History of Albion (1878-1914)

Post-Independence Albion (1878-1914) covers the period following the Condominium of New Albion Act to the beginning of World War I.

Dominion and the 1878 Election
The efforts of self-annexationists paid off in 1878, when on March 1, the British Parliament passed the Condominium of New Albion Act. This Act combined the Crown Colony of New Albion, the Mackenzie and Yukon Territories, the Athabasca Territory and Queen Charlotte Island into a single entity known as New Albion and granted the territory the status of a Commonwealth Dominion. It was the beginning of Alban autonomy, if not full independence. Four provinces were carved out: Columbia, Calapuya, Fraser and Vancouver, though the status of Vancouver had been hotly disputed at the time of the Act. Ultimately, efforts to combine the province with the mainland of Columbia or Fraser failed, and the province was admitted independently, much to the delight of its chattering class and the chagrin of some politicians in mainland Fraser, with territorial administrator Amor Davida being among the most chagrined.

Notwithstanding this matter, elated self-annexationists went into the election that spring on a high of public support.

The greater part of the population rallied around William Lanark Townshend, a longtime Popham disciple and then-Joint Premier of the Provinces of Columbia and Vancouver Island. Townshend had been critical not only in advocating for self-rule, but in building mutual good relations with the United States. A friend to the late President Abraham Lincoln, Townshend had been present for the famous Gettysburg Address, even traveling there by train with Lincoln the day prior. As joint premier at the time of Dominion, he had been sworn in by then-Governor General, Lord Monteagle, as interim Prime Minister going into the scheduled high-spring election.

The Great Coalition created by the political deadlock between north and south Columbia disintegrated going into the election, but left the Liberals with no candidate, most of the Clear Grits jumping over to side with Townshend's Tories. Internecine fighting saw the quixotic Amor Davida, a former Conservative who had broken with the Great Coalition over personal differences with Townshend, emerge as interim leader going into the election. But Davida's support in the rest of Vancouver Island outside Victoria was thin owing to his stance on unification, and his party supported him only softly.

The key issue, however, was not interjurisdictional internal politics, but foreign affairs: The election turned on the matter of trade with the United States. The Liberals largely supported opening reciprocal free trade with the United States, while Townshend supported a policy of robust tariffs designed to promote the development of domestic industry. The Conservatives painted the policy as a bulwark against American annexationism, describing themselves as the Albion First party and their platform as "A British Policy for a British Albion." It was the Conservatives who tapped most effectively into the zeitgeist: Most Albans saw dangers in getting too cozy with the United States, fearing that a revanchist Union, still smarting from the loss of the South, might turn its attention to the northwest. The results translated into a victory for Townshend, who coasted to an outright majority of the 161 seats at play. Davida, who ran in a Granville riding, lost his seat and wouldn't return to Parliament until the next election. A minority of seats in the Snake River area were picked up by the Anti-Dominion Party of Brian Mason, a former Union officer who had emigrated from the United States to settle in Albion, but the area around Treasure Valley was surprisingly picked up by a pro-British MP, John S. Laird.

Townshend faced immediate problems upon the formation of the new country. Much work remained to do in not only forging a federal government, but in establishing national unity in those areas peripheral to Albion - the territories, and in particular the Snake River and Kootenay regions, where most settlers were American fortune-seekers. Alban-American relations were in a tense state, with fears of Union revanchism increasing anxieties. Privately, opinions in both Boston and London were that Albion would quickly prove to be unsustainable on its own, and plans were quietly floated among the American administration to absorb the nascent nation, particularly now that the need to adhere to the Missouri Compromise was moot.

Townshend, however, proved uniquely able to navigate these challenges. While derided by his opponents as vain, erratic, bigoted against Catholics and prone to ugly white-supremacist views, he was an extremely skilled politician who quickly flipped his position on eastern expansion once he became Prime Minister.

Rupert's Land having been purchased by the Columbian Provinces, the territory was combined into Albion at the time of dominion, and early efforts had been under way to settle some of the areas nearer the Rocky Mountains. Townshend ramped this effort up in earnest with a simple but ambitious national mission: He would link Albion to Britain through the creation of an Eastern Gateway, and he would forge that link by building a great railroad that would link Hudson Bay to the Columbia River basin, stretching across the prairies. The Dominion Pacific Railway would form a vast chain across Albion, linking together train stops across the prairies and making it possible for Alban ships to easily sail to Mother Britannia for six months of the year rather than sailing back and forth from the edge of the world.

The Townshend years: Railroad Fever and the Pacific Scandal
In fact, survey efforts to select an eastern port had been under way since at least 1872, and they had settled on three options: York Factory on the Hayes River, Port Nelson on the nearby Nelson River, or the less-developed furring station at the mouth of the Churchill River. Townshend elected for Churchill, finding its harbour more suited for handling ships en masse: The Nelson River's shallowness and silty bottom would have required regular dredging and the construction of an artificial island, while. The Hudson Ports Act of 1878 finalized the decision: It provided for the purchase from the rump Hudson Bay Company of several key rivermouth factories along the Hudson Bay rim, all at a nominal price. The true cost would be that of building a railroad not only across open prairies, but across the vast reach of rock, muskeg and permafrost separating Palliser's Triangle and the prairie aspen parklands from the Hudson Bay coast.

Construction on legs of the railway had begun even prior to Dominion, but the Townshend government's support transformed smaller regional efforts into a larger national one. Chinese labourers poured into Albion as developers leaned on them to do the heavy lifting, plotting the route of the railway over the mountains and eastwar across the endless prairies.

No small amount of the effort took the form of politics. A key early decision saw the Dominion Pacific Railroad's route diverted through Crowsnest Pass, a change from initial plans to route the railroad through the more northerly Yellowhead Pass. The decision was largely owed to the influence of a major Tory donor, Colonel Alphonsus Baker, who owned well-surveyed lands along the route and saw opportunities in the coal mining sector. A few well-placed "donations" to key Tory politicians put the wheels of policy change in motion, ensuring the route tracked through Baker's properties - a move which set the stage for the later foundation of the province of Kootenay, centred on Bakersfield, a city built on land owned by Baker, and for the development of the city of Kiottowa (then called Fort Hamilton, or colloqually Fort Whoop-Up) at the expense of the more northerly stop of Augusta (later Wichispa).

From Fort Hamilton the railroad would continue east across the lower prairies to the settlement of Swift Current before turning northeast to largely follow the Kisatchewan River, plotting mainly through unsettled territory that would later grow into towns and cities like Minishic. It would continue from there north of the Prairie Great Lakes (Winnipeg and Winnipegosis respectively) before tracking up the Nelson River and finally veering due north to reach the mouth of the Churchill River. An offshoot at Swift Current - the Assiniboine Railroad - would continue on east to the lower Prairie Great Lakes, tracking along the Assiniboine River before linking up to the American rail system at the mouth of the Red River. A connector would later stretch along the west side of the lakes through Dauphin.

Construction of the railway took four years and required extensive deal-making with First Nations; among the most notable efforts was a missionary priest convincing the Blackfoot chief Crowfoot that construction of the railway was inevitable, for which Crowfoot was cynically rewarded with a pass to ride the railway free for life. The Blackfoot became key backers of the Crown as Albion expanded the railway out across the grasslands, and many of the first settlers from the Pacific Northwest to reach the prairies learned to speak Blackfoot, leading to a gradual influence of Blackfoot language on English in the area. Crowfoot and his people were generally allowed to keep their land - but the buffalo herds continued to decline as gun-armed white settlers competed with Cree and Blackfoot hunters for them, and "white man's disease" continued to ravage the native population.

Secure in his majority, Townshend implemented the Homestead Act, which promised 65 hectares of free land to any male farmer age 21 or older physically capable of farming at least a quarter of the land and building a home on it within three years.

A major social issue of the time was the steady trickle of Black immigrants out of the Confederacy and into Albion, most of them coming up through the Rocky Mountains by way of Texas along what was known as the Underground Trail. These escaped Black slaves tended to find their way to urban centres along the Columbia and Fraser Rivers, and while some communities (particularly along the Columbia) accepted them, more remote communities complained. Townshend dealt with this in a simple fashion: He opened up the Homestead Act to free Blacks and offered them the same promise of land offered to any white settler. Several plots of land were specifically set aside for these escaped slaves, mostly on ceded Indian land in an area known as Minishic. On its face an egalitarian action, Townshend, who harboured white supremacist and eugenicist views, intended this move to get Black people out of the cities and tucked away in a prairie enclave were they would be out of sight and out of mind. Instead he ended up ensuring that Alban Blacks would form a thriving cultural enclave.

In 1882, Townshend was re-elected on the back of "Railroad Fever." With Davida having lost his seat in 1878, Lynden timber businessman E. Gregory Samples was chosen as the party's leader in the House. Discontent with Townshend's perceived coolness towards Coast First Nations saw Samples increase the Grits' fortunes, carrying several ridings in the Puget Sound area with a good performance among those fluent in Chinookan. However, Townshend held on to his majority and enjoyed the support of three of the five independents elected, with the remaining two caucusing with the Liberals. The election saw Davida return to the House, though Samples would remain leader until his health began to decline in 1885.

Townshend's Homestead Act was intended to fill out the Prairies, and it did just that: A wave of settlers, seeing opportunity on the great plains, took the government up on its offer. Settlers and immigrants of all races and faiths followed the railroad in their trek to the Prairies, establishing communities along key stops and planting their crops on former Indian land. As the Railroad grew, so too did the reach of the settlement.

By 1884, the last stake had been driven into the Railway, and work continued to bring the new Port of Churchill online. Steamships were already coming and going from the first quays, enabling Albion to easily communicate with Britain during the warm season, though the harsh cold and seasonal freezes of the Hudson Bay rim ensured that traffic was cut off in winter.

The next year, Townshend was obliged to put down the Eastern Rebellion, a Metis uprising led by agitators imported from the former Red River Colony in the United States. Many resisting First Nations leaders - prominently, Big Bear of the Plains Cree and Poundmaker of the same - took the side of the rebels. However, the outside agitators quickly morphed the rebellion from a movement into a military action with Catholic overtones, quickly splintering the rebellion. The Alban government quickly moved in; while the First Nations won a few battles, they eventually ran out of ammunition, and most of them surrendered to the government. The Albans hanged the Cree chief Wandering Spirit, who was behind a massacre of white settlers at Frog Lake, but let most of the other rebels out of jail eventually.

Beyond this, though, Townshend looked to make deals with First Nations wherever he could, preferring to enlist them as allied against the "boston mans." By and large this involved conning them out of their land and leaving them on marginal reserves while the rest of their traditional territory was parceled out to the white man.

The Dominion Pacific Railway Company itself fueled much of this immigration. Much of the railroad ran through flatlands with nothing more than the occasional Cree to break the wind. Populating the route stood to make the DPR's operations far more profitable. At its peak, Dominion Pacific employees operated in countries throughout Europe, providing incentive packages and land parcels to new immigrants on the condition they could settle and cultivate the land. Immigrants made crossings on Dominion Pacific ships and landed at a Dominion Pacific pier in Churchill before being loaded onto Dominion Pacific "colony cars" and shipped inland to their new homes.

The fingerprints of Dominion Pacific's strategy fundamentally shaped the development of the Prairies. While the travel of Free Blacks to Minishic largely came from the west, it was DPR's funding of ships into Churchill that would set the stage for boom towns like Swift Current, Paskoyac, Tampere, Winterbridge and Fort Hamilton/Kiottawa to flourish. The later Alban National Railway would portend similar booms for towns such as Stannassipi, Fife and Edmonton.

However, Townshend's reputation as a great leader would take a hit as the railroad came to completion. When Parliament opened in 1885, Liberal MP Joseph S. Harvick rose with allegations that government ministers had been bribed with political contributions to award the charter for the Hudson-Pacific Railway. The allegations were dismissed by Townshend as "rank falsity," and no documents emerged to prove the allegations. Nevertheless, they damaged Townshend going into the election of 1886.

By that point, Samples had stepped down due to poor health, and the Liberals had selected Davida as their leader once again. The mercurial and fiery Liberal leader went into the 1886 election blistering Townshend as a corrupt, vain "poppycock of a man," though Townshend was said to have responded at one point, "This from a man named Amor Davida." The 1886 election was ugly by Albion's standards - in fact even by modern ones - and it delivered Townshend a shock: He had lost his majority. The Conservatives and Liberals were very close in the seat count. Negotiations ensued with the six independent MPs who had made it into the House.

Ultimately, Townshend was able to prop up his government with the support of four independents who caucused with the anti-Catholic zealot Thomas Lucius McGruder. This had the effect of irritating Conservative settlers on the prairies, including Catholics who had migrated to Albion by way of Europe in search of land grants. Many of these voters owed their opportunities to Townshend and were willing to overlook his known pro-Anglican predilections, but the alliance with the rabid McGruder faction saw many of them begin to drift away.

In 1887, letters emerged detailing that the allegations raised by Harvick were true. The Conservatives had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US-backed firms. In return, Townshend - who received $50,000 personally - had ensured that his donors received the charter to operate the Hudson-Pacific Railway. Other Conservative ministers were also revealed to have traded donations for contracts. The resulting havoc saw key members of Townshend's cabinet resign and several within the Party recoil from their leader's conduct. Townshend himself was infamously referred to as a "mendacious blatherskite" by Davida on the floor of the House, resulting in Davida being chastised for unparliamentary language.

Townshend offered his resignation to his caucus later that year. The party accepted it with reluctance, and the office was filled by the highest-ranking Conservative not to take money from the railroad concern: John S. Laird, who owed his support not to railroad prosperity, but to mountaineers and miners. But while Laird was seen as more moderate and incorruptible than Townshend (and indeed, would go on to become a respected Minister of Indian Affairs in the Silburn government), the Liberals saw their opportunity. The McGruderites joined the Grits in bringing the government down on a vote of confidence, launching Albion into an election.

Eastern expansion
Davida went into the election on a platform of restoring accountability, calling himself "A Plain and Honest Man" in his campaign materials. A Conservative and strong Townshend supporter prior to Dominion, he had fallen out with the now-disgraced PM during the campaign for sovereignty, and he came into the election claiming that he had the judgment to see Townshend's duplicity ahead of time.

The Conservatives went into the election trusting Laird to try and repair the damage. But the fallout from the Pacific Scandal saw the Tories wiped out, losing more than 30 seats and sweeping the Grits into power with a strong majority.

With the Pacific Scandal fresh in Albion's mind and Davida holding a majority mandate, the new Grit government set to work establishing the Supreme Court of Albion and hiring the nation's first Auditor-General. Eccentric, eloquent and temperamental, Davida is also notable for opening the Homestead Act to the Chinese, allowing dispossessed railway workers to accept land grants in the Prairies. His stewardship saw a wave of European immigrants join the initial wave of prairie settlers, gradually filling the fertile areas of the grassland with farms.

The years also saw Albion continue to sign treaties with Aboriginal peoples across the Prairies, expropriating vast quantities of land for European settlers. Almost from the get-go, Albion proved to be a half-hearted ally, often failing to fully deliver on these treaties and alliances. However, those who signed the treaties generally managed better than those who resisted, among the reasons the likes of Crowfoot held their peoples back from joining this or that rebellion. Bit by bit, the buffalo herds dwindled and the best land fell into the hands of Eurasian settlers, though a complaint from Crowfoot in 1888 did result in Davida harshly chastising those companies responsible for delivering food to the First Nations following an ugly incident in which many Blackfoot went hungry. The companies rectified the problem and Albion began to do a little better at keeping its promises, though in general this period is still rightly remembered as a dark one for the First Nations, even those like the Blackfoot and those few Cree clans whose chiefs managed to wrestle an alliance rather than a treaty out of the white man. The buffalo continued to vanish, many of the First Nations continued to be herded onto subpar plots of land, and the Catholic clergy in the flatlands continued to take the children of some of the eastern Great Plains First Nations away from their parents to be tortured and brainwashed at residential schools.

Davida largely dodged major cultural issues during his term, focusing instead on building an economy that could stand on its own. His economic policies focused on "the Three Fs - farming, forestry and fisheries." Promoting the Dominion Lands Act satisfied the former, while the latter two saw the Liberal government promote the formation of fishing companies, the establishment of logging firms and the foundation of ports to service fishing boats and transport fine lumber far and wide. Much of the modern port infrastructure enjoyed by Albion has its roots in Davida's economic policy.

A black mark on Davida's record was the 1888 Wrangler Rebellion, when pro-American cattle ranchers in the near rim of the Prairies revolted and demanded independence. The Wrangler Rebellion was abortive and unsuccessful, but ended in the brutal Fort Milk Massacre, in which 66 rebels attempting to storm the Alban fort at Fort Milk were mowed down and killed to a man by Alban soldiers. The Albans left no survivors, much to the consternation of the government.

Davida himself was one of the more colourful characters in Albion's history. While he had a reputation as a stirring orator, he was also considered eccentric, and his temper was the stuff of legends. On more than one occasion he apologized for unparliamentary language after a sharp verbal barb or two at his Conservative foes in the House.

It was ultimately this temper which shortened Davida's term: In 1890, he suffered a heart attack brought on by stress. While he survived, he chose to step back from his role as Prime Minister and resigned his seat in the House. His office was taken up by his Minister of Finance, James R. Rankin.

Rankin, an old-stock Alban, was a fluent speaker of chinuk wawa, and he came to office at a time of controversy, with Anglican clergy agitating against the fact that in many parts of Albion, even as the Catholics kidnapped Native children to raise them Catholic, schoolchildren in Anglican areas were still being educated in the wawa.

The Indian Schools Affair divided opinions within Albion, but the region's long history of partnership with the First Nations saw public opinion in Rankin's core region of Puget Sound tilting in favour of the Coast First Nations. Rankin was ultimately handed a lifeline when the Affair was referred to the Supreme Court later that year. While the Auditor-General's office had been strengthened by Davida, Rankin took the position that it would be anti-democratic to intervene in a court case, and he chose to let the court figure it out.

While this position would shore up Rankin's position close to home, as would his affirmation of state control of the Bank of Albion, the Conservatives would leverage the Indian Schools Affair to push ugly insinuations. In particular, a rumour circulated that Rankin had a Chinookan mistress and had fathered an illegitimate child. These rumours were entirely false, but they dogged Rankin on the campaign trail despite his denouncing them as "scurrilous falsities." Conservative Leader Alvin John Davie never directly repeated the rumours, but campaigners close to him did.

The shadow campaign had an impact on Rankin - but it did not bear fruit entirely for the Tories. Some of their vote instead went to McGruder, whose anti-Catholic party soaked up resentful settlers in the north and along the Fraser River - largely devout Protestants who resented that Catholic churches were opening residential schools in the east to convert native children with the government's quiet acquiescence, while the Anglican Church was not. Anti-Catholic and anti-native sentiment allowed for the Grits to hold on to a few key ridings through vote splitting, retaining control with the aid of two independent MPs - and McGruder's caucus of 10, on some issues.

Religious turmoil continued to stir Albion. A anti-Catholic riot in Windsor in 1892, however, bought Rankin some cover, and he turned the tides on the more zealous religious forces in the city, criticizing the priesthood and promoting the separation of church and state. A by-election win that year saw another Liberal MP edge Rankin's party closer to a majority. Finally, in late 1892, the Supreme Court issued its ruling: Denying the First Nations their language rights would be contrary to the law of the land.

The court decision forced Rankin's hand, but he moved quickly to meet the conditions imposed upon his government. What emerged was the Official Languages Act of 1892. This act established chinuk wawa as a Protected Dialect Within Albion and affirmed the right of speakers of it to be educated in their own language. It also - two years after the death of Crowfoot - affirmed the right of Blackfoot children to be educated in their native tongue in Athabasca. The law would effectively ban religious residential schooling of First Nations children, though the Catholic Church would continue to practice it.

The Official Languages Act would pass Parliament by one of the narrowest margins in history: 101-99. The Conservatives and McGruderites voted against it in a bloc, while the Liberals and one independent voted for it.

The OLA would prove deeply consequential, setting the stage for English in Albion to continue to be influenced by the Chinook dialect. However, it cost Rankin his government: When a Liberal MP died in 1892, the by-election was won by a Conservative, tipping the balance of power. With no governing majority, Rankin was defeated on a motion of confidence in 1893.

But the 1893 election surprised partisans: The Liberals managed to emerge with a precarious majority government. The death of McGruder that year saw the anti-Catholic vote diffuse across parties, leaving the House with just six independents - two of whom were sympathetic to the Liberals. The Conservatives soaked up most of the remaining McGruder MPs, but Rankin was left with a majority, as well as support from a potential governing coalition he could work with.

The next three years saw little of consequence trouble Rankin save the continued expansion of Albion into the Prairies. He did, however, implement equalization payments in the education system, ensuring equal access to free public education across the country. The biggest tumult came in the form of the migration of Mormon settlers from the Utah Territory into the Snake River Valley, where Rankin's government was obliged to send in the Royal Alban Mounted Police to arrest several community leaders for polygamy. A later court decision explicitly affirmed that polygamous marriage would not be permitted in Albion, and police presence in the area was increased to protect the small Mormon community near Georgina from reprisals - though in fact the police proved almost as big a threat to Mormons as the locals did.

Rankin's last term was one of expansion, and several key cities in the east came to prosperity in this timeframe. In particular, the town of Augusta, along the Bow River, absorbed the neighbouring village of Makinissis and was incorporated as a city. Further north, Edmonton was incorporated as a town, while in the east, the towns of Stannassippi and Fife were incorporated, as was the town of Port Churchill, later shortened to just Churchill. Rankin continued to pursue Davida's Three Fs, including providing generous subsidies for farming and even making land available for Blackfoot and Cree farmers who wanted to settle.

However, Rankin's tenuous majority would slip away after a series of by-election defeats. His party faced three in 1895, losing two and thus their governing majority. Forced to rely on the votes of two independents, Rankin found himself under pressure to deliver an austerity budget in 1896 in order to win the vote of one. He declined, banking on his party's brand to win in an election.

1896: The Year of Four Chiefs
Rankin went into the 1896 election in a weakened position, criticized heavily by the Conservatives for his overspending and from the public for the tax increases and deficits he delivered en route to his drive for public education. He faced a Conservative Party headed up by young Townshend protegé William Wright Corden, who had taken over party leadership from Davie after an outbreak of Conservative infighting over the Party's failure to unseat Rankin. While Corden faced some mistrust from the public due to his Catholic faith, he was well-known in the public consciousness and associated with a couple of contradictory feelings: Nostalgia and change. Able to harness both forces, Corden promised a return to responsible spending and a more protective trade policy.

Outwardly, the campaign was issues-based, with Corden's Catholicism downplayed. Internally, however, some members of the Conservative cabinet - mainly Albion First nationalists and arch-conservatives sympathetic to the late McGruderites - resented having a Catholic calling the shots. Party solidarity carried the day in the end, however, with the Tories sweeping to a majority.

Seeking to paper over some of the internal fissures in the Tory caucus, Corden set to work building an internal coalition, distributing cabinet seats to powerful opponents. In particular he turned to party elder statesman Aaron Pillinger, a Senator since 1878, to join his cabinet as Minister of Trade, while bringing leadership rival Hugh John Silburn on-side by appointing him Minister of the Interior. The so-called Cabinet of Rivals was intended to heal the rifts in the Conservative Party, and Corden went into his swearing-in energized and ready to govern.

Twelve days later, he dropped dead of a stroke.

With the Tories in chaos, the Governor General - at that point the Earl of Onslow - stepped in appointed Pillinger Prime Minister due to his capacity as the most senior Cabinet minister. Pillinger became the first and only sitting Senator to hold the office of Prime Minister.

From the start, Pillinger was almost shockingly ineffective, in part because his station as a Senator made him unable to speak in the House. But Pillinger was also a crusty old man and a survivor of the Pacific Scandal, seen as compromised and wishy-washy. His sole act of consequence was to intervene in anti-Catholic riots carried out against Irish immigrants, issuing a government ruling that the Irish did in fact have the same rights as everyone else.

But his term was deeply undercut by factional strife within his own party, resurgent following the death of Corden. The ineffectiveness of Pillinger was seen by newer MPs as evidence that the Conservative "old guard" - former Townshend MPs who had survived the Pacific Scandal - lacked the foresight and clarity of conscience to govern Albion. Pillinger's appointment of old-guard MP Charles Winchester MacLeod as Minister of Trade in his stead was similarly seen as evidence that the old Senator would take the party backward. Seeking to try to reunify the party, Pillinger teased a bill to amend the Official Languages Act, but was forced to postpone it as infighting roiled his cabinet.

Pillinger didn't last the year; In late November of 1896, eight members of Pillinger's Cabinet resigned, declaring Pillinger incompetent to lead. A furious Pillinger denounced his ministers as '"a gaggle of god-be-damned hornswogglers, to a man." The crisis seemed to abate following the intervention of the Earl of Onslow, who coaxed the plotters back into Cabinet, but power from that point was effectively held by Silburn, who had emerged as the de facto leader of the "new blood" faction. With no real power in his hands, Pillinger finally resigned in December, and Silburn was boosted to replace him.

The Silburn years: Expansion and political realignment
In Silburn, Albion found someone known to history as the most controversial Conservative Prime Minister the country ever had - even if he spent most of his ministry not actually being a Conservative.

Installed by party apparatchiks and muckity-mucks at the expense of Pillinger, Silburn immediately found himself faced with a revolt by the Conservative Old Guard. While they were the smaller faction, the Old Guard MPs were numerous enough that if they were to withdraw their support from Silburn, he would lose his majority. Silburn reshuffled his cabinet, but it wasn't enough to forestall talk of the Old Guard and their allies refusing to work with him. The business of government ground to a halt as Silburn tried to rein in his caucus amidst allegations of an intra-party coup.

An irritated Silburn went to the Earl of Onslow in April of 1897 and asked him to prorogue Parliament. The unusual request in a majority parliament was met with raised eyebrows by Onslow, but the Governor General eventually acceded to Silburn's request, agreeing to prorogation for a short period to give Silburn time to try and sort out the mess. However, when Parliament resumed the next month, Silburn found that the Old Guard Conservatives had rallied behind Eustace MacGregor, a surviving Townshend MP who viewed Silburn as a traitor. Onslow turned to the Liberals to explore if they could form a government, only to find them divided on the issue of siding with Silburn or not. MacGregor and 17 of his fellow partisans broke off from Silburn and declared themselves the Conservative Unionist Party, focused on traditional Conservatism, nationalism and promotion of Anglican and Protestant ideals.

With Silburn's governing majority lost, he went to Onslow and asked him to dissolve Parliament. Onslow acceded and called for new elections in 1897. Voters went to the polls at the most acrimonious time in Albion's history. The Conservative Party fissure deepened, with the Unionists threatening to deliver another Liberal government by splitting the vote with Silburn in key ridings. But the Liberals had their own internal party fissure to deal with, with a number of MPs opposed to the Official Languages Act beginning to gain power within the party in the hopes of pushing out still-leader Rankin. Rankin's residual unpopularity saw him lose his seat. Voters supportive of the Official Languages Act drifted to Silburn, who was seen as a fiscally responsible and socially tolerant moderate. On election day, the Unionists placed a distant third, mainly carrying a few mountain ridings, while Silburn came in with a minority.

The results seemed to leave Silburn with no hope of forming a government. While he allied with three independents to bring his coalition to 97, he was still four points short of a majority - and the Unionists refused to prop up Silburn's government. A constitutional crisis was looming, with the prospect of new elections mooted. But the deadlock was broken when secret negotiations saw eight MPs cross the floor from the Liberal Party to join the Conservatives, most of them former Rankin allies who saw their position in the party deteriorating as more socially conservative elements made their play to replace Rankin as leader. Rankin himself supported the move from the sidelines, calling Silburn "the best chance for a sensible domestic policy."

As the eastern territories continued to grow during this period, the government set to work managing the growth, entering into preliminary discussions of how to organize the prairie lands. The unity government also set to work establishing more friendly relations with the United States. Silburn signed his name to a carefully-worded reciprocal trade deal with the United States, and railroad links began to be established to the US as Boston began to push into the west. Treaties between the two nations were undertaken with Silburn projecting confidence and approaching the Americans as an equal, effectively taking any remaining talk of annexation off the table.

The most divisive issue of Silburn's term was not languages; the furor over that gradually faded. Rather, it was Albion's involvement in the Second Pionero War, from October 1899 to May 1902. The public largely supported sending men to support the British, but former American migrants in the east and the Snake River area opposed the war as a British colonial venture. Ultimately Silburn went with the British move and dispatched 7,000 men to fight in the Argentine, provoking riots in Georgina and Stannassippi.

Early British setbacks in the war saw Albion's troops eventually called into action on the front lines, delivering the first victory for Commonwealth soldiers at the Battle of Salta. News of the victory hit the papers just days after Silburn delivered a budget that saw four of his independent allies vote with the Opposition on a confidence motion, throwing the country into an election. Against the backdrop of the war, Silburn took the opportunity to pivot: He rebranded his party as the Liberal-Conservatives, highlighting his partnership with the Independent Liberals and pushing his credentials as a moderate who stood for Britishness and British values, using the war to neutralize criticism that he was too soft on Catholics and Indians. The ploy took the bullets out of the proverbial gun of the Liberals and effectively diminished the Conservative Unionists as a force, wiping their party out completely and depriving MacGregor of his seat. Silburn soaked up a large slice of the Liberal vote, and several disaffected Liberals switched to run on Silburn's ticket against Liberal Leader Edward Broadhead, whom they criticized as too radical.

For the next eight years, Silburn managed to hold his alliance together through sheer force of will. Victory in the Pionero War in 1902 coincided with more movement east by settlers, with Silburn opening the gates to immigrants from eastern Europe in addition to western European Protestants and British Anglicans. It was under Silburn that the first wave of Ukrainian immigration to Albion began to crest, leaving Greek Catholic Ukrainians scattered in the aspen parklands on the borders of Palliser's Triangle.

The economic prosperity Silburn delivered in his first majority was sufficient to divide opinions in the Liberal Party's base. Silburn was a moderate politician who married the centre of the Conservative Party with the centre of the Liberals, drawing support from business owners, working men and pioneers. That translated to a robust victory in the 1904 election, a rematch with Broadhead, who had absorbed a large number of Conservative Unionist supporters. But Broadhead was seen as extreme, and many of his voters swung to Silburn, while Unionist voters ticked into the Liberal camp largely to oppose him. On paper, the 1904 election was a lopsided Liberal-Conservative victory, but its consequences were farther-reaching: It marked the move of social conservatives and anti-Catholics decisively to the Liberals, while moderate voters and working men sided with Silburn.

By this time, large numbers of settlers had flocked not only to the prairies, but to the Kootenay Range, where silver mining had become an increasingly important part of the economy. Moves towards provincial status had been ongoing for a few years, but three new provinces were carved out of the Northwest Territory in 1905: Athabasca, Kisatchewan and Kootenay. The remaining stretch of country east of the Prairie Lakes was reclassified as the District of Keewatin, basically extant as a framework around the port of Churchill, which maintained its status as a federally-managed city largely due to how inadequate the land in the area was for farming.

With the Pionero War out of the way, however, issues of language and representation came to the fore again. Seeing an opportunity to widen his base, Silburn put forward a new piece of legislation: The Indian Suffrage Act. But the Act backfired on him by revealing the schisms which underlaid his coalition. A number of old Conservatives within the party recoiled from the legislation, and when the time came for it to go to a vote, 19 former Tories defected from Silburn, pushing the law through by a narrow margin. The legislation itself was highly progressive for its time, granting First Nations the right to vote in provincial and federal elections without sacrificing their recognition as status Indians. While the decision would see many of these new voters begin to consider Silburn, it also proved to be a step too far for many white voters, and increasing frustration with Silburn began to build.

Silburn's last budget was shockingly progressive for its time, affirming universal public education, founding new agricultural and technical colleges and requiring provinces to set up a Workmen's Compensation Board. However, the budget did not include prohibition, despite increasing moves towards it in the public consciousness. A few provinces had begun to pass prohibition laws, and Silburn was under pressure to pass prohibition nationally, but he declined, once again annoying social conservatives within his own base.

Going into the 1908 election, the Liberal-Conservative base was fracturing, and it only worsened as word broke that Silburn had accepted donations from Albion's largest rum company, which opponents alleged were a quid-pro-quo for keeping prohibition off the agenda. Silburn denied the allegations, but they caused voters to hemorrhage from his party and flee to various third parties, with the largest of these being the Prohibition Party, an economically liberal and socially conservative group of dissident Silburn supporters. Working-class progressives opposed to progressivism also found Silburn lacking, largely due to simple exhaustion after years of him.

The fracturing of the centre-left vote saw much of the vote move into the camp of the Liberals, who won with less than 40% of the popular vote but still carried a huge majority. The party's standard-bearer represented their move into the former bailiwick of the Conservatives and the far-right nationalists: Charles S. Quinn had been a Conservative minister under Silburn but had left the party following his alliance with the breakaway Liberals, only to join the Liberals as the party moved to the right.

Quinn represented the public backlash to years of Silburn and his nonsense. Backed by Alban Orangemen along with everyone in Albion who hated Silburn, he went on to ban immigration by the Koreans, limit it harshly for the Chinese, and allow it only for the wealthy for the Japanese. While he attempted to roll back the franchise for Aboriginals, he was shut down by the Supreme Court, and their rights were quickly restored. He did, however, bring in the Prohibition Act, encouraging the provinces to pass prohibition and banning the sale of alcohol in the territories.

Quinn moved in 1910 to impose taxation on Catholic churches in Albion, considering them to be "Papist dreck" and potentially traitorous to the country. The move was prompted by the arrival of the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants in the Prairies and in the Pacific Northwest. These new arrivals, many of them poor and unable to speak much English, were denigrated as "half-civilized Galicians" in some circles and considered untrustworthy, and their Catholic faith seemed alien even to main-line Catholics. Their arrival provoked suspicion of other Catholics, prompting Quinn to make a move he hoped would stem the power of the Papacy in Albion.

The move backfired immediately: Catholics across Albion protested in the streets, and world leaders denounced Albion in diplomatic circles. The height of the backlash came in late 1910, when Pope Pius X thunderously denounced Albion from the pulpit and threatened to excommunicate any Catholics in Quinn's government who participated in anti-Catholic discrimination. Faced with complaints from Catholic voters and members of his administration, Quinn backed down in 1911 and restored the tax-exempt status of churches.

In retrospect, however, Quinn has come to be remembered well by First Nations for one thing: His liquidation of the Alban residential school system]] in 1910. Most of these religious boarding schools/torture institutions designed to break First Nations of their religion and culture were run by the Catholic Church, many of them concentrated in the Prairies and the Hudson rim, where more Catholics lived; Quinn shut them down when he moved to tax the churches, and even after backing down on that, he refused to let the residential schools reopen, saying, "The last thing the Aboriginals need is the Pope appropriating their children. Let them find God in their own way." Quinn's bigotry and prejudice thus had the silver lining of preventing Catholic missionaries from continuing to kidnap and abuse Aboriginal kids; in a way, he's directly responsible for the preservation of many native languages and religious traditions in Albion. To this day, the Swamp Cree vote Liberal almost in a bloc.

The rise of the Labour movement
The Silburn and Quinn years gave rise to another quiet story: The rise of socialism and labour politics in Albion.

The Puget Sound area, home to most of Albion's dense urban areas, was the birthplace of the country's labour movement. Provincially, the Socialist Party of Fraser became the first true socialist party in Albion, electing two members to the province's parliament in 1899. The Socialist Party of Columbia similarly elected members to its provincial parliament, but its biggest strength was in the city of Windsor itself, where a majority of city councillors elected in 1903 were socialists and labour activists, as was the mayor, Edward B. Green. A dentist by trade, Green - known as "Doc" informally - was a champion of working men in Albion, and he positioned himself as the city's best bulwark against the Quinn years, establishing sanctuary policies which attempted to shield Chinese and Catholic workers from Quinn's policies.

The fractured state of politics outside of the Liberal umbrella made it possible for a new party to move in and capture the hearts of workers of all classes. That promise fell to the Liberals, who chose Mayor Green as their champion in 1910. In the 1912 election, Labour posted a surprisingly strong performance that siphoned off a slice of the Liberals' working-class vote, delivering a third-place performance that forced the Lib-Cons to form a devil's bargain with Quinn to act as the balance of power. Much of this support came from Catholic workers in the east, particularly in urban centres like Stannassippi and Minishic, where Labour performed very well - indeed, Kisatchewan in general, and particularly Ukrainian communities, would prove to be fertile ground for the Labour Party in the decades ahead.

Labour's federal breakthrough was startling to the public consciousness, and much of it was owed to worker anger at years of bickering over language rights, Catholicism and railroads and not enough years of bickering over workers' wages, public services and families' quality of life. Green rode a wave of populism to his seat in the house, making a splash in Parliament despite being a rookie legislator. The alliance between the Grits and the Tories suited him perfectly, enabling him to not only reclaim the colour red for Labour, but to flog both parties for wasting too much time dividing Albans and not enough time supporting workers.

Green was on the forefront of a strike by silver miners in Coeur d'Alene in 1912, appearing on the picket line to excoriate the mine owners for not doing enough to protect the workers and demanding that the company meet the miners' demands. He made the rounds of Albion, helping to organize workers in the Golden Fishhook, in Multnomah and Granville, and in other cities, where organization had already been spearheaded by provincial partners. Quinn chose to dismiss the effective Opposition Leader as a "quaint dingbat" with "foolhardy ideas," but workers liked what Doc Green was saying, particularly his promise to build more of Albion's needs domestically and reduce imports from the United States and Britain in favour of employing more Albans.

The success of Doc Green's year-long campaign proved palpable, particularly as an economic downturn sank the economy into recession: Anger at Quinn only continued to rise, and the role of the Liberal-Conservatives in supporting him made them appear deeply ineffectual. Quinn's government fell in 1913 over a controversy involving the purchase of certain ships from the British, which the Lib-Cons and Labour Party felt should have been built at Alban ports - ironically, ports established by Davida years prior. In the ensuing election, a wave of populism built up, and the beneficiary was Green.

Green came to power promising to represent common men in Albion, successfully making the case that the Liberals and their Liberal-Conservative allies were effectively the same party and unable to truly represent "Joe Everyday." On election day, this campaign gutted the Liberal-Conservatives, with most of their support fleeing to the Liberals and the rest to Labour, while more and more working-class voters jumped to Labour as well. The results shocked much of the country and startled the British Empire on the whole, but workers seemed all too satisfied to have a Prime Minister who could credibly say he was one of their own.

Coming to power at the time of prohibition, Green himself did not drink, but supported the public's right to do so. He planned to use his majority to repeal the federal Prohibition Act and replace it with a provincial and municipal option. However, the popularity of prohibition in the general public forestalled him from immediately pursuing repeal, and he instead set to work building up Albion's road and port infrastructure, seeking to put men to work building ships in the hopes of making the country a Pacific naval power to be reckoned with.

Green would not get the chance to be the great economy-building premier he wanted to be. In 1914, the British Empire entered the First World War. As a Commonwealth Dominion, Albion followed, much to the consternation of peaceniks within Green's inner circle.