Canada (PoW 2020)

The Royal Dominion of Canada is a country in North America. It is bordered by the United States to the south, and shares maritime borders with Denmark-Sweden via Greenland.

It, along with the United Kingdom's other colonial holdings, is a member of the Imperial Federation.

History
The Great White North was one of the major players of the British Empire during the Great War. Dutifully they served throughout all thirteen years of warfare, and without question died for colonial masters who ruled from across an ocean. Their participation did not come without a price, however, as the Westminster Statute of 1924 forced the hands of the Crown, and Canada became in the terms of British Parliament, “separate and coequal”.

Canada came through the Great War as one of the most well-off Dominions. It had rapidly industrialized, and its standard of living became comparable to those in Britain itself pre-war. Squalor shrunk massively as factories opened their doors to produce war materiel. Being an ocean away from the fighting, no pillaging took place, and besides U-Boats sailing the North Atlantic, the homeland was spared.

All was not well as 1927 rolled around. Canada was now legally independent as a civilized nation, true. But it had come at great cost. 120,000 Canadians were casualties in some form throughout the war, dealing an extreme blow to the young male population. Maimed and shell-shocked soldiers returned home to a society which was increasingly moving away from agrarian pursuits in favor of industry. Farmers cursed the factories which their sons and daughters went to work for. Canada in 1929 was a perfect storm for disaster.

As the United States’ stock market took its dive, it sent the precarious Canadian economy into free-fall. The Dust Bowl moved north through the US plains and forced what few Canadian farmers remained in the prairies to flee or starve. While never in outright famine, for as long as the United States struggled, so too did its largest overland trade partner to the north.

In the midst of the crisis, Mackenzie King refused to resign his Liberal government as the Conservatives took the Parliamentary majority. Upon calling for a dissolving of the Parliament and a new general election by King (a precedent set in 1925, only granted due to the emergency war-time government), the affair spiraled into a crisis which only resolved when the British Crown threatened to exercise its power to change the Canadian Constitution itself. King stepped down without incident, and the Conservative government took power.

The Conservative government would receive a vote of no confidence in 1931 due to disastrous economic policy, including minimizing worker's rights in an emulation of the American system.. King attempted to claim his seat once again but was ousted by his party due to the crisis he’d caused only a year before. A young Liberal MP from British Columbia by the name of Lawrence Morriss had climbed through the ranks in the recent blunders, and achieved the station of party leader, being sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada in 1932.

His first experience in office was a coup in the United States. Morriss’s test of leadership had come in his first two months. People had not forgotten the Liberal party of Mackenzie, nor the Crisis of 1930. As American refugees flooded the border, he had to pick and choose his battles. As the people in his own borders suffered, he had to turn back at least half of all those seeking asylum due to protest by a growing Conservative minority. Canada would eventually recover, but as a changed nation.

With its new national identity and its economic integrity restored by 1940, Prime Minister Morriss saw his ninth year in office, until suddenly dying from a heart attack at the age of 45. His most trusted advisor, Lennox Dwight, was earmarked to take his post until a spat over the newest development in the American Great Cleansing saw the radically leftist Dwight removed in favor of a more moderate candidate, leaving neither Conservative nor the average Liberal worker in good standing with the sitting party.

The Liberal party’s control wanes under ineffective leadership which neglects issues at home and abroad. The British-aligned Conservatives grow steadily under new leadership, and a coming general election threatens to oust the Liberal party from its twenty-year government. Quebec and the rest of French Canada prepare their referendums for a Conservative victory, and Canada itself is poised to return to the hole it had dug itself in 1917 during the conscription crisis as war looms.