Religious expulsions from western Canada

With a POD of 1900, have one or more religious groups get expelled from western Canada. This can be done via outright state-sponsored cleansing, ie. the military and/or Mounties show up and make everyone leave at gunpoint, or legally valid but still rather harsh immigration measures, eg. a group that had been issued entry visas suddenly has those visas revoked, with orders for all erstwhile visa holders to vamoose ASAP.

Push comes to shove, have a voluntary exodus, with the Canadian government arranging with some foreign government to host the sect, while offering attractive incentives for emigration.

Also, come up with some sort of background as to WHY exactly things reached a point where the Canadian government no longer wished to tolerate the group's presence.

Off the top of my head, candidates could include the Mormons of southern Alberta and BC(originally polygamists who had fled the US), the Hutterites of Alberta(who were subject to discriminatory land-purchase laws for decades) the Doukhobors of Saskatchewan and BC(I'm guessing the idea of kicking THEM out was at least entertained by several levels of government), and the Mennonites and other anabaptist groups.
 
It would take a rather extreme situation to cause a Canadian government (whether Federal or provincial) to wish to destroy productive, peaceful, and law abiding communities of this kind. One of these would be a security situation that caused Canada to adopt a particularly demanding form of military conscription, which would lead to an atmosphere in which pacifists were seen as slackers of a particularly egregious kind.

So, here goes:

In 1900, William Jennings Bryan becomes president of the United States. With him comes a program of "overseas divestiture," one that grants independence to all territories acquired by the United States after 1853. Thus, such possessions/territories as Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Alaska are converted into independent republics.

In 1904, the Empire of Japan sends an expeditionary force to the Republic of Alaska, ostensibly to protect it from Russia. In 1905, Bryan brokers the Treaty of Lincoln (Nebraska), which ends the war between Russia and Japan. This treaty contains a provision calling for Japanese troops to withdraw from Alaska. This, however, does not happen. Instead, Alaska becomes the first of a growing number of Japanese colonies in the Western Hemisphere, which quickly become home, not merely to garrisons of Japanese troops, but to large numbers of Japanese settlers. (The second of these colonies is Magdalena Bay, in the Mexican state of Baja California.)

British opposition to Japanese expansion creates a change in the alliance system in the Pacific, with the British Empire abandoning its close relationship with Japan in favor of cooperation with Russia. This, in turn, leads Japan to ally itself with Germany.

When, in 1914, the Great European War breaks out, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan combine their efforts against Russia. Within a year, these deprive Russia of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, White Russia, and Ukraine as well as the entirety of its Pacific littoral and substantial territories in the Caucasus, and cause the Russian government to sue for peace. Thus began the long cold war between the British Empire, on the one hand, and a grand alliance that dominated Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific Littoral.

In 1916, as veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force return home, the Dominion of Canada begins a massive expansion of its peacetime armed forces. Part of this is a national service law that requires that every able bodied man resident in the Dominion serve for a minimum of three years "with the colors," nine years with the "army reserve," and twelve years with his local militia regiment.

Soon thereafter, newspapers begin to publish editorials, with titles like "The Two Yellow Perils," condemning attempts by pacifist communities to obtain exemptions from military service for their young men. These invariably refer to the famous speech of War Minister Sam Hughes, which ended with the words, "We did not fill the Danish Straits with Canadian blood so that men who stayed at home might avoid guard duty on the Alaskan frontier."

The rest, as they say, is history ...
 
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Thanks, Holophile. Indeed, a somewhat Rube Goldberg route to expulsion, but would probably do the trick. You could probably also concoct a scenario where Alaska reverts to Russian control, Russia adopts an expansionist posture, and that creates hostility toward various Russian communities within western Canada(even if those communities are not all enamored of Czarist Russia). One thing...

It would take a rather extreme situation to cause a Canadian government (whether Federal or provincial) to wish to destroy productive, peaceful, and law abiding communities of this kind.

The more militant of the Doukhobors would probably not be regarded as "productive, peaceful, and law abiding" by a wide section of Canadian society. Granted, the school burners and train bombers were a minority, but they tended to get most of the media attention.

Back to your scenario, I wonder how electorally feasible Bryan's decolonization program would be at that point in time. Granted, the places he'd be dumping weren't full states, but still.
 
Considering that Canadian policy under Clifford Sifton was to import 'peasants in sheepskin coats' to fill the Prairies, and that we got LOTS of odd religious groups as a result (people who were uncomfortable in Orthodox Russia and Catholic A-H), there would have to be a strange shift of policy and attitude for this to happen.
 
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