese in particular didn't want.)
India was another place that jumped into the future with both feet and with eyes wide open. Having been dismantling the remains of the License Raj in the 1980s and 1990s and then spending the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s brutally cracking down on corruption, India saw both its economic output and living standards rise dramatically in the later years of the 20th Century, and by the turn of the millenium had overtaken Canada and the United Kingdom as the Commonwealth's largest economy, and despite starting far back of the 'White Dominions', by the 2000s the gap had closed dramatically and showed no signs of slowing down, as India averaged an economic growth rate of 7.6% a year between the beginning of the end of the License Raj in 1980 and 2008, and by the 1990s was actively working to counteract many of the less-than-savoury results of such rapid growth (particularly environmental and health concerns). By the mid-2000s, India was seeking to take its place in the world, and nowhere was this more heavily seen than in its relationship with the Commonwealth. India was open in that it wanted greater influence in the Commonwealth, but it was also well aware that the best way to do that was to advance the interests its Commonwealth allies both at home and abroad, and India's vast cultural industries were among the first elements to jump on this - the International Indian Film Academy Awards, held for the first time in June 1997 in London, were major undertakings from the start. (Canada's introduction to how big India's efforts were came in 1999, when to surprise of many in India though not many in Toronto, the 1999 awards became the center of a four-day festival that marked what the festival was to become. Hosted by Salman Khan and Sonali Bendre, it was supported to such a degree by both Toronto's nearly million-strong Indian-Canadian community and the rest of the citizens of the city of Toronto that the crowd of Bollywood's elite that came for the event were physically shocked by it all. Needless to say, the event returned to Toronto in 2007.) Political connections existing since colonial times became economic connections, which by the 1980s and 1990s had evolved into business ties, but by the 2000s the sizable Indian population in Canada (and not a few Canadians in India) turned that into cultural and tourist ones. It was a similar story in Britain and Australia, and India leveraged this heavily in campaigns and economic efforts, selling the Commonwealth its electronics, textiles, gemstones, medications and agricultural products, in return buying British and Canadian cars, fertilizer, chemicals and aircraft, importing vast sums of foodstuffs and iron ore from Australia and minerals from South Africa and getting its technical knowledge and advancement from the Commonwealth in fields from telecommunications to nuclear reactors. India continued to rely on the Middle East for oil - and Pakistan's unwillingness to allow an oil pipeline across its territory for India proved a continuing headache - but with India and Iran's relations steadily improving this wasn't a terribly big issue, and one of India's big early 21st Century technological advancement efforts was in the field of biofuels.
It was America, however, that the development the next great revolution in materials science began.
After over a decade of work, 3M in Minnesota in 2004 gave up on its storied (and well-known) carbon atom chaining project, instead focusing its developed technology into better ways of manufacturing carbonfiber. Within weeks, however, two of its most skilled scientists, Dr, Paul Washington and Dr. Ashley Milliner, departed the company for a startup firm in Kenosha, Wisconsin, founded with the goal of continuing the research. 3M's patents on what it had developed forced the new company, Kenosha Materials Science and Engineering (KMSE for short) to license a way of extracting raw carbon, getting that license from the TPC Carbon Technologies consortium and initially being supplied from their facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. However, KMSE built on the knowledge that Doctors Washington and Milliner developed to develop a process that allowed graphene to be produced in a nearly flawless manner from raw carbon atoms, and the process allowed for the graphene to be made into a vast variety of thicknesses, at a fraction of the cost of previous methods. KMSE rapidly patented the newly-named Washington-Milliner Process and set about advertising its use to customers around the world, starting the process in May 2006.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first adopters of the idea for a specific purpose was Canadian Hydro Engineering Group, a firm based out of Calgary, Alberta, which had shifted over its existence from hydroelectric power to other uses of water as a resource, who had worked for years on the idea of a graphite oxide-based system of water desalinization, running into repeated difficulties with making its filtration systems last. Graphene to them was a godsend, and the company quickly paired with KMSE to develop the 'Mariner' water-desalinization system, based on their existing efforts but with the new graphene filters in place of the old ones and other detail improvements, testing it through 2007 until the first commercial projects to use it began being built in 2008. Launched in May 2008 first in Victoria, British Columbia, the Mariner water desalinization system worked perfectly, and thanks to graphene's durability, the system worked for over twelve years before any of the cells needed replacing. It was not able to supply the entire city, of course, but the system did work, and indeed the 2010s and 2020s would see the system developed for use all around the world, in essence making it possible to unlock all of the world's salt water for use for fresh water purposes - a huge benefit to say the least, and one which, while legal troubles lay ahead for it, would be used to the full extent of its benefits.
By the 2000s, the long boom of the post-war era was showing its dark side with regards to the problems with resource consumption, but just as fast as the problems began to pop up solutions to them came into being. It wasn't long before the development of the Washington-Milliner Process that carbon dioxide became a valuable feedstock, and its recovery from industrial applications became a lucrative business, and while recovering it from vehicles was not practical at that time, it was more than a little practical to do so from industrial facilities, incinerators, large buildings and a variety of other applications. The development of coal mining first for synthetic fuel and then for the carbon it created gave miners new jobs deep into the 21st Century, even as larger industrial facilities began shipping out tanker trucks and rail cars of liquified carbon dioxide to facilities that would harvest the carbon from it. Energy development hardly stopped there - from the beginnings of the Tesla car company in 2003 to the rapid technological advances in the 21st Century of wind turbines and solar cells and the development of ever-better ways of creating biofuels - and it raised the prospect of a world with energy that was both cheap and useful for the environment. Canada, which had been used to such things for decades, found itself somewhat lagging their southern cousins on this front, even as America in the later years of the 21st Century finally learned the value of government-owned corporations and the ability to use them for national or state goals. America had started that trend with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Authority in the 1930s, and had gained a number of examples of this in the 1970s, particularly with Amtrak and Conrail. By the 1990s all were proving highly useful tools for Washington and in most cases to be profitable companies, contributing both to Washington's coffers as well as to the people they served. But two events would drive this into the American psyche for good, and would have major effects on Canada.
The first event was the California Energy Crisis of 2000-2001. Having deregulated the electricity market in 1992, market conditions and maniuplations by the soon-to-be-infamous Enron Corporation caused a series of rolling blackouts that first struck the San Francisco Bay Area on June 14, 2000, and led to a massive problem for California's power transmitters - having been forced to sell much of their generating capacity as a result of degregulation, several utilities found themselves having to take massive losses on electricity generation while being required to buy power for their customers from speculators, in some cases not making back 15 percent of the cost. This resulted in the bankruptcies of San Diego Gas and Electric and Pacific Gas and Electric within days of each other in April 2001, followed by Southern California Edison three weeks later. The original plan by California Governor Gray Davis to buy power to bail out bankrupt firms was, in a truly shocking move, blocked by his legislature, who introduced a counter-plan to nationalize the assets of the bankrupt companies, creating the California Energy Corporation in return. What sealed this path was the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, pointing out publicly that his city, served by its own Power and Water Utility, hadn't suffered a single blackout, and that California might not have the same problem ever again if they took back their facilities. Despite howling by serveral companies involved in the manipulations (particularly Enron), California's legislature steadfastly refused bailouts for the companies, pointing out they had already done that a decade before and that the utilities, bankrupt as they were, needed to be returned to regulated hands. After the collapse of the stock markets following the September 11 attacks, support for bailouts evaporated, and on November 16, 2001, Davis grudgingly signed into law creating California Energy Corporation.
California Energy effectively nationalized the assets of the bankrupt firms and negotiated out payouts to creditors for liabilities, effectively transferring all of the assets of the companies into government hands in return for ownership of all of the physical plants, including three nuclear power stations, hydroelectric generators, wind turbines and a large number of natural gas-fired plants. California Energy proved difficult to manage at first, but the company provided its first profits to the state in 2005, and proved a highly useful way of improving electricity demand and prices.
A more serious event occurred on March 9, 2002, when the Number 1 reactor at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Northwestern Ohio suffered the largest (at that time) accident at a Western civilian nuclear power station. The reactor had suffered a serious leak of borated water from control mechanisms, and corrosion ate through the top of a piece of the six-inch-thick reactor head, causing the head to fail and causing a massive loss of coolant incident which, making matters worse, completely destroyed the control rod drive mechanisms above the reactor, and other safety issues at the facility caused complete loss of control over the reactor, causing a complete meltdown and three subsequent hydrogen explosions which cracked the reactor's containment structure (though it did not fail) and gutted its insides. The reactor was completely destroyed in the accident, and while the containment structure recovered most of lost coolant, over 10,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked both into the groundwater around the facility and into Lake Erie. 37 people at Davis-Besse died in the accident itself and twelve more would die from radiation poisoning as a direct result.
Davis-Besse became an international incident as a result of the contamination in Lake Erie, with Ontario Premier Mike Harris speaking at a press conference four days after the accident in Windsor, Ontario, less than 80 kilometres from the stricken reactor, visibly livid about it. President Clinton was quick to deploy resources, but it took fifteen days to completely seal off the leaks from the site. Thankfully, it was soon concluded that the radioactive contamination aside from the lost coolant had not left the reactor in large amounts and thus while the reactor was a total loss, locals outside of the site were safe - but it was rapidly discovered that FirstEnergy's reports on Davis-Besse's material condition had been falsified to a considerable degree, and inspections of other facilities found alarming corrosion and falsified records at two other FirstEnergy-owned facilities. Livid about this, Ottawa demanded Washington act against FirstEnergy, and the residents of Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan likewise demanded FirstEnergy out of the nuclear energy business. Facing truly monstrous liabilities and vast amounts of legal trouble, FirstEnergy declared bankruptcy on October 18, 2002, filing in court to seek dissolution and asset sales. The bankruptcy ruling, however, was stayed by judges of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals out of a desire to seek a solution to the issue.
What came of it, however, was stunning.
Having heard months of demands from his party (and some from other side, too) and with FirstEnergy's misconduct investigations and a suddenly very-aggressive Nuclear Regulatory Commission having subsequently shaken loose similar misconduct by Duke, Exelon and Southern Company (though, notably, much less or nothing from others, including the BPA, TVA or California Energy or indeed any of the latter's predecessors), President Clinton and assistants in the House and Senate proposed the creation of the American Nuclear Energy Corporation, ANEC for short. ANEC would have the power to nationalize the nuclear assets of companies found to be in violation of the law (Exelon fought this provision all the way to the Supreme Court, but lost) and would offer to take over those assets of others. The cost up front was smaller than many expected, but there was a reason most energy companies did not object to small amounts paid for assets - after Davis-Besse operating and insurance costs for such facilities had (understandably) skyrocketed and as such the plants to a man were losing money, and giving up the assets for a low cost also meant passing off any future liabilities for them. The state-owned facilities for the most part stayed out of ANEC, but the corporate-owned facilities were mostly supportive, and knowing of its ability to pass off liabilities, almost universally jumped in. FirstEnergy's attempt to use ANEC's creation to pass off its liabilities for Davis-Besse failed miserably and the company was ultimately dissolved between 2004 and 2011.
ANEC, too, got off to a chaotic start, but would make profit early on as well, and being highly scrutinized by Congress pretty much constanly after the disaster at Davis-Besse, didn't take long to gain some level of public trust, a situation helped by dedicated efforts to work with nuclear opponents and massive retrofitting efforts at existing facilities with poor placement (particularly the Indian Point, San Onofre, Shoreham, Diablo Canyon, Three Mile Island and Trojan facilities) and serious improvements at facilities with known safety issues, several of which were completely shut down. On May 21, 2007, ANEC announced its first planned new facility, to be built on Lake Mead less than 30 miles from the Las Vegas Strip. The site choice was deliberate - ANEC wanted to prove they could build a nuclear power station that could handle any emergency, and went to considerable effort to prove this. The Lake Mead facility's six reactors would have part of their containment structures punched into solid rock, and the structures there were meant to handle any possible natural disaster up to a 9.5-magnitude Earthquake. The plant also used Las Vegas' wastewater system as a source of cooling water and as a result was able to both reduce the demands on Lake Mead and treat and return millions of gallons of very pure water back to the City of Las Vegas and its suburbs every day. It was considerably more expensive to do things this way, but ANEC was aware that it had to do better on safety precautions and be seen to be doing better to assure the public of other facilities' safety.
In Canada, the operators of nuclear power stations - Ontario Hydro, Hydro-Quebec, Alberta Hydroelectric System, BC Hydro, Atlantic Power, SaskPower and Jamaica Energy - all were quick to point out that the safety records of their facilities were all but flawless, that the sort of accident that had happened at Davis-Besse was impossible at their facilities and were willing to, along with Atomic Energy of Canada, distribute as much information as they could and allow facility tours and technical briefings to show that their facilities were safe despite the horrible accident at Davis-Besse. Windsor's new water treatment system, under construction at the time, changed the location of its input system in an attempt to make sure the radioactive water from Davis-Besse never made it into the city's water system and Environment Canada and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment doing in-depth studies to make sure the accident didn't effect the water supplies in Canada. At the same time, the furor of the mess at Davis-Besse focused AECL's project to faster process nuclear waste so that the problem of it was massively reduced, this ultimately resulting in the proposal to build a new such facility in Quebec to better handle the waste so as the existing Chalk River Laboratories could find its job easier. With the prairie provinces, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Jamaica critically reliant on nuclear power and and it being very important to Ontario, there was never any talk of replacing it, but it was hardly a surprise that there would be objections to it, and the operators of the facilities in question all moved quickly to assure the public that what had happened there would not happen here.
As much as ANEC and California Energy had massive effects on the energy industry in the United States, it had a bigger one in the overall economy. While government-owned corporations had been part of Canada's economy for its entire modern industry - Petro-Canada, Canadian National Railways, Air Canada, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian National Research and Development Council and the provincial and regional power corporations were well regarded in Canada, and CNR and Petro-Canada were considerable contributors to government coffers just as the power companies were to provincial ones - this was relatively unknown in America, despite the BPA and TVA and the creation of Amtrak and Conrail in the 1970s. But the power companies would gain a very good reputation in the United States, and it wouldn't be long before the threat of nationalization made some industries in the United States clean up their actions, particularly in the energy industries. The companies also rapidly put paid to the long-held idea that government-held companies couldn't make money - ANEC not only buried that idea, by the late 2010s it would be a brave politician that proposed selling it because of the income it brought to Washington.
For Canada, the sudden entry of the American monster energy companies came with it a desire for the companies who had now sold off their nuclear assets get additional capacity, and Hydro-Quebec and Ontario Hydro were only too happy to provide this additional capacity. As the likes of American Electric Power, Consolidated Edison, Duke Energy, Southern Company and Exelon sold off their nuclear operations to ANEC they needed new capacity, and well aware of the desire to keep air pollution down, the companies invested heavily in hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, solar cells, waste-to-energy facilities, geothermal power stations and pumped storage hydroelectric power stations, the pumped-storage stations being used in several cases by Southern Company as a backup for its other facilities, particularly its wind turbines. The United States built more wind turbines than anywhere else in the world during this time, with its wind power capacity growing from 16,000 MW in 2005 to over 275,000 MW by 2025, while over three dozen pumped-storage facilities were built, the largest being the immense Swannanoa Pumped Storage facility, completed in 2016 near Asheville, North Carolina, with a capacity of 4,426 MW at peak power. Flush with cash and with cheap electricity in the offering, the companies proudly pushed for demand growth, with electric heating replacing natural gas or fuel-oil furnaces, railroad electrification being encouraged, steady development of (and ever-stronger demand for) electric cars and more and more electricity used by industry was the result, and immense supplies of cheap renewable energy and nuclear power from ANEC-owned sources made the advertising easier. It also meant that Ontario Hydro and Hydro-Quebec, both joined at the hip with the American power systems, were forced to upgrade to keep up. It was an investment nobody objected to - Ontario Hydro in 2020 paid out $5.56 Billion in dividends to the province of Ontario, while Hydro-Quebec returned $3.21 Billion to the province of Quebec.
Particularly because of the billions suddenly at stake, the American electricity companies and their partners in heavy industry firms - General Electric, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Honeywell, Morrison-Knudsen, Emerson Electric, Square D and Bechtel, among others - focused giant resources into the renewable energy industries, and the dramatic improvements that rapidly followed surprised no-one but created something of an arms race among the Commonwealth's energy firms and electrical and electronic equipment companies to keep up and not pass off leadership in the field to the Americans, a fight the Asian electronics giants - Hitachi, LG, Samsung, Mitsubishi Electric, Toshiba - rapidly also leapt into. As tens of thousands of wind turbines were built in the United States, once-drying towns in the primarily-agricultural plains states suddenly had new reasons to live, trading the growing of grain or the raising of cattle for the generation of electricity. This didn't stay stateside, of course - Alberta Hydroelectric System and SaskPower in particular wanted in on the action, and the corporations not only built the wind turbines they needed they also modified their nuclear power stations to allow them to be powered down or run at lower power outputs to allow the wind turbines to provide all the power they could when it was possible for them to do so. This became a common occurence for state-owned energy companies as well, as it allowed them to reduce the load on their expensive nuclear facilities while using power that produced little, if any, emissions. Coal companies took falling demand for their products as a challenge to find new sources of demand for the coal they mined - and the steady growth of the Fischer-Tropsch produced synthetic crude pioneered by Hess and Petro-Canada in the 1970s swelled in the 1990s and 2000s, helped by a steady rise in oil prices and the entry into the world of Sasol, South Africa's coal-to-oil giant which had been prevented by apartheid sanctions from providing its considerable expertise in the field to other companies.
If September 11 and Afghanistan and the world of the early 21st Century proved anything clearly, it was that by 2004 the after effects of cold war politics and colonial pasts that had dominated the 1990s - Russia's Civil War, Rwanda, China's rocky decade, the birth of the European Union - were giving way to the creation of a totally new world, one where the rules would indeed be very different. The long boom in many of the world's developing nations that had begun in earnest in the 1980s had by the mid-2000s elevated a number of large nations - India, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Iran, Turkey and South Africa leading the way - into countries of influence. When combined with Russia's steady rebirth from the devastating end of the Soviet Union and China spending the 2000s trying to regain its lost momentum with some success, it resulted in the post-1992 talk of the West being back in control of the world's destiny being pretty much completely shattered.
The 2000s also saw shifts in the balance of power in Asia as Japan's relationship with Korea, steadily improving since Japan's beginning of its investigations of its past in the 1960s, began a source of strength for both countries, particularly as Japan and Korea found themselves on parallel paths with regards to social and economic development. Japan found themselves more than a little envious of Korea's development of the Korean Wave phenomenon, even as Japan's own cultural exports gained popularity in the 2000s across other parts of the world, and as Korea's industries reformed themselves from the Chaebol era in the 2000s they became natural rivals in many ways to Japan's industrial firms. But rather than fight them, in many cases Japan's vast keiretsu groups invited the Koreans to join the Keiretsu as partners - a move that initially surprised the Koreans, but which by the 2000s many saw as highly appropriate. This was first seen in the alliances between the remnants of the fallen Daewoo Group in the early 2000s as many of the surviving portions of the vast Daewoo conglomorate found Japanese benefactors, but it got the shock of a lifetime when, in March 2004, a number of the directors of the Fuyo Keiretsu made a highly-publicized visit to Seoul and announced, to the surprise of many, that LG Group had been invited to join the Keiretsu and would be able, and encouraged, to work with the group, including access to vast funds from the Mizuho Financial Group, which anchored the Fuyo Keiretsu. It was a sign to come, and over the decade the great corporations of Korea and Japan forged stronger links, alliances that would be joined by those of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the Philippines as time went on. (China, however, sought to outlaw such corporate alliances unless the Chinese had much greater access to the companies' technical information, something the Japanese in particular didn't want.)
India was another place that jumped into the future with both feet and with eyes wide open. Having been dismantling the remains of the License Raj in the 1980s and 1990s and then spending the second half of the 1990s and into the 2000s brutally cracking down on corruption, India saw both its economic output and living standards rise dramatically in the later years of the 20th Century, and by the turn of the millenium had overtaken Canada and the United Kingdom as the Commonwealth's largest economy, and despite starting far back of the 'White Dominions', by the 2000s the gap had closed dramatically and showed no signs of slowing down, as India averaged an economic growth rate of 7.6% a year between the beginning of the end of the License Raj in 1980 and 2008, and by the 1990s was actively working to counteract many of the less-than-savoury results of such rapid growth (particularly environmental and health concerns). By the mid-2000s, India was seeking to take its place in the world, and nowhere was this more heavily seen than in its relationship with the Commonwealth. India was open in that it wanted greater influence in the Commonwealth, but it was also well aware that the best way to do that was to advance the interests its Commonwealth allies both at home and abroad, and India's vast cultural industries were among the first elements to jump on this - the International Indian Film Academy Awards, held for the first time in June 1997 in London, were major undertakings from the start. (Canada's introduction to how big India's efforts were came in 1999, when to surprise of many in India though not many in Toronto, the 1999 awards became the center of a four-day festival that marked what the festival was to become. Hosted by Salman Khan and Sonali Bendre, it was supported to such a degree by both Toronto's nearly million-strong Indian-Canadian community and the rest of the citizens of the city of Toronto that the crowd of Bollywood's elite that came for the event were physically shocked by it all. Needless to say, the event returned to Toronto in 2007.) Political connections existing since colonial times became economic connections, which by the 1980s and 1990s had evolved into business ties, but by the 2000s the sizable Indian population in Canada (and not a few Canadians in India) turned that into cultural and tourist ones. It was a similar story in Britain and Australia, and India leveraged this heavily in campaigns and economic efforts, selling the Commonwealth its electronics, textiles, gemstones, medications and agricultural products, in return buying British and Canadian cars, fertilizer, chemicals and aircraft, importing vast sums of foodstuffs and iron ore from Australia and minerals from South Africa and getting its technical knowledge and advancement from the Commonwealth in fields from telecommunications to nuclear reactors. India continued to rely on the Middle East for oil - and Pakistan's unwillingness to allow an oil pipeline across its territory for India proved a continuing headache - but with India and Iran's relations steadily improving this wasn't a terribly big issue, and one of India's big early 21st Century technological advancement efforts was in the field of biofuels.
It was America, however, that the development the next great revolution in materials science began.
After over a decade of work, 3M in Minnesota in 2004 gave up on its storied (and well-known) carbon atom chaining project, instead focusing its developed technology into better ways of manufacturing carbonfiber. Within weeks, however, two of its most skilled scientists, Dr, Paul Washington and Dr. Ashley Milliner, departed the company for a startup firm in Kenosha, Wisconsin, founded with the goal of continuing the research. 3M's patents on what it had developed forced the new company, Kenosha Materials Science and Engineering (KMSE for short) to license a way of extracting raw carbon, getting that license from the TPC Carbon Technologies consortium and initially being supplied from their facility in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. However, KMSE built on the knowledge that Doctors Washington and Milliner developed to develop a process that allowed graphene to be produced in a nearly flawless manner from raw carbon atoms, and the process allowed for the graphene to be made into a vast variety of thicknesses, at a fraction of the cost of previous methods. KMSE rapidly patented the newly-named Washington-Milliner Process and set about advertising its use to customers around the world, starting the process in May 2006.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first adopters of the idea for a specific purpose was Canadian Hydro Engineering Group, a firm based out of Calgary, Alberta, which had shifted over its existence from hydroelectric power to other uses of water as a resource, who had worked for years on the idea of a graphite oxide-based system of water desalinization, running into repeated difficulties with making its filtration systems last. Graphene to them was a godsend, and the company quickly paired with KMSE to develop the 'Mariner' water-desalinization system, based on their existing efforts but with the new graphene filters in place of the old ones and other detail improvements, testing it through 2007 until the first commercial projects to use it began being built in 2008. Launched in May 2008 first in Victoria, British Columbia, the Mariner water desalinization system worked perfectly, and thanks to graphene's durability, the system worked for over twelve years before any of the cells needed replacing. It was not able to supply the entire city, of course, but the system did work, and indeed the 2010s and 2020s would see the system developed for use all around the world, in essence making it possible to unlock all of the world's salt water for use for fresh water purposes - a huge benefit to say the least, and one which, while legal troubles lay ahead for it, would be used to the full extent of its benefits.
By the 2000s, the long boom of the post-war era was showing its dark side with regards to the problems with resource consumption, but just as fast as the problems began to pop up solutions to them came into being. It wasn't long before the development of the Washington-Milliner Process that carbon dioxide became a valuable feedstock, and its recovery from industrial applications became a lucrative business, and while recovering it from vehicles was not practical at that time, it was more than a little practical to do so from industrial facilities, incinerators, large buildings and a variety of other applications. The development of coal mining first for synthetic fuel and then for the carbon it created gave miners new jobs deep into the 21st Century, even as larger industrial facilities began shipping out tanker trucks and rail cars of liquified carbon dioxide to facilities that would harvest the carbon from it. Energy development hardly stopped there - from the beginnings of the Tesla car company in 2003 to the rapid technological advances in the 21st Century of wind turbines and solar cells and the development of ever-better ways of creating biofuels - and it raised the prospect of a world with energy that was both cheap and useful for the environment. Canada, which had been used to such things for decades, found itself somewhat lagging their southern cousins on this front, even as America in the later years of the 21st Century finally learned the value of government-owned corporations and the ability to use them for national or state goals. America had started that trend with the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Authority in the 1930s, and had gained a number of examples of this in the 1970s, particularly with Amtrak and Conrail. By the 1990s all were proving highly useful tools for Washington and in most cases to be profitable companies, contributing both to Washington's coffers as well as to the people they served. But two events would drive this into the American psyche for good, and would have major effects on Canada.
The first event was the California Energy Crisis of 2000-2001. Having deregulated the electricity market in 1992, market conditions and maniuplations by the soon-to-be-infamous Enron Corporation caused a series of rolling blackouts that first struck the San Francisco Bay Area on June 14, 2000, and led to a massive problem for California's power transmitters - having been forced to sell much of their generating capacity as a result of degregulation, several utilities found themselves having to take massive losses on electricity generation while being required to buy power for their customers from speculators, in some cases not making back 15 percent of the cost. This resulted in the bankruptcies of San Diego Gas and Electric and Pacific Gas and Electric within days of each other in April 2001, followed by Southern California Edison three weeks later. The original plan by California Governor Gray Davis to buy power to bail out bankrupt firms was, in a truly shocking move, blocked by his legislature, who introduced a counter-plan to nationalize the assets of the bankrupt companies, creating the California Energy Corporation in return. What sealed this path was the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, pointing out publicly that his city, served by its own Power and Water Utility, hadn't suffered a single blackout, and that California might not have the same problem ever again if they took back their facilities. Despite howling by serveral companies involved in the manipulations (particularly Enron), California's legislature steadfastly refused bailouts for the companies, pointing out they had already done that a decade before and that the utilities, bankrupt as they were, needed to be returned to regulated hands. After the collapse of the stock markets following the September 11 attacks, support for bailouts evaporated, and on November 16, 2001, Davis grudgingly signed into law creating California Energy Corporation.
California Energy effectively nationalized the assets of the bankrupt firms and negotiated out payouts to creditors for liabilities, effectively transferring all of the assets of the companies into government hands in return for ownership of all of the physical plants, including three nuclear power stations, hydroelectric generators, wind turbines and a large number of natural gas-fired plants. California Energy proved difficult to manage at first, but the company provided its first profits to the state in 2005, and proved a highly useful way of improving electricity demand and prices.
A more serious event occurred on March 9, 2002, when the Number 1 reactor at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Northwestern Ohio suffered the largest (at that time) accident at a Western civilian nuclear power station. The reactor had suffered a serious leak of borated water from control mechanisms, and corrosion ate through the top of a piece of the six-inch-thick reactor head, causing the head to fail and causing a massive loss of coolant incident which, making matters worse, completely destroyed the control rod drive mechanisms above the reactor, and other safety issues at the facility caused complete loss of control over the reactor, causing a complete meltdown and three subsequent hydrogen explosions which cracked the reactor's containment structure (though it did not fail) and gutted its insides. The reactor was completely destroyed in the accident, and while the containment structure recovered most of lost coolant, over 10,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked both into the groundwater around the facility and into Lake Erie. 37 people at Davis-Besse died in the accident itself and twelve more would die from radiation poisoning as a direct result.
Davis-Besse became an international incident as a result of the contamination in Lake Erie, with Ontario Premier Mike Harris speaking at a press conference four days after the accident in Windsor, Ontario, less than 80 kilometres from the stricken reactor, visibly livid about it. President Clinton was quick to deploy resources, but it took fifteen days to completely seal off the leaks from the site. Thankfully, it was soon concluded that the radioactive contamination aside from the lost coolant had not left the reactor in large amounts and thus while the reactor was a total loss, locals outside of the site were safe - but it was rapidly discovered that FirstEnergy's reports on Davis-Besse's material condition had been falsified to a considerable degree, and inspections of other facilities found alarming corrosion and falsified records at two other FirstEnergy-owned facilities. Livid about this, Ottawa demanded Washington act against FirstEnergy, and the residents of Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Michigan likewise demanded FirstEnergy out of the nuclear energy business. Facing truly monstrous liabilities and vast amounts of legal trouble, FirstEnergy declared bankruptcy on October 18, 2002, filing in court to seek dissolution and asset sales. The bankruptcy ruling, however, was stayed by judges of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals out of a desire to seek a solution to the issue.
What came of it, however, was stunning.
Having heard months of demands from his party (and some from other side, too) and with FirstEnergy's misconduct investigations and a suddenly very-aggressive Nuclear Regulatory Commission having subsequently shaken loose similar misconduct by Duke, Exelon and Southern Company (though, notably, much less or nothing from others, including the BPA, TVA or California Energy or indeed any of the latter's predecessors), President Clinton and assistants in the House and Senate proposed the creation of the American Nuclear Energy Corporation, ANEC for short. ANEC would have the power to nationalize the nuclear assets of companies found to be in violation of the law (Exelon fought this provision all the way to the Supreme Court, but lost) and would offer to take over those assets of others. The cost up front was smaller than many expected, but there was a reason most energy companies did not object to small amounts paid for assets - after Davis-Besse operating and insurance costs for such facilities had (understandably) skyrocketed and as such the plants to a man were losing money, and giving up the assets for a low cost also meant passing off any future liabilities for them. The state-owned facilities for the most part stayed out of ANEC, but the corporate-owned facilities were mostly supportive, and knowing of its ability to pass off liabilities, almost universally jumped in. FirstEnergy's attempt to use ANEC's creation to pass off its liabilities for Davis-Besse failed miserably and the company was ultimately dissolved between 2004 and 2011.
ANEC, too, got off to a chaotic start, but would make profit early on as well, and being highly scrutinized by Congress pretty much constanly after the disaster at Davis-Besse, didn't take long to gain some level of public trust, a situation helped by dedicated efforts to work with nuclear opponents and massive retrofitting efforts at existing facilities with poor placement (particularly the Indian Point, San Onofre, Shoreham, Diablo Canyon, Three Mile Island and Trojan facilities) and serious improvements at facilities with known safety issues, several of which were completely shut down. On May 21, 2007, ANEC announced its first planned new facility, to be built on Lake Mead less than 30 miles from the Las Vegas Strip. The site choice was deliberate - ANEC wanted to prove they could build a nuclear power station that could handle any emergency, and went to considerable effort to prove this. The Lake Mead facility's six reactors would have part of their containment structures punched into solid rock, and the structures there were meant to handle any possible natural disaster up to a 9.5-magnitude Earthquake. The plant also used Las Vegas' wastewater system as a source of cooling water and as a result was able to both reduce the demands on Lake Mead and treat and return millions of gallons of very pure water back to the City of Las Vegas and its suburbs every day. It was considerably more expensive to do things this way, but ANEC was aware that it had to do better on safety precautions and be seen to be doing better to assure the public of other facilities' safety.
In Canada, the operators of nuclear power stations - Ontario Hydro, Hydro-Quebec, Alberta Hydroelectric System, BC Hydro, Atlantic Power, SaskPower and Jamaica Energy - all were quick to point out that the safety records of their facilities were all but flawless, that the sort of accident that had happened at Davis-Besse was impossible at their facilities and were willing to, along with Atomic Energy of Canada, distribute as much information as they could and allow facility tours and technical briefings to show that their facilities were safe despite the horrible accident at Davis-Besse. Windsor's new water treatment system, under construction at the time, changed the location of its input system in an attempt to make sure the radioactive water from Davis-Besse never made it into the city's water system and Environment Canada and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment doing in-depth studies to make sure the accident didn't effect the water supplies in Canada. At the same time, the furor of the mess at Davis-Besse focused AECL's project to faster process nuclear waste so that the problem of it was massively reduced, this ultimately resulting in the proposal to build a new such facility in Quebec to better handle the waste so as the existing Chalk River Laboratories could find its job easier. With the prairie provinces, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Jamaica critically reliant on nuclear power and and it being very important to Ontario, there was never any talk of replacing it, but it was hardly a surprise that there would be objections to it, and the operators of the facilities in question all moved quickly to assure the public that what had happened there would not happen here.
As much as ANEC and California Energy had massive effects on the energy industry in the United States, it had a bigger one in the overall economy. While government-owned corporations had been part of Canada's economy for its entire modern industry - Petro-Canada, Canadian National Railways, Air Canada, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian National Research and Development Council and the provincial and regional power corporations were well regarded in Canada, and CNR and Petro-Canada were considerable contributors to government coffers just as the power companies were to provincial ones - this was relatively unknown in America, despite the BPA and TVA and the creation of Amtrak and Conrail in the 1970s. But the power companies would gain a very good reputation in the United States, and it wouldn't be long before the threat of nationalization made some industries in the United States clean up their actions, particularly in the energy industries. The companies also rapidly put paid to the long-held idea that government-held companies couldn't make money - ANEC not only buried that idea, by the late 2010s it would be a brave politician that proposed selling it because of the income it brought to Washington.
For Canada, the sudden entry of the American monster energy companies came with it a desire for the companies who had now sold off their nuclear assets get additional capacity, and Hydro-Quebec and Ontario Hydro were only too happy to provide this additional capacity. As the likes of American Electric Power, Consolidated Edison, Duke Energy, Southern Company and Exelon sold off their nuclear operations to ANEC they needed new capacity, and well aware of the desire to keep air pollution down, the companies invested heavily in hydroelectric dams, wind turbines, solar cells, waste-to-energy facilities, geothermal power stations and pumped storage hydroelectric power stations, the pumped-storage stations being used in several cases by Southern Company as a backup for its other facilities, particularly its wind turbines. The United States built more wind turbines than anywhere else in the world during this time, with its wind power capacity growing from 16,000 MW in 2005 to over 275,000 MW by 2025, while over three dozen pumped-storage facilities were built, the largest being the immense Swannanoa Pumped Storage facility, completed in 2016 near Asheville, North Carolina, with a capacity of 4,426 MW at peak power. Flush with cash and with cheap electricity in the offering, the companies proudly pushed for demand growth, with electric heating replacing natural gas or fuel-oil furnaces, railroad electrification being encouraged, steady development of (and ever-stronger demand for) electric cars and more and more electricity used by industry was the result, and immense supplies of cheap renewable energy and nuclear power from ANEC-owned sources made the advertising easier. It also meant that Ontario Hydro and Hydro-Quebec, both joined at the hip with the American power systems, were forced to upgrade to keep up. It was an investment nobody objected to - Ontario Hydro in 2020 paid out $5.56 Billion in dividends to the province of Ontario, while Hydro-Quebec returned $3.21 Billion to the province of Quebec.
Particularly because of the billions suddenly at stake, the American electricity companies and their partners in heavy industry firms - General Electric, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Honeywell, Morrison-Knudsen, Emerson Electric, Square D and Bechtel, among others - focused giant resources into the renewable energy industries, and the dramatic improvements that rapidly followed surprised no-one but created something of an arms race among the Commonwealth's energy firms and electrical and electronic equipment companies to keep up and not pass off leadership in the field to the Americans, a fight the Asian electronics giants - Hitachi, LG, Samsung, Mitsubishi Electric, Toshiba - rapidly also leapt into. As tens of thousands of wind turbines were built in the United States, once-drying towns in the primarily-agricultural plains states suddenly had new reasons to live, trading the growing of grain or the raising of cattle for the generation of electricity. This didn't stay stateside, of course - Alberta Hydroelectric System and SaskPower in particular wanted in on the action, and the corporations not only built the wind turbines they needed they also modified their nuclear power stations to allow them to be powered down or run at lower power outputs to allow the wind turbines to provide all the power they could when it was possible for them to do so. This became a common occurence for state-owned energy companies as well, as it allowed them to reduce the load on their expensive nuclear facilities while using power that produced little, if any, emissions. Coal companies took falling demand for their products as a challenge to find new sources of demand for the coal they mined - and the steady growth of the Fischer-Tropsch produced synthetic crude pioneered by Hess and Petro-Canada in the 1970s swelled in the 1990s and 2000s, helped by a steady rise in oil prices and the entry into the world of Sasol, South Africa's coal-to-oil giant which had been prevented by apartheid sanctions from providing its considerable expertise in the field to other companies.
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The Large or Notable Power Stations in Canada, for a bit of detail for the above:
Robert Bourassa Hydroelectric Generating Station
Baie-James, Quebec
Type: Hydroelectric Dam and Diversion
Construction: February 1962-June 1969
First Operation: September 1968
Expanded: 1982-1987 (Robert-Bourassa-2 station)
Generating Capacity: 7,722 MW
Units: 16x 351 MW Francis turbines, 6x 351 MW Francis turbines
Owner/Operator: Hydro-Quebec
Peter Lougheed Nuclear Generating Station
Fort McMurray, Alberta
Type: Nuclear
Construction: May 1976-August 1984
First Operation: November 1985
Generating Capacity: 7,400 MW
Units: 8x 925 MW CANDU-11A nuclear reactors
Owner/Operator: Alberta Hydroelectric System
Grand Coulee Hydroelectric Power Station
Coulee, British Columbia
Type: Hydroelectric Dam
Construction: April 1932-September 1943
First Operation: May 1943
Expanded: 1965-1972 (third powerhouse), 1986-91 (pump-generators)
Generating Capacity: 6,700 MW continuous, 6,920 MW peak
Units: 3x 810 MW Francis turbines, 3x 700 MW Francis turbines, 18x 125 MW Francis turbines, 3x 15 MW turbines Francis turbines, 4x 55 MW pump-generators
Owner/Operator: Bonneville Power Authority 55%, British Columbia Hydro 45%
Bruce Nuclear Generating Station
Kincardine, Bruce County, Ontario
Type: Nuclear
Construction: September 1969-May 1980
First Operation: July 1977
Generating Capacity: 6,384 MW
Units: 4x 817 MW CANDU-8B nuclear reactors, 4x 779 MW CANDU-8A nuclear reactors)
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro
Albany River-1A Hydroelectric Generating Station
Kashechewan-Fort Albany, Ontario
Type: Hydroelectric Dam and Diversion
Construction: September 1945-July 1956
First Operation: June 1958
Expansion: 1965-1970 (central powerhouse)
Generating Capacity: 5,544 MW
Units: 8x 258 MW Francis turbines, 24x 145 MW Francis turbines
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro
Nanticoke Generating and Processing Station
Nanticoke, Haldimand County, Ontario
Type: Waste-to-Energy Thermal
Construction: August 1931-September 1937
First Operation: July 1937
Rebuilding: May 1994-February 2007
Reactivated: July 2007
Generating Capacity: 4,546 MW
Units: 12x 252 MW VHT combustion furnaces, 5x 200 MW UHT combustion furnaces, 17x 26 MW combined-cycle generators
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro 47.5%, Waste Management 27.5%, Second Planet Resources 15%, Canadian National Research and Development Council 7.5%, City of Toronto 2.5%
Tommy Douglas Generating System
Radville, Saskatchewan
Type: Wind
Construction: March 2005-September 2009
First Operation: July 2005
Generating Capacity: 1,317 MW
Units: 86x Vestas V152 4.5 MW wind turbines, 246x Dominion Engineering / Northern Power Systems WE24 4 MW wind turbines
Owner/Operator: SaskPower
Robert Bourassa Hydroelectric Generating Station
Baie-James, Quebec
Type: Hydroelectric Dam and Diversion
Construction: February 1962-June 1969
First Operation: September 1968
Expanded: 1982-1987 (Robert-Bourassa-2 station)
Generating Capacity: 7,722 MW
Units: 16x 351 MW Francis turbines, 6x 351 MW Francis turbines
Owner/Operator: Hydro-Quebec
Peter Lougheed Nuclear Generating Station
Fort McMurray, Alberta
Type: Nuclear
Construction: May 1976-August 1984
First Operation: November 1985
Generating Capacity: 7,400 MW
Units: 8x 925 MW CANDU-11A nuclear reactors
Owner/Operator: Alberta Hydroelectric System
Grand Coulee Hydroelectric Power Station
Coulee, British Columbia
Type: Hydroelectric Dam
Construction: April 1932-September 1943
First Operation: May 1943
Expanded: 1965-1972 (third powerhouse), 1986-91 (pump-generators)
Generating Capacity: 6,700 MW continuous, 6,920 MW peak
Units: 3x 810 MW Francis turbines, 3x 700 MW Francis turbines, 18x 125 MW Francis turbines, 3x 15 MW turbines Francis turbines, 4x 55 MW pump-generators
Owner/Operator: Bonneville Power Authority 55%, British Columbia Hydro 45%
Bruce Nuclear Generating Station
Kincardine, Bruce County, Ontario
Type: Nuclear
Construction: September 1969-May 1980
First Operation: July 1977
Generating Capacity: 6,384 MW
Units: 4x 817 MW CANDU-8B nuclear reactors, 4x 779 MW CANDU-8A nuclear reactors)
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro
Albany River-1A Hydroelectric Generating Station
Kashechewan-Fort Albany, Ontario
Type: Hydroelectric Dam and Diversion
Construction: September 1945-July 1956
First Operation: June 1958
Expansion: 1965-1970 (central powerhouse)
Generating Capacity: 5,544 MW
Units: 8x 258 MW Francis turbines, 24x 145 MW Francis turbines
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro
Nanticoke Generating and Processing Station
Nanticoke, Haldimand County, Ontario
Type: Waste-to-Energy Thermal
Construction: August 1931-September 1937
First Operation: July 1937
Rebuilding: May 1994-February 2007
Reactivated: July 2007
Generating Capacity: 4,546 MW
Units: 12x 252 MW VHT combustion furnaces, 5x 200 MW UHT combustion furnaces, 17x 26 MW combined-cycle generators
Owner/Operator: Ontario Hydro 47.5%, Waste Management 27.5%, Second Planet Resources 15%, Canadian National Research and Development Council 7.5%, City of Toronto 2.5%
Tommy Douglas Generating System
Radville, Saskatchewan
Type: Wind
Construction: March 2005-September 2009
First Operation: July 2005
Generating Capacity: 1,317 MW
Units: 86x Vestas V152 4.5 MW wind turbines, 246x Dominion Engineering / Northern Power Systems WE24 4 MW wind turbines
Owner/Operator: SaskPower
I was wondering if the Robert Bourassa complex was TTL's name for the La Grande complex... I didn't know that they changed the name from LG iOTL! When did that happen? I know I haven't been living in Quebec for a couple of years now, but I don't remember this! 
Unfortunately not, though fish ladders were backfitted to the dam as part of the third powerhouse project. Today, fish can be found most of the way up the Columbia. Building a fish ladder at Revelstoke would be all but possible though....
I was wondering if the Robert Bourassa complex was TTL's name for the La Grande complex... I didn't know that they changed the name from LG iOTL! When did that happen? I know I haven't been living in Quebec for a couple of years now, but I don't remember this!
I didn't know that had happened until I was researching this TL, so no reason to be embarrassed.
Personally, I think by 2060, electric energy generation will come from two sources:
1. Solar power--there will be massive use of rooftop solar power in parts of the world where solar energy is very viable, like California and the deserts of the southwestern USA.
2. Nuclear power--a new, safer form of nuclear power called the molten salt reactor, fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as liquid nuclear fuel. MSR's will be common, with reactor sizes ranging from 85 MW to 1,000 MW with multiple reactor installations in many parts of the world. TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi site by 2060 has six 1,000 MW Hitachi-built MSR's, once the original boil-water reactors (BWR's) were dismantled in the 2030's, including removing the remains of the uranium fuel rods to be reprocessed into MSR fuel. Canadian companies will be those building these reactors, particularly the 85 to 100 MW units built next to industrial sites and sites of large computer server farms.
Due to serious technical issues, the first nuclear fusion power plants have only reached the experimental power generation stage by 2050. There's still a lot of work to make it sustainable for long periods and to really generate power.
1. Solar power--there will be massive use of rooftop solar power in parts of the world where solar energy is very viable, like California and the deserts of the southwestern USA.
2. Nuclear power--a new, safer form of nuclear power called the molten salt reactor, fueled by thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as liquid nuclear fuel. MSR's will be common, with reactor sizes ranging from 85 MW to 1,000 MW with multiple reactor installations in many parts of the world. TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi site by 2060 has six 1,000 MW Hitachi-built MSR's, once the original boil-water reactors (BWR's) were dismantled in the 2030's, including removing the remains of the uranium fuel rods to be reprocessed into MSR fuel. Canadian companies will be those building these reactors, particularly the 85 to 100 MW units built next to industrial sites and sites of large computer server farms.
Due to serious technical issues, the first nuclear fusion power plants have only reached the experimental power generation stage by 2050. There's still a lot of work to make it sustainable for long periods and to really generate power.
Iron Sun
Banned
Minor question: with the Metroliner name being taken by Canadair/Bombardier, what names does Fairchild choose for the OTL Metroliner?
So the VC-10 doesn't have rear-mounted engines like OTL?
Iron Sun
Banned
One of the reasons why the 727 outsold the Trident was that the former had excellent short field performance while the latter only got airborne due to the curvature of the Earth.
Does the Trident still have that problem ITTL?Iron Sun
Banned
It wasn't just the engines-the wings were designed for high cruise speeds, which limited the amount of lift they provided at lower speeds.
Just finished the whole thing, and may I say that this is a damn fine timeline you have here. Kudos to you, sir!
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post this but I feel like I have to. This timeline has been absolutely amazing to follow. I have just finished it for the second time in a year, and all I can say is bravo to you sir. It shows a strong Canada that is everything it could have been unlike IOTL. I can not thank you enough for creating this magnificent piece of literature.
I assume this is a finished timeline now but can I just say how much I thoroughly enjoyed it? It's fabulous and I've happily spent all morning reading it. As a Welsh Brit with many Canadian relatives, a super Canada of this type (a key member of a much closer Commonwealth, on a par with OTL Germany) is something I've thought about too. I like the way in which this Canada provides masses of common sense to such a Commonwealth (and to the UNSC - a lovely touch). Its dealings with Israel/Palestine almost gave me goosebumps. Would you consider making further additions?
Thinking about Canada's borders, I love the idea of Alaska and parts of Washington (maybe Oregon) being part of BC. Having visited the Pacific Northwest last summer to visit the aforementioned relatives, I love the idea of Seattle being part of the same country as Vancouver. More broadly, if Hawaii/the Sandwich Islands had ever become a British protectorate of sorts rather than an American state, I wonder if it might have passed over to Canada eventually? If a takeover of the British Caribbean was seriously entertained, I should imagine that a relationship with Hawaii would have been entirely plausible, given such a POD.
Also, I think I saw you mention you were going to give more detail about how Canadian automotive companies were going to takeover/support British ones. God knows, they needed it. So many fabulous names have been lost so it might have been nice to have seen those Canadian investors in BMW do the same thing with Triumph (a British BMW if there ever was one). Just glad that British aerospace companies haven't been lost ITTL and that Britain is cooperating with Canada/Commonwealth on defence. And the RAF gets its hands on the Avro Arrow! Yay!
Thinking about Canada's borders, I love the idea of Alaska and parts of Washington (maybe Oregon) being part of BC. Having visited the Pacific Northwest last summer to visit the aforementioned relatives, I love the idea of Seattle being part of the same country as Vancouver. More broadly, if Hawaii/the Sandwich Islands had ever become a British protectorate of sorts rather than an American state, I wonder if it might have passed over to Canada eventually? If a takeover of the British Caribbean was seriously entertained, I should imagine that a relationship with Hawaii would have been entirely plausible, given such a POD.
Also, I think I saw you mention you were going to give more detail about how Canadian automotive companies were going to takeover/support British ones. God knows, they needed it. So many fabulous names have been lost so it might have been nice to have seen those Canadian investors in BMW do the same thing with Triumph (a British BMW if there ever was one). Just glad that British aerospace companies haven't been lost ITTL and that Britain is cooperating with Canada/Commonwealth on defence. And the RAF gets its hands on the Avro Arrow! Yay!
Part 22 - India vs. Social Demons, The Marines' Fleet, The Commonwealth and Europe Come Together, Welcome Skylon and it's Power From The Stars
OOC: Yes, I know I haven't added to this in literally years, but I've been kinda inspired on this lately and this bit came to me, and I hadn't quite finished it. Hopefully the Mods let me use an old thread to get this restarted. If not, my apologies.
Part 22 - India vs. Social Demons, The Marines' Fleet, The Commonwealth and Europe Come Together, Welcome Skylon and it's Power From The Stars
The 2000s had been dominated by the War on Terror and the eradication of the scourge of Muslim terrorism from Afghanistan, as well as dramatically reducing the danger posed by Al-Qaeda and their disciples, and the successes of it had proven in the growing standards of living in many of the areas where such terrorists had been beaten back. The problems these lone wolves posed was by no means ended by the assault on Afghanistan and dislodging and eventual destruction of the Taliban, but a lot of other factors had changed as a result. Iran, now more or less entirely on side with the West and starting to socially liberalize with time, helped in no small part by increasing wealth and ever-improving education standards, the economic growth also driving ever more Iranians into their already-massive major cities. Iran's movements and the rapid liberalization of the North African Arab nations starting in the early 1980s drove a dramatic wedge into the Muslim world that by 2005 had become a clear source of trouble for that part of the world. Saudi Arabia's problems with Wahhabism and its relationship with the West had been seen clearly by the fact that the vast majority of the 9/11 attackers ghad been Saudis, though as the decade went on Bangladesh and Pakistan became prime sources for radicalized Muslims, something that made life difficult for the Commonwealth in that Pakistan's long-standing rivalry with India had been economically and socially settled in the latter's favour, as India was rapidly becoming one of the world's most powerful nations and its leaders made no secrets of their desire to use this power. Iran's movements towards liberalism in a way drove a wedge in geopolitical terms between Washington and the Commonwealth by the end of the 2000s, as Washington was keen on Pakistan not falling into the orbit of Beijing or Moscow and felt that active involvement in the nation was a necessary evil despite the radicalism problems it posed, while the Commonwealth by that point was long past sick of decades of Pakistani antics and had India's back, something further added to by India's efforts in assisting Commonwealth forces during the Afghan conflict.
For Canada siding with India had forced them to confront Islamist terrorism head-on, but in a society with a large number of Muslims (nearly 1.5 million by 2010) that by then were utterly unwilling to tolerate radicalism and its poisonous actions, this didn't prove particularly dfficult - more than a few such troublemakers were snitched out by members of their own congregations, and several such Houses of Worship earned the wrath of their own communities in the Winter of 2006-07 when the Globe and Mail newspaper discovered financial ties between two such mosques, one in Pickering, Ontario and the other in Airdrie, Alberta, to an organization based in Medina, Saudi Arabia, that was known to have given funds to Osama bin Laden and was a major supporter of a number of hard-line madrassas in Pakistan, India, Azerbaijan, Syria and Turkmenistan. (In both cases, the authorities hardly had to make efforts against these places because angered congregation members did it themselves, seeing both lose over three-quarters of their worshipers in a matter of ten days.) After Canada's call-out of Saudi Arabia's treatment of human rights campaigners in 2007 led to enraged withdrawals of ambassadors from Saudi in April 2007, Canada's relationship with the Kingdom faltered rather badly for several years, but as the Commonwealth by then all had such issues with the Kingdom, this accomplished little for the Saudis. The Middle East around the same time saw considerable changes, with Bahrain, Qatar and the Emirates began to shift towards the Western way of the world in the 2000s, coming partly as a result of repeated spats with Riyadh and with some interesting moves, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi spending two decades and vast sums of money becoming major trade and commercial centers and Qatar loudly and proudly supporting the Al-Jazeera television news network, which by the end of the 2000s was increasingly respected in the West and genuinely liked in much of the more-liberal portions of the Arabic-speaking world.
India took to its growing hard and soft power with aplomb, even as the Commonwealth nations regularly leaned into them for many less-than-desirables realities of their society (the presence of the RSS and the Caste system were two such regular criticisms, but as India's government heard such criticisms from voices at home regularly the concerns weren't ignored) but desired to work with the nation for its growing economic power, while also pushing to influence the country's soft power structures and many elements of its politics. This in India was most heavily seen in terms of Manmohan Singh, the short-lived term of Narendra Modi and then his successors in Sonia Gandhi and Ragunath Nripendra, where the country's political pendulum swing back and forth primarily on economic concerns but over the 2000s and 2010s saw multiple ugly incidents involving violence against women and minorities result in rioting against the perpetrators. By 2008, the violence against women that had been rampant in the 1990s and 2000s was rapidly subsiding, with the nation and huge portions of its male population using the slogan "Men Of Quality Do Not Fear Equality". This showed very vividly in one case in Hyderabad in 2011, where a particularly-awful gang rape of four women by nine men saw two of the men lynched by residents of their own small village, and when during the trial the four women and their families went to the trial of their perpetrators, they did so with thousands of supporters escorting them to the courthouse every single day, and the fundraising for the women raised the equivalent of nearly $700,000 for them in a matter of days.
Back in Canada the politicial battles that had begun in the 1990s had caused the country's politics to slowly evolve into a system with four distinct political parties - Conservative, Liberal, Progressive and Reform (and by the late 2000s, the Green Party had made it five) - resulting in the prospect of any party winning an outright majority in the country's general election being almost impossible due to the breadth and depth of Progressive and Reform support. This encouraged the development of various alliances, but the need to create alliances did much to enforce needs amongst the parties to make compromises and sort out differences to make governments remain effective, a situation that was rapidly copied in Quebec and Ontario and soon spread to other provinces over time as well, even in ones like Saskatchewan and Alberta that had traditionally seen dynasties by one or more political parties. The Ed Broadbent-Jean Charest Progressive-Conservative government (1997-2000) ended up being the last one for a while, as over time the growth of the Reform Party in the West and the Progressives in the Caribbean resulted in the split government eras coming to an end, particularly as the Progressives saw new leaders in the likes of Jack Layton, Rachel Notley, Adam Giambrone, Yuna Kawahara, Jagmeet Singh, Abrianna Maurice and Jody Wilson-Raybould rise into its upper ranks and the Reform Party, led by the competency-minded Stephen Harper and Elijah Roberts, grew into a position of being the wingman party to the Conservatives. The 2007 general election, where the Paul Martin and Jack Layton-led Liberal-Progressive Coalition (restoring the name of the famed governments led during the Depression by Thomas Crerar and William Lyon Mackenzie King) ousted the government of Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper, saw the beginning of a long round of leadership by the Liberal-Progressive Coalition while the Conservatives would spend the rest of the 2000s and 2010s gaining new blood which would be to their immense benefit later. Decades of conservative domination in Alberta were ended by Rachel Notley in 2011, and Ontario's traditional back and forth between the Liberals and Conservatives, only broken once before by Bob Rae in 1990, would see a dramatic shift thanks to the Progressives led by Vanessa Raunier, David Miller and Celina Cesar-Chavannes in 2012, defeating the Kathleen Wynne-led Liberals and leaving the John Tory-led Conservatives far, far behind.
Indeed the shifting political sands saw more new blood and intriguing members than ever headed for elected office in the 2000s, ranging from multimillionaire heiress Victoria Faulkner to high-profile black activist Traynesha Ingraham to Pierre Trudeau's charismatic son Justin Trudeau to journeyman hockey player John Scott to steel mill worker Mauricio Ferrani to language activist Ariel Bourgault, all of whom would end up playing many roles as the nation's social evolution continued. While charisma still counted for much, among such a field of quality candidates among coalition governments it was clear that if you aspired to being a Premier or Prime Minister, you didn't just have to earn it amongst your colleagues and party members, you had to earn it amongst the people, and Canadians weren't the type to fall for style alone, you needed to show (and very publicly) why you deserved that office. It led to ever more cases of high-achievers in Canada seeking elected office on a mission of one sort of another, and many achieved it.
For Canadians abroad, Canada's immense and powerful armed forces, with a legend having been named for themselves amid the chaos of Rwanda and proven during the War in Afghanistan, were a source of security, particularly as the Forces advanced their needs and figured out their faults in Afghanistan. The Bell helicopters used in Afghanistan had proven inadequate in many ways for the jobs they had been given, and so the purchase of NHI NH90 and additional AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters, ordered in 2008, to handle the flying loads, while the M777 artillery guns ordered for Afghanistan ended up all being mounted on large trucks for a faster-moving artillery system, another drawback of battles in Afghanistan where artillery tractor duties at times proved troublesome. The development of a stealth strike fighter program, begun initially by just Canada and the United Kingdom in 1995, grew to include Australia during the 1990s and Israel starting in about 2002, and the resulting aircraft, the CF-190 "Crossbow", flew for the first time in August 2008, but didn't reach operational capability in Canada and the UK until 2012 and Australia in 2013, in Canada and Australia's cases replacing aging F-111 strike aircraft. The VS-145 Poseidon Antisubmarine tiltwing that had been the backbone of Royal Canadian Navy antisubmarine forces since the late 1980s got further improvements and the V-22 Osprey tiltwing, first shown off by the Americans in Afghanistan, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2007, and the armed forces by then had begun plans to purchase the Commonwealth's Challenger 2 main battle tank and development of new mine-protected and conventional armored personnel carriers. Having returned their heavy units from Europe and then sent them out again to Afghanistan, the Canadian armed forces began to refocus for a greater role for further afield operations, helped out by the amphibious fleet that the Navy developed in the 2000s.
That fleet, centered on amphibious assault ships Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach and Rwanda, was developed as part of amphibious assault efforts by the Commonwealth in the 2000s. Joined by two fast sealift ships (converted from fast container ships built for Canada Steamship Lines in the 1980s), two barge-carrying cargo ships (brought into the RCN after Rwanda and after their commercial operator went bankrupt in 1995) and four landing platform docks, the resulting fleet could land a complete brigade and then some, and with the Royal Canadian Navy's acquiring of navalized CA-200 Scorpion tiltwings with the amphibious assault ships (joined by some 46 BAE Harrier GR9s, bought second-hand from the Royal Navy in 2008) and the ships did have some operating ability on their own. The Harriers added to that dramatically, of course, and the purchase of LCAC hovercraft also helped with the deployable abilities, while the fleet also used the British landing craft, with the British LCU Mark 10s (license-built in Canada) being joined by the hovercraft, with the Navy's hovercraft fleet being assigned to the barge-carrying vessels and the Columbia-class littoral combat ships and the LCUs assigned to all of the others, a number that was added to when Canada, as part of a NATO-Commonwealth amphibious fleet project, bought three vessels from the project, becoming the James Bay-class landing platform docks, and five Panamax-class container ships - all of them just eight years old, owing to the expansion of the Panama Canal's locks - were bought by the RCN for next to nothing in 2012 and refitted for RCN service. This expansion gave Canada's the world's second-largest amphibious fleet, and with the addition of the Columbia-class littoral combat ships, gave the Royal Canadian Navy the ability to land two complete brigades of the Royal Canadian Marine Corps at one time, this demonstrated at the US Navy-led RIMPAC 2013 exercises where the RCN did just that, to the surprise of the Americans, and the following year the Canadians showed off at the Royal Marines' training exercises in Scotland that ability, this time joined by three RCN Fraser-class destroyers who also did a mock fire support exercise to support the landings. Impressed, the Royal Marines began to look at advancing their own fleet's amphibious abilities.
The massive growth of the Canadian Forces' long-range capability was very much welcomed in Canada, as the Navy quite openly said that they would rather use such vessels and the aircraft that come with them on humanitarian missions, and on December 26, 2004, they got the chance to prove it.
On that day, a massive undersea earthquake off of the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, measuring as high as 9.1 on the Richter scale, causing a tsunami that in places was over 100 feet high to devastate much of the surrounding regions as well as causing damage as far away as the Western Cape of South Africa, 8,000 kilometres from the earthquake epicenter. Nearly 230,000 lost their lives, and the tsunami devastated much of Indonesia as well locations in Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Madagascar and much of the eastern coast of Africa from South Africa to Somalia.
At the time, Canadian amphibious ships Vimy Ridge, Bluenose and Challenge were exercising with the Indian Navy and Royal Australian Navy in northern Australia, and the entire fleet was quick to head north for the devastated zone, as well as Northwest Passage, which had been preparing to depart for New Zealand via Hawaii and instead was sent with all possible speed to Indonesia, making one of the fastest crossings of the Ocean imaginable in going from Vancouver to Darwin in Northern Australia in just over thirteen days, averaging over 30 knots to do so. The helicopters of the fleet were quickly sent to Sumatra to search for survivors, joined by practically everyone who could. Two Royal Canadian Navy rescuers in Aceh in Indonesia and an off-duty RCMP officer vacationing in Phuket, Thailand, saw their efforts rewarded with the Cross of Valour, and the efforts of HMCS Vimy Ridge, whose personnel, boats and helicopters on their own rescued at least 1500 people in the first 36 hours, earned them a unit citation from the Royal Canadian Navy. American destroyer John Paul Jones was damaged by the tsunami while docked in Male in the Maldives, but despite that the destroyer's crew acted as rescuers, earning five members of the ship's company the Navy Cross. The RCAF quickly used its heavy airlift squadrons to carry additional helicopters to the region, assisting in the recovery efforts. The combined rescue and humanitarian response that followed the tsunami proved instrumental in saving thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives, and the fast deployment of nations around the world proved the benefits of airlift squadrons and amphibious ships in dramatic fashion, and during the 2000s they were purchased by numerous countries as a way of helping assist their citizens in a time of need as well as for military purposes.
Having succeeded in building a vast naval fleet in the post-Cold War era (and having increasingly-co-operative India adding to it, whose naval fleet was vast in its own right), the Commonwealth's level of co-operation on issues of state swelled ever further during the 2000s, with everything from the development of military equipment and aviation rules to standards for vehicles and mobile phones becoming sorted between the nations of the Central Commonwealth. Singapore joined the Central Commonwealth in 2003, and Hong Kong was given special status within the Commonwealth in 2008, something China (to the surprise of some but not many in Hong Kong) had few objections to. Despite the Commonwealth agreements Britain's place within the European Union was never in question, and indeed London in 2004 negotiated out an agreement allowing citizens of the Central Commonwealth nations to have privileged access to the nations of the European Union, that move coming months before the EU massively expanded into the Eastern Bloc. The EU's expansion had been planned for some time and had few objectors, and indeed the feared drop in living standards for those in rich countries never materialized - if anything, the reverse happened, as much of the former Eastern Bloc rapidly and enthusiastically took on the "European Project" with eyes wide open and proud plans for the future. For the Commonwealth, London's agreement with Brussels and the expansion gave them new places and new markets to search out, but much was expected in return and indeed much was indeed given. Canada's markets for its exports, both in terms of raw materials and manufactured goods, soared dramatically in the years after 2004, and while plenty came back, the moving to harmonize as many standards as possible with those of Britain - and thus, Europe - paid considerable dividends. Cyprus probably benefitted the most, as its entry into the EU paved the way for its entry into the Central Commonwealth, done in 2006, and it led to the island positioning itself as a bridge between the global worlds of the Commonwealth and the world of Europe.
Indeed the commonality between Europe and the Commonwealth wasn't exclusively approved of by the EU and Commonwealth bodies, of course. The Netherlands and France, long-time allies of Canada, both felt that such agreements would bring them all closer together and move Canada further away from the Americans towards the European orbit, and they weren't shy about saying so. Ottawa, for their part, understood such sympathies but had eyes of being good friends and partners with everyone around them, something not made particularly difficult by the United States, which was Canada's largest trading partner (OOC: Though its share is far less than OTL, obviously) and its largest investor. (The same was also true in reverse, with Canada holding more equity in American assets than any other nation.) In truth, America didn't mind many aspects of the standardization, as it too was well aware of the benefits involved in allowing there to be less duplication, and they wanted to sell to Europe too. Washington, while not entirely on side with Commonwealth decisions at times, wasn't blind to the fact that in all but most widely different of situations they could count on Commonwealth help.
As the Commonwealth was slowly uniting standards and developments, a new source of energy was being born in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia.
Anik Power Systems, named for the ground-breaking Canadian satellite of the 1960s, had come out of a designs and development of nuclear power plant-operator Dr. Hunter Roberts and Haudenosaunee heir Michael Neikan, developing the idea of microwave power transmission from a geosynchronous satellite to a receiver on Earth, allowing such a design to dispense with weather concerns that plagued Earth-based solar cells. By 1994 the company's revolutionary "Power From The Stars" study was complete and caused a stir, but even the company admitted then that without major reductions in the cost of space launches the project was unfeasible. Despite this, in 1995 the Government of South Africa commissioned them to develop a plan for what the power station would look like on Earth, with the vast, sunny desert of South Africa's Great Karoo desert as the landscape to develop the facility on. By the late 2000s, the company had come up with a prototype design for a massive rectenna - the rectenna was over five kilometres in diameter - and had developed the design of a trio of power satellites, which would use ion thrusters to keep themselves in position and would be capable of beaming 625 MW of power to the rectenna each, the power station producing a net output of 1700 MW, equivalent of a very large coal-fired power station or two large nuclear reactors. To help with this, the Commonwealth's Skylon Project was helped along by Anik and its investors, with the Reaction Engines company, based in Brisbane, Australia, successfully developing the powerful engines needed for Skylon and the airframe being assembled in the United Kingdom, with virtually the entire electronics suite being supplied from Research in Motion in Canada.
The development of the Skylon moved fairly slowly until Reaction Engines, assisted by Rolls-Royce Orenda, figured out the precooler technology that would make the SABRE engine possible. That job done, the first Skylon test flew in May 2010 on normal jet engines, controlled from a Bombardier Dash-8 aircraft which its remote controls had been housed in. The flight went well and by the time the first two Reaction Engines were installed in a Skylon in August 2012, the airframe worked perfectly and electronics to control it from ground control or a flying remote control station had been perfected. Testing in 2013 showed the Skylon was ready to fly, and in January 2014 the world's first single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft - and perhaps the biggest scientific achievement for the Commonwealth's unified development projects since the development of Commonwealth nuclear weapons 60 years prior - was ready to fly, and the first two for the United Kingdom's Space Authority and the Canadian Space Agency were ready to fly. Three months, the third Skylon - and the first Australian Skylon - got the honor of flying the first communications satellites of the Commonwealth to space.
No sooner had the Skylon flown than Anik was convincing the company's investors and the South African Government to give it the go-ahead for the building of the first Space-based solar power plant. They got that approval in 2015, and the construction of the Beaufort West Microwave Generating Station began. It was not a small job building a bowl-spaced rectenna five kilometres in diameter of course, but the company completed the job in 2018 and six separate Skylon flights carried its satellites to orbit in 2017 and 2018, making what once seemed impossible to be very possible indeed. Construction done and the satellites aligned, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa personally activated the power station on March 22, 2019, and true to form the station's power output was a touch conservative, as the Beaufort West facility produced a net output of 1826 MW when fully operational, which it was within hours.
It was perhaps the greatest result for the scientific efforts of the Commonwealth and its member states, and almost immediately Anik and other partners were working on the building of similar facilities to the groundbreaking South African facility in other parts of the world, with particular interest coming from parts of the world with similar climates to the Great Karoo, including in Australia, Chile, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the United States, and the first Canadian facility was soon also proposed by SaskPower for a facility in northern Saskatchewan. The idea of space-based solar power as part of the world's energy mix dramatically sped up solar cell research development as well, aiming to have cells of greater efficiency and durability to soon be ready to deploy. Knowing the growth in such space flights, Canada had by then already designated the volcano-devastated island of Montserrat as its new spaceport location, taking a risk on the dormant Soufriere Hills Volcano (which had gone dormant in 2010 after 15 years of regular activity) and developing a new facility on the island's west side (including building over top of part of the destroyed former capital city of Plymouth) and developing a modern spaceport, including a 12,500-foot runway specifically strengthened for the use of the Skylon. Like one would expect, it was built to high standards and for functionality, and when opened in 2017 provided work to a sizable portion of the population of the island, doing things properly.
After all, this is Canada we're talking about here after all....
Part 22 - India vs. Social Demons, The Marines' Fleet, The Commonwealth and Europe Come Together, Welcome Skylon and it's Power From The Stars
The 2000s had been dominated by the War on Terror and the eradication of the scourge of Muslim terrorism from Afghanistan, as well as dramatically reducing the danger posed by Al-Qaeda and their disciples, and the successes of it had proven in the growing standards of living in many of the areas where such terrorists had been beaten back. The problems these lone wolves posed was by no means ended by the assault on Afghanistan and dislodging and eventual destruction of the Taliban, but a lot of other factors had changed as a result. Iran, now more or less entirely on side with the West and starting to socially liberalize with time, helped in no small part by increasing wealth and ever-improving education standards, the economic growth also driving ever more Iranians into their already-massive major cities. Iran's movements and the rapid liberalization of the North African Arab nations starting in the early 1980s drove a dramatic wedge into the Muslim world that by 2005 had become a clear source of trouble for that part of the world. Saudi Arabia's problems with Wahhabism and its relationship with the West had been seen clearly by the fact that the vast majority of the 9/11 attackers ghad been Saudis, though as the decade went on Bangladesh and Pakistan became prime sources for radicalized Muslims, something that made life difficult for the Commonwealth in that Pakistan's long-standing rivalry with India had been economically and socially settled in the latter's favour, as India was rapidly becoming one of the world's most powerful nations and its leaders made no secrets of their desire to use this power. Iran's movements towards liberalism in a way drove a wedge in geopolitical terms between Washington and the Commonwealth by the end of the 2000s, as Washington was keen on Pakistan not falling into the orbit of Beijing or Moscow and felt that active involvement in the nation was a necessary evil despite the radicalism problems it posed, while the Commonwealth by that point was long past sick of decades of Pakistani antics and had India's back, something further added to by India's efforts in assisting Commonwealth forces during the Afghan conflict.
For Canada siding with India had forced them to confront Islamist terrorism head-on, but in a society with a large number of Muslims (nearly 1.5 million by 2010) that by then were utterly unwilling to tolerate radicalism and its poisonous actions, this didn't prove particularly dfficult - more than a few such troublemakers were snitched out by members of their own congregations, and several such Houses of Worship earned the wrath of their own communities in the Winter of 2006-07 when the Globe and Mail newspaper discovered financial ties between two such mosques, one in Pickering, Ontario and the other in Airdrie, Alberta, to an organization based in Medina, Saudi Arabia, that was known to have given funds to Osama bin Laden and was a major supporter of a number of hard-line madrassas in Pakistan, India, Azerbaijan, Syria and Turkmenistan. (In both cases, the authorities hardly had to make efforts against these places because angered congregation members did it themselves, seeing both lose over three-quarters of their worshipers in a matter of ten days.) After Canada's call-out of Saudi Arabia's treatment of human rights campaigners in 2007 led to enraged withdrawals of ambassadors from Saudi in April 2007, Canada's relationship with the Kingdom faltered rather badly for several years, but as the Commonwealth by then all had such issues with the Kingdom, this accomplished little for the Saudis. The Middle East around the same time saw considerable changes, with Bahrain, Qatar and the Emirates began to shift towards the Western way of the world in the 2000s, coming partly as a result of repeated spats with Riyadh and with some interesting moves, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi spending two decades and vast sums of money becoming major trade and commercial centers and Qatar loudly and proudly supporting the Al-Jazeera television news network, which by the end of the 2000s was increasingly respected in the West and genuinely liked in much of the more-liberal portions of the Arabic-speaking world.
India took to its growing hard and soft power with aplomb, even as the Commonwealth nations regularly leaned into them for many less-than-desirables realities of their society (the presence of the RSS and the Caste system were two such regular criticisms, but as India's government heard such criticisms from voices at home regularly the concerns weren't ignored) but desired to work with the nation for its growing economic power, while also pushing to influence the country's soft power structures and many elements of its politics. This in India was most heavily seen in terms of Manmohan Singh, the short-lived term of Narendra Modi and then his successors in Sonia Gandhi and Ragunath Nripendra, where the country's political pendulum swing back and forth primarily on economic concerns but over the 2000s and 2010s saw multiple ugly incidents involving violence against women and minorities result in rioting against the perpetrators. By 2008, the violence against women that had been rampant in the 1990s and 2000s was rapidly subsiding, with the nation and huge portions of its male population using the slogan "Men Of Quality Do Not Fear Equality". This showed very vividly in one case in Hyderabad in 2011, where a particularly-awful gang rape of four women by nine men saw two of the men lynched by residents of their own small village, and when during the trial the four women and their families went to the trial of their perpetrators, they did so with thousands of supporters escorting them to the courthouse every single day, and the fundraising for the women raised the equivalent of nearly $700,000 for them in a matter of days.
Back in Canada the politicial battles that had begun in the 1990s had caused the country's politics to slowly evolve into a system with four distinct political parties - Conservative, Liberal, Progressive and Reform (and by the late 2000s, the Green Party had made it five) - resulting in the prospect of any party winning an outright majority in the country's general election being almost impossible due to the breadth and depth of Progressive and Reform support. This encouraged the development of various alliances, but the need to create alliances did much to enforce needs amongst the parties to make compromises and sort out differences to make governments remain effective, a situation that was rapidly copied in Quebec and Ontario and soon spread to other provinces over time as well, even in ones like Saskatchewan and Alberta that had traditionally seen dynasties by one or more political parties. The Ed Broadbent-Jean Charest Progressive-Conservative government (1997-2000) ended up being the last one for a while, as over time the growth of the Reform Party in the West and the Progressives in the Caribbean resulted in the split government eras coming to an end, particularly as the Progressives saw new leaders in the likes of Jack Layton, Rachel Notley, Adam Giambrone, Yuna Kawahara, Jagmeet Singh, Abrianna Maurice and Jody Wilson-Raybould rise into its upper ranks and the Reform Party, led by the competency-minded Stephen Harper and Elijah Roberts, grew into a position of being the wingman party to the Conservatives. The 2007 general election, where the Paul Martin and Jack Layton-led Liberal-Progressive Coalition (restoring the name of the famed governments led during the Depression by Thomas Crerar and William Lyon Mackenzie King) ousted the government of Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper, saw the beginning of a long round of leadership by the Liberal-Progressive Coalition while the Conservatives would spend the rest of the 2000s and 2010s gaining new blood which would be to their immense benefit later. Decades of conservative domination in Alberta were ended by Rachel Notley in 2011, and Ontario's traditional back and forth between the Liberals and Conservatives, only broken once before by Bob Rae in 1990, would see a dramatic shift thanks to the Progressives led by Vanessa Raunier, David Miller and Celina Cesar-Chavannes in 2012, defeating the Kathleen Wynne-led Liberals and leaving the John Tory-led Conservatives far, far behind.
Indeed the shifting political sands saw more new blood and intriguing members than ever headed for elected office in the 2000s, ranging from multimillionaire heiress Victoria Faulkner to high-profile black activist Traynesha Ingraham to Pierre Trudeau's charismatic son Justin Trudeau to journeyman hockey player John Scott to steel mill worker Mauricio Ferrani to language activist Ariel Bourgault, all of whom would end up playing many roles as the nation's social evolution continued. While charisma still counted for much, among such a field of quality candidates among coalition governments it was clear that if you aspired to being a Premier or Prime Minister, you didn't just have to earn it amongst your colleagues and party members, you had to earn it amongst the people, and Canadians weren't the type to fall for style alone, you needed to show (and very publicly) why you deserved that office. It led to ever more cases of high-achievers in Canada seeking elected office on a mission of one sort of another, and many achieved it.
For Canadians abroad, Canada's immense and powerful armed forces, with a legend having been named for themselves amid the chaos of Rwanda and proven during the War in Afghanistan, were a source of security, particularly as the Forces advanced their needs and figured out their faults in Afghanistan. The Bell helicopters used in Afghanistan had proven inadequate in many ways for the jobs they had been given, and so the purchase of NHI NH90 and additional AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters, ordered in 2008, to handle the flying loads, while the M777 artillery guns ordered for Afghanistan ended up all being mounted on large trucks for a faster-moving artillery system, another drawback of battles in Afghanistan where artillery tractor duties at times proved troublesome. The development of a stealth strike fighter program, begun initially by just Canada and the United Kingdom in 1995, grew to include Australia during the 1990s and Israel starting in about 2002, and the resulting aircraft, the CF-190 "Crossbow", flew for the first time in August 2008, but didn't reach operational capability in Canada and the UK until 2012 and Australia in 2013, in Canada and Australia's cases replacing aging F-111 strike aircraft. The VS-145 Poseidon Antisubmarine tiltwing that had been the backbone of Royal Canadian Navy antisubmarine forces since the late 1980s got further improvements and the V-22 Osprey tiltwing, first shown off by the Americans in Afghanistan, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2007, and the armed forces by then had begun plans to purchase the Commonwealth's Challenger 2 main battle tank and development of new mine-protected and conventional armored personnel carriers. Having returned their heavy units from Europe and then sent them out again to Afghanistan, the Canadian armed forces began to refocus for a greater role for further afield operations, helped out by the amphibious fleet that the Navy developed in the 2000s.
That fleet, centered on amphibious assault ships Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach and Rwanda, was developed as part of amphibious assault efforts by the Commonwealth in the 2000s. Joined by two fast sealift ships (converted from fast container ships built for Canada Steamship Lines in the 1980s), two barge-carrying cargo ships (brought into the RCN after Rwanda and after their commercial operator went bankrupt in 1995) and four landing platform docks, the resulting fleet could land a complete brigade and then some, and with the Royal Canadian Navy's acquiring of navalized CA-200 Scorpion tiltwings with the amphibious assault ships (joined by some 46 BAE Harrier GR9s, bought second-hand from the Royal Navy in 2008) and the ships did have some operating ability on their own. The Harriers added to that dramatically, of course, and the purchase of LCAC hovercraft also helped with the deployable abilities, while the fleet also used the British landing craft, with the British LCU Mark 10s (license-built in Canada) being joined by the hovercraft, with the Navy's hovercraft fleet being assigned to the barge-carrying vessels and the Columbia-class littoral combat ships and the LCUs assigned to all of the others, a number that was added to when Canada, as part of a NATO-Commonwealth amphibious fleet project, bought three vessels from the project, becoming the James Bay-class landing platform docks, and five Panamax-class container ships - all of them just eight years old, owing to the expansion of the Panama Canal's locks - were bought by the RCN for next to nothing in 2012 and refitted for RCN service. This expansion gave Canada's the world's second-largest amphibious fleet, and with the addition of the Columbia-class littoral combat ships, gave the Royal Canadian Navy the ability to land two complete brigades of the Royal Canadian Marine Corps at one time, this demonstrated at the US Navy-led RIMPAC 2013 exercises where the RCN did just that, to the surprise of the Americans, and the following year the Canadians showed off at the Royal Marines' training exercises in Scotland that ability, this time joined by three RCN Fraser-class destroyers who also did a mock fire support exercise to support the landings. Impressed, the Royal Marines began to look at advancing their own fleet's amphibious abilities.
The massive growth of the Canadian Forces' long-range capability was very much welcomed in Canada, as the Navy quite openly said that they would rather use such vessels and the aircraft that come with them on humanitarian missions, and on December 26, 2004, they got the chance to prove it.
On that day, a massive undersea earthquake off of the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, measuring as high as 9.1 on the Richter scale, causing a tsunami that in places was over 100 feet high to devastate much of the surrounding regions as well as causing damage as far away as the Western Cape of South Africa, 8,000 kilometres from the earthquake epicenter. Nearly 230,000 lost their lives, and the tsunami devastated much of Indonesia as well locations in Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Madagascar and much of the eastern coast of Africa from South Africa to Somalia.
At the time, Canadian amphibious ships Vimy Ridge, Bluenose and Challenge were exercising with the Indian Navy and Royal Australian Navy in northern Australia, and the entire fleet was quick to head north for the devastated zone, as well as Northwest Passage, which had been preparing to depart for New Zealand via Hawaii and instead was sent with all possible speed to Indonesia, making one of the fastest crossings of the Ocean imaginable in going from Vancouver to Darwin in Northern Australia in just over thirteen days, averaging over 30 knots to do so. The helicopters of the fleet were quickly sent to Sumatra to search for survivors, joined by practically everyone who could. Two Royal Canadian Navy rescuers in Aceh in Indonesia and an off-duty RCMP officer vacationing in Phuket, Thailand, saw their efforts rewarded with the Cross of Valour, and the efforts of HMCS Vimy Ridge, whose personnel, boats and helicopters on their own rescued at least 1500 people in the first 36 hours, earned them a unit citation from the Royal Canadian Navy. American destroyer John Paul Jones was damaged by the tsunami while docked in Male in the Maldives, but despite that the destroyer's crew acted as rescuers, earning five members of the ship's company the Navy Cross. The RCAF quickly used its heavy airlift squadrons to carry additional helicopters to the region, assisting in the recovery efforts. The combined rescue and humanitarian response that followed the tsunami proved instrumental in saving thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives, and the fast deployment of nations around the world proved the benefits of airlift squadrons and amphibious ships in dramatic fashion, and during the 2000s they were purchased by numerous countries as a way of helping assist their citizens in a time of need as well as for military purposes.
Having succeeded in building a vast naval fleet in the post-Cold War era (and having increasingly-co-operative India adding to it, whose naval fleet was vast in its own right), the Commonwealth's level of co-operation on issues of state swelled ever further during the 2000s, with everything from the development of military equipment and aviation rules to standards for vehicles and mobile phones becoming sorted between the nations of the Central Commonwealth. Singapore joined the Central Commonwealth in 2003, and Hong Kong was given special status within the Commonwealth in 2008, something China (to the surprise of some but not many in Hong Kong) had few objections to. Despite the Commonwealth agreements Britain's place within the European Union was never in question, and indeed London in 2004 negotiated out an agreement allowing citizens of the Central Commonwealth nations to have privileged access to the nations of the European Union, that move coming months before the EU massively expanded into the Eastern Bloc. The EU's expansion had been planned for some time and had few objectors, and indeed the feared drop in living standards for those in rich countries never materialized - if anything, the reverse happened, as much of the former Eastern Bloc rapidly and enthusiastically took on the "European Project" with eyes wide open and proud plans for the future. For the Commonwealth, London's agreement with Brussels and the expansion gave them new places and new markets to search out, but much was expected in return and indeed much was indeed given. Canada's markets for its exports, both in terms of raw materials and manufactured goods, soared dramatically in the years after 2004, and while plenty came back, the moving to harmonize as many standards as possible with those of Britain - and thus, Europe - paid considerable dividends. Cyprus probably benefitted the most, as its entry into the EU paved the way for its entry into the Central Commonwealth, done in 2006, and it led to the island positioning itself as a bridge between the global worlds of the Commonwealth and the world of Europe.
Indeed the commonality between Europe and the Commonwealth wasn't exclusively approved of by the EU and Commonwealth bodies, of course. The Netherlands and France, long-time allies of Canada, both felt that such agreements would bring them all closer together and move Canada further away from the Americans towards the European orbit, and they weren't shy about saying so. Ottawa, for their part, understood such sympathies but had eyes of being good friends and partners with everyone around them, something not made particularly difficult by the United States, which was Canada's largest trading partner (OOC: Though its share is far less than OTL, obviously) and its largest investor. (The same was also true in reverse, with Canada holding more equity in American assets than any other nation.) In truth, America didn't mind many aspects of the standardization, as it too was well aware of the benefits involved in allowing there to be less duplication, and they wanted to sell to Europe too. Washington, while not entirely on side with Commonwealth decisions at times, wasn't blind to the fact that in all but most widely different of situations they could count on Commonwealth help.
As the Commonwealth was slowly uniting standards and developments, a new source of energy was being born in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia.
Anik Power Systems, named for the ground-breaking Canadian satellite of the 1960s, had come out of a designs and development of nuclear power plant-operator Dr. Hunter Roberts and Haudenosaunee heir Michael Neikan, developing the idea of microwave power transmission from a geosynchronous satellite to a receiver on Earth, allowing such a design to dispense with weather concerns that plagued Earth-based solar cells. By 1994 the company's revolutionary "Power From The Stars" study was complete and caused a stir, but even the company admitted then that without major reductions in the cost of space launches the project was unfeasible. Despite this, in 1995 the Government of South Africa commissioned them to develop a plan for what the power station would look like on Earth, with the vast, sunny desert of South Africa's Great Karoo desert as the landscape to develop the facility on. By the late 2000s, the company had come up with a prototype design for a massive rectenna - the rectenna was over five kilometres in diameter - and had developed the design of a trio of power satellites, which would use ion thrusters to keep themselves in position and would be capable of beaming 625 MW of power to the rectenna each, the power station producing a net output of 1700 MW, equivalent of a very large coal-fired power station or two large nuclear reactors. To help with this, the Commonwealth's Skylon Project was helped along by Anik and its investors, with the Reaction Engines company, based in Brisbane, Australia, successfully developing the powerful engines needed for Skylon and the airframe being assembled in the United Kingdom, with virtually the entire electronics suite being supplied from Research in Motion in Canada.
The development of the Skylon moved fairly slowly until Reaction Engines, assisted by Rolls-Royce Orenda, figured out the precooler technology that would make the SABRE engine possible. That job done, the first Skylon test flew in May 2010 on normal jet engines, controlled from a Bombardier Dash-8 aircraft which its remote controls had been housed in. The flight went well and by the time the first two Reaction Engines were installed in a Skylon in August 2012, the airframe worked perfectly and electronics to control it from ground control or a flying remote control station had been perfected. Testing in 2013 showed the Skylon was ready to fly, and in January 2014 the world's first single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft - and perhaps the biggest scientific achievement for the Commonwealth's unified development projects since the development of Commonwealth nuclear weapons 60 years prior - was ready to fly, and the first two for the United Kingdom's Space Authority and the Canadian Space Agency were ready to fly. Three months, the third Skylon - and the first Australian Skylon - got the honor of flying the first communications satellites of the Commonwealth to space.
No sooner had the Skylon flown than Anik was convincing the company's investors and the South African Government to give it the go-ahead for the building of the first Space-based solar power plant. They got that approval in 2015, and the construction of the Beaufort West Microwave Generating Station began. It was not a small job building a bowl-spaced rectenna five kilometres in diameter of course, but the company completed the job in 2018 and six separate Skylon flights carried its satellites to orbit in 2017 and 2018, making what once seemed impossible to be very possible indeed. Construction done and the satellites aligned, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa personally activated the power station on March 22, 2019, and true to form the station's power output was a touch conservative, as the Beaufort West facility produced a net output of 1826 MW when fully operational, which it was within hours.
It was perhaps the greatest result for the scientific efforts of the Commonwealth and its member states, and almost immediately Anik and other partners were working on the building of similar facilities to the groundbreaking South African facility in other parts of the world, with particular interest coming from parts of the world with similar climates to the Great Karoo, including in Australia, Chile, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the United States, and the first Canadian facility was soon also proposed by SaskPower for a facility in northern Saskatchewan. The idea of space-based solar power as part of the world's energy mix dramatically sped up solar cell research development as well, aiming to have cells of greater efficiency and durability to soon be ready to deploy. Knowing the growth in such space flights, Canada had by then already designated the volcano-devastated island of Montserrat as its new spaceport location, taking a risk on the dormant Soufriere Hills Volcano (which had gone dormant in 2010 after 15 years of regular activity) and developing a new facility on the island's west side (including building over top of part of the destroyed former capital city of Plymouth) and developing a modern spaceport, including a 12,500-foot runway specifically strengthened for the use of the Skylon. Like one would expect, it was built to high standards and for functionality, and when opened in 2017 provided work to a sizable portion of the population of the island, doing things properly.
After all, this is Canada we're talking about here after all....
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Holy shit, it's back!!!
Much as I'd love to see this happen, unless you manage to avert the Handover altogether, any such move will guarantee a Beijing-Commonwealth spat that would rival the current Sino-American Trade War and the Sino-Australian Pissing Contest.
Marc A
Much as I'd love to see this happen, unless you manage to avert the Handover altogether, any such move will guarantee a Beijing-Commonwealth spat that would rival the current Sino-American Trade War and the Sino-Australian Pissing Contest.
Marc A
Yep. I had a half finished chapter and have been talking a lot about the universe these days, so I'm gonna get back on it and merge a few details.
Here Tiananmen Square was way, way uglier and the hardliners in Beijing responded to British and Commonwealth disdain with "Get Fucked, we hate you, we'll take Hong Kong back any time we feel like it and there isn't shit you can do about it." Hong Kong saw a gigantic exodus pretty much instantaneously - nearly 500,000 people left in six months, half of those in the first three weeks - and the view of the PRC dropped like a lead brick along with its economy, forcing the UK to either let Hong Kong collapse under fear of a PLA invasion and downright hatred of the powers in Beijing or try to save the colony by getting American and Commonwealth backup to scrap the handover. They got it, Hong Kong stayed British for the foreseeable future, and China in the end was too concerned with a monumental embargo that appeared on them as a result of the Massacre. 1997 came and went without incident, and now Britain has been trying to figure out what to do about Hong Kong that won't ruin it again or send Beijing into orbit. For the Commonwealth, China spent 15 years or so as a pariah, something lots of countries took advantage of, India most of all - in this TL, they are becoming the nation of the 21st Century, not the PRC, and Tiananmen Square and lingering memories of it have resulted in the countries around China being at best lukewarm towards them.
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