I saw “more nation specific events” as a thing to vote for (voted for it), and figured I’d give some more specific feedback.
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Neighbor nuclear test. I’ve brought this up before, but it happened again today, so I’ll mention it. Nobody expects the prime minister of Canada to be able to convince the United States military to not conduct a nuclear test. Therefore nobody would think less of the Canadian PM for this happening, therefore this event should be blocked for Canada.
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Regional war…um…yeah…we have one neighbor. Even central American wars don’t really affect us, the U.S. makes for a pretty good buffer between us and any central American…event. A decade ago I would have said that this event should be outright disabled for Canada, but I’d be a liar if I said that the last decade hadn’t changed my opinion on the potential here. I’d still say reduce the likelihood by 95%, but I think “America collapses” deserves to be it’s own category of disaster. This is NOT on the same level as the impact for a western European country when eastern Europe has a dust up.
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Quebec. Oh boy, where to begin. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the Canada simulation simply will not be complete without some reference to Quebec separatism. As I’m thinking about this, it comes to mind that the U.K. needs a potential disaster where it becomes a little less U, and Spain needs something about the Catalans…and the Basques. If I missed anyone do let me know.
Long read after this, there are no further numbered points after here, only my attempt to unpack Quebec within Canada. I have no idea what gameplay development could possibly come out of this write up, but I’m still going to do my best.
Anyways, the love shared between Quebec and the rest of Canada goes back to the wonderful friendship which the English and the French have shared throughout history. Rest assured that we have kept your amazing friendship going on this side of the Atlantic. As the English and French were trying to impress each other by setting up colonies right beside each other in this new land where absolutely nobody at all minded them being here, two gentlemen named Wolfe and Montcalm threw a big party (to which a surprising number of Scots were invited by both gentlemen) where at the end of it the English decided they loved the French so much that they were going to do all the hard work of governing for them from then on.
Fast forward a couple generations and there were a couple simultaneous problems. One was that Canada, broken into upper and lower Canada, had a government made up of 2 groups with equal voting power who regularly opposed each other’s ideas just to express their true feelings. This left a certain John A. MacDonald in need of a way to break the deadlock and get the government moving again. The other problem was related to traitor colonies to the south. They’d just had a big war about whether or not humans with dark skin are humans, therefore they had a big and expensive military with vast quantities of modern equipment and many soldiers who were very recently practiced at using it. In addition to this, they had many politicians who were making speeches about the “Manifest Destiny”, which in short is a document which states that the American government has a God given right to rule 2 continents. In modern times Americans try to retcon that the manifest destiny only ever referred to their modern borders, therefore “mission accomplished” (“USA! USA! USA!” FIREWORKS) but fun fact: No. The Manifest Destiny referred to all the land which had ever been geographically referred to as “America” before “America” was a name for any political entity. Side note, the British had been sending clandestine support to the losing side of that war (Divide and conquer I guess?), and many Americans were talking about revenge against the British. When asked if they were going to protect their colonies from the hornet’s nest they’d just kicked, the British government answered something to the effect of “Meh, your problem”. This left John with a strong imperative to be “not British” as soon as possible in addition to his imperative to break the parliamentary deadlock.
In some of his neighbors, John found a solution. The colonies of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick were having a conference to discuss the formation of union of the three of them which could be independent enough from Britain that the Americans would lose their political justification to invade (Which some gamers will know as “Casus Belli”) in order to not get a visit from some men in blue clothing, but not so independent that they would get a visit from the men wearing red either. John set out without invitation to attend this conference, and upon hearing of his imminent arrival the government of Prince Edward Island, out of “concern for public safety”, ordered all passenger ferries to and from their island grounded until further notice. Apparently the shipping industry didn’t get the memo, and John and his entourage hitched a ride on a barge full of pickle barrels. With him John brought copious amounts of alcohol, as while a substantial portion of it was no doubt intended for his own consumption, he had other intentions for the rest. The formal discussions went nowhere, but 21st century attitudes around alcohol, informed consent and validity of signatures didn’t apply in the 19th century, and by the end of the evening social the leaders of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had signed enough documentation to start a new nation of 4 provinces. Strangely enough, the host of the conference was not included in the original union.
From Quebec’s perspective, the end result of the formation of Canada as a nation of 4 provinces was that the Prime minister had displayed his care and concern for their issues by adding enough English votes to the parliament to simply outvote them at every turn. This as a historic back drop has never ceased to be relevant to the the topic of how respected Quebec feels by the rest of Canada, as 1867 was the year when French Canadians stopped being equals in the eyes of their own country. I cannot overstate the fact that in 154 years this wound has never healed. It wasn’t until Pierre Trudeau that federal services started being offered in French more than 100 years after the country had formed. We also we didn’t get invaded by the Americans.
I’ve been at this for a couple hours and I’m out of steam. I may continue later with topics such as conscription in the first world war, the FLQ crisis and Meech Lake if I see interest. I really didn’t intend to go on for this long when I started writing this.