Part 28 - How Canada Handles Hurricanes, Russian Rebirth and African Renaissance, Challenges of Technology and a Greater Commonwealth
As Canada began to evolve in the 21st Century from powerful middleweight power to genuine Superpower in many ways, with it came the challenges of the world becomeing closer together, driven by ever-better trade and transportation and massive growth in communications technologies, many of the above driven by the wide-spread Commonwealth itself and the desire of the nations involved to work around the distances between them. The development of the Skylon, VC-60 and Crossbow may have gotten the headlines and made the imaginations of whole generations of young boys swoon, but many technologies that were far more prosaic had come to help grow the Commonwealth, helped along by the nations themselves seeing rapid population growth driven by both natural increase (even as the Baby Boomers reached the ages where their numbers began to decrease) and immigration and a massive growth in the 21st Century in the STEM fields among the young professionals in the nations.
This manifested itself in a lot of technical development in other fields beyond aerospace and spacecraft. Australia finally bit the bullet and built their first nuclear power plants in the 2010s - to the surprise of exactly no one, they were CANDU-1250 units with British-design turbine and generator systems, but the facility design and construction was entirely done by Australians - and rapidly made up for falling demand for coal for power by developing a massive synthetic fuel industry, supported by Petro-Canada and British Petroleum (both of which had major expertise in this field) and developing the industry just as Canada and Britain had for higher-grade diesel fuel and high-octane gasoline, both of which were good for vehicle efficiency. South Africa rather audaciously developed a trio of supply ships powered by home-developed pebble bed nuclear reactors that would soon see many miles supporting Commonwealth battle groups, and their successes led to the use of the helium-cooled PBMRs being used on numerous commercial vessels in the 2010s and 2020s, and the South African-designed reactors were joined by Israel Nuclear Technologies and their thermal molten salt reactor design, which went into use at Israel's Dimona Nuclear Research Laboratories in 2016.
The Skylon made it much cheaper to deploy communications satellites and numerous companies took advantage, and the growth of telecommunications companies across different nations of the Commonwealth told the tale, causing a dramatic improvement in data speeds during the 2010s in all of the nations and allowing some of the biggest companies involved - Vodafone, BT Group, Telus, Rogers, Telstra, HK Asia Telecom - to become global juggernauts, while also improving matters for customers by creating a much more competitive market and driving down mobile and internet prices to some of the lowest in the world. Research in Motion's famed BlackBerry series of smartphones remained a powerful force in the market even as competitors from the likes of American tech giants Apple, Motorola and Google and Asian heavyweights Samsung, LG, Sony and Asus and European heavyweight Nokia. The merger between French tech company Alcatel with Canadian networking giant Nortel Networks led to a major shift as Alcatel was branded as Nortel's consumer division, and Indian tech makers Karbonn and Micromax quickly spread their products across the world in the 2010s, and Hong Kong's Infinix Technologies scored a major coup by buying the Palm brand from Hewlett-Packard in 2011 and relaunching it two years later. Even as the huge phone series of the 2010s spread across the world - count the Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, BlackBerry Avatar, LG G Series, Google Nexus, Motorola One and Sony Ericcson X Series among these - several smaller makers landed successes in their own right, with Infinix's new series of Palm Pilot devices in the 2010s being a sizable hit and the Indian Karbonn, Micromax and Technoss proving highly popular in their homeland and common among the Indian disapora around the world.
The spread around the Commonwealth - and then around the world - of the use of graphene desalinization took what water concerns lay behind from the massive growth in climate-change rainfall and flushed into the history books, with fresh water-short cities across the Commonwealth - Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Perth, Mumbai, Mombasa, Cape Town, Aden, Singapore, Auckland - being quick to build desalinization plants in the 2010s to handle their municipal water problems, while the largest such plant in the world was completed in Los Angeles in the United States in 2017. These new sources of fresh water were soon quick to move beyond the supplying of water to cities to supplying of water to agriculture, particularly in Israel and South Africa, both of which saw huge growth in their production of more-specialist crops that were suited to their weather - coffee, tea, cocoa, citrus fruits, almonds, peaches - during the decades after their new water supplies began to become apparent, and this led to calls in more densely-populated countries (especially India) and cities located on the best of agricultural land to avoid urban sprawl in order to preserve productive agricultural lands. Helping this in many ways was the ever-improving power of computers, and aside from the growth of communications satellites one also saw a huge number of new weather satellites, taking advantage of ever-greater computer power and better radar systems to improve weather forecasting to a remarkable degree, and though it would be the 2030s before the true effects were completely felt it was becoming obvious by the 2020s that the growth of such technologies would have a marked impact on agriculture all across the world.
All of these changes pushed the Commonwealth together, even as the communications and transportation revolutions made that rather easier. By the time of the accession of South Africa, Botswana and Namibia to the Central Commonwealth in 2020, the level of integration of the European Union had not gone at all unnoticed by the Commonwealth's greatest boosters, with calls for everything from larger numbers of common standards for the Commonwealth countries all the way up to a single Parliament with jurisdiction over the entire Commonwealth being called for. While the idea of complete political integration was never likely to go far and a single Commonwealth Parliament was deemed as unworkable for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being the fact that India's population outstripped the rest of the Commonwealth combined), additional standards, economic alignments and growth in markets between the nations was more or less unavoidable, and by 2020 while the Commonwealth very much had foreign competitors in its markets, many of its largest retailers and industrials held dominant positions across the many of the Commonwealth's nations and those seeking expansion often looked to the rest of the Commonwealth to grow their businesses first. South Africa's pushing for "Commonwealth Stocks" in the 2020s had a major effect as its largest financial and industrial companies - Anglo American, FirstRand, MTN, Sasol, Richemont, Woolworths, Forrestar, Goldfields, Austal - began listing their stocks on exchanges around the world, with the mining companies usually listing in Toronto and Sydney and the financials in London and Hong Kong. It wasn't long before the action was reciprocated, with Canadian companies with major positions in South Africa - Scotiabank, Westland-Reynard, Barrick Gold, Research in Motion, Commodore, Desjardins Commonwealth - establishing listings in Johannesburg, and this led over the rest of the 2020s for listings across the Commonwealth. By 2030 the Commonwealth markets were becoming increasingly integrated, and one of the results was that while the "Big Seven" Commonwealth markets - London, Toronto, Mumbai, Johannesburg, Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong - were the biggest players, many smaller-but-still-substantial stock markets - Montreal, Calgary, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Birmingham, Kolkata, Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi - were soon able to get into the game as well.
People traveling began to be a bigger deal as the immense wealth of the Central Commonwealth countries and growing wealth elsewhere saw ever-bigger growth in travel as the idea of a rich life being one filled with experiences rather than things began to become almost a religion across the Commonwealth countries. While hard work would always be appreciated, tourism would become an ever-bigger industry across the world and people began to be able to put more time and effort into their hobbies and pursuits, trading buying more things for one's home for spending on the money chasing a pursuit, even if that pursuit was far away - with Australians coming to the West Coast of Canada to experience hiking in the Rocky Mountains and Canadians going the other way to experience the Great Barrier Reef and surfing at Surfers Paradise or Bondi Beach, for example. This shift brought more money than ever before to Canada's greatest tourist spots, particularly in the Caribbean and West Coast, and it also led to more than a few travelers going to spots that hadn't been huge tourist spots and undertaking adventures of their own. Aside from the travel aspect, it led to more participants of amateur and semi-pro sports than ever before, a giant growth in the field of personal fitness in the 21st Century (particularly in the UK and Canada) and the expansion of interest in sports of kinds not normally seen in nations before. Long-distance air travel became a ever-bigger business, with this helping out with demands for larger and longer-ranged airliners along with the supersonics - while the gorgeous VC-60s and 2717s got all the attention at air shows and on TV, tons of 747s, 777s and 787s, A330/A340s, A350s and A380s, WA Series, VC-24/VC-25s and VC-28s and IL-96s saw plenty of service flying passengers around the world in the 2010s, and the luxury train market grew massive during this time, particularly across large, beautiful landscapes such as Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United States. McDonnell Douglas in 2002 finally reached the end of the road for aircraft production in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and was absorbed into Mitsubishi Aerospace in 2004, a move done primarily to allow the new Mitsubishi McDonnell Douglas company to develop newer airliners on both sides of the Atlantic and support the many remaining McDonnell Douglas products. MMD would return to the industry with the SpaceJet program a handful of years later, however.
The growth of India into a world power brought with it a new reality as well. As India's gigantic economic power began to manifest itself in actions all around the world New Delhi, in stark contrast to Beijing next door and their naked belligerence, sought long and hard to make clear that they rather liked the state of the world in modern times, particularly with its Commonwealth allies, and they made sure their power of all kinds was never expressed in aggressive ways, aside from Pakistan which remained very hostile towards India, a hostility that was only getting only uglier with time. India's relationship was perhaps strongest with Australia, which was by far India's biggest supplier of raw materials and foodstuffs and it's second-largest investor after the United Kingdom itself. Having one of the Commonwealth's most-powerful Navies by the 2020s - particularly after the three Vishal-class carriers entered the fleet and India's fleet of Kirov-class battlecruisers (which they named the "Battlecruiser Fleet") were finished their constructions and refurbishments in the 2010s, along with the arrival of the Arihant-class nuclear submarines in the 2020s - India's Navy began to be regular visitors all around the world and heavy hitters even among the Commonwealth, with India's four Kirovs being among the most common global visitors and regular members of Commonwealth battle groups around the world. India's massive armed forces began during the 2000s and 2010s to see themselves as part of the Commonwealth's operating abilities, and they began to reduce the huge size of their land forces to provide better equipment and training to a smaller force while also developing a powerful air force, which was indeed a force to reckon on with in terms of quality as well as quantity. The South Africans made their presence known as well, particularly across Africa, and the combination of the Indians, Australians and South Africans basically turned the Indian Ocean into the ocean completely dominated by Commonwealth naval units and operations, and it made headlines that when Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard commented while visiting India in 2014 that the Indian Ocean was "basically India's lake", her Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, retorted "it's Australia's lake too, it was only named after us because the Europeans hadn't learned of Australia yet." Such viewpoints were common in Indian society, both at its highest levels and at much more prosaic ones.
The internet ended up being a world-changer for just about every aspect of commercial business, and it showed in both the growth of major e-business retailers such as eBay and Amazon, but in many ways in many western countries they were usurped by many traditional retailers developing sizable footprints of their own in online business, with the Canadian department stores being classic examples - in a great many cases their products available swelled in both types and quantity and the big stores began reducing the available inventory at stores in many cases to suit the new realities, which making there be many new products and services that once upon a time the retailers wouldn't have space for, and websites like Etsy, Localmotion and Mainstreeter focused on being an outlet for the sale of goods from small businesses to customers, something that proved hugely successful in the 2010s and 2020s and forcing an Amazon division, Amazon Handmade, to try to compete with these. The internet boom, while absolutely devastating to some retailers (Sears was one of the largest casualties and foundered in the 2010s), didn't end up being nearly as devastating as once feared to many businesses, particularly those that adapted quickly, as it allowed many established brick-and-mortar businesses to move into new markets, products and services without having to physically expand their businesses.
If anything, the changing times of the modern boom ended up being a net benefit to most. Social Media became a powerful tool for creating engagement between the media and its readers, viewers and listeners, particularly after the Commonwealth began forcing legal changes to the business model of many social media giants in many markets in the 2010s, with Facebook's bitter opposition to any taxes on its website's connections to media organization being answered with a resounding "if the creators of your content go down, you will too, and we'll see you go down before they do" from most markets. In the end while some media organizations were unable to move on, most could, and many survived by offering people new options, both in terms of news and information media and the entertainment industry, as indeed websites and providers like Apple iTunes, Spotify, Last.FM and Pandora had the effect of allowing artists to develop their own music production companies and record labels, something that was not beneficial at first to many of the larger established labels, before many of them quickly pivoted to being focused less on the marketing of music and more on the development of it, a reality that ended up being hugely beneficial for the artists themselves in many cases. As the growth of the desire for experiences swelled so did the number of concerts and venues catered towards them, and the 2010s created a long list of artists who had first made their music available on social media websites who had become enormously popular as more and more people discovered them and their work. As on-demand streaming services became common across the world their available libraries swelled with it, and Netflix and many of its rivals - including Canadian heavyweight Shomi and Amazon's streaming service division Amazon Prime - began to create their own new content for viewers in order to battle back against the many rivals growing into this field. The huge growth in bandwidth demand that resulted from this finally made use of the massive infrastructure developed first during the 1990s and 2000s dot-com booms and created completely new industries out of many of its creators, while making the entertainment industries bigger than they had ever been before - and that was before the huge experiences growth.
While much was positive about the world, one of the most major of problems Canada's five Caribbean provinces dealt with regularly - hurricanes - was becoming an ever-larger problem as a result of climate change. This had first been seen with the damage done to Grenada and Jamaica from Hurricane Ivan in 2004, but in both cases repairs were swift and effective, though it didn't escape anyone's notice that the hurricanes hitting Canada's Caribbean provinces were getting stronger, as Ivan had been a Category 3 when it hit Grenada and a near Category 5 from the glance off of Jamaica, but the damage there regardless was well-handled - but by the late 2010s the regular hits by hurricanes had become much more severe, and Irma's absolutely devastating hit to the northern part of the Caribbean Islands then Dorian's similarly-awful hit on the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos two years later showed the realities of the stronger hurricanes that climate change was causing.
As was usual with Canadian handling of such situations, solutions were worked on and developed. After the devstation of Irma and Dorian, much of the rebuilding of the islands saw major changes made to building codes, with many properties that had been wooden-frame structures being replaced with steel frames, heavier walls and more resilient infrastructure, particularly with regards to hospitals, shelters and emergency departments, became the norm. After the Royal Canadian Navy's base at West Caicos took an absolute beating from Irma, the repairs were underway when it was struck dead on by Dorian and almost completely destroyed, though as before it was rebuilt and the new facilities were stronger than the older ones. Emergency power generators were stationed on the islands in safe places, supplies were stockpiled and equipment prepared for emergencies. The Canadian Coast Guard, which had focused its efforts primarily on smuggling and Arctic security concerns, ended up also switching up its equipment for the islands, with the development of "Hurricane Hunters" aircraft and the development of "aid carrier" vessels based on the Canadian Shield-class container ships that paired with the carriers of landing ships to allow supplies to be landed on beaches if the situation on a hard-hit island required it, as well as working with the Royal Canadian Air Force to improve their ability to land supplies in areas that had infrastructure difficulties due to disasters.
The Arctic growth was both as a result of the major growth in population, economic activity and infrastructure in the North and as a result of the growth of the Russians once again. While the Russians weren't explicitly hostile - in many ways, the horrible civil war of the 1990s had made them far more receptive of the concerns of the Western nations - they were a proud people, and the devastation of so much of European Russia in the 1990s had led to a shift in population eastward somewhat, even as Russia went through the not-inconsiderable task of reconstruction.
While the task's needs were huge, the Russians had never been dumb, and the two decades after had been spent rebuilding what had been lost. Decades of communist rule and its many problems that had existed during those times - from endemic corruption and mismanagement to serious issues with unsafe facilities and living conditions to massive drug and alcohol abuse to massive levels of bigotry against many others - had made Russia completely unwilling to tolerate totalitarianism in any form. Post-Soviet Russia rapidly evolved into one of the freedom-minded nations in the world, with a massive free press that wouldn't hesitate to burn crooks and troublemakers, a free press that battled bitterly with the criminal elements that spread throughout Russia in its post-Soviet era and caused more than a few rounds of ugliness that nevertheless went the way of the press by the 2000s, resulting in many of what had been called the "pushers" in Russia during the Soviet era who went into the criminal worlds to end up in prison - and indeed more than one who pushed outside of the former Soviet Union became targets for co-operation between Russian authorities and others in the West, with Scotland Yard bringing down Vladimir Kumarin and the RCMP being responsible for hauling in Semyon Mogilevich. The famed "Russian Mafia" of the 1990s soon found out that there was a reason the once-powerful organized crime organizations in the West had been massively weakened over time, and they fell heavily to many of the same forces that had dismantled so much of the Italian Mafia in North America in the 1980s.
Russia spent the 1990s and 2000s rebuilding, with the leaderships of Alexander Rutskoy (1993-2001), Vladimir Putin (2001-2009) and Dmitry Medvedev (2009-2017) all being remarkably well-run affairs, with all three men being capable of running the nation despite in many ways being very different people in terms of background and leadership. Putin, a veteran of the civil war, was initially somewhat disliked by Russian allies primarily out of fear of Russia's past, though it would later be known that Putin had lost family members during the conflict and despite being a former intelligence officer was completely unwilling to allow his own and his family's sacrifices to be in vain, particularly as Russia was by then very much powering out of its slump. Medvedev and Putin had been friends for many years and so one succeeding the other led to charges of nepotism, particularly as Medvedev appointed Putin as his Prime Minister, but during the terms of Putin and Medvedev the quality of Russia's civil service improved just as dramatically as its economy did, and Russia's armed forces, drawn down so dramatically after the civil war and 1990s economic difficulties, grew back again in a professional manner, in many ways modeling themselves off of many European and even American characteristics, and while Russia spent a lot on its armed forces, their equipment quality improved dramatically and by the 2010s was growing in number as well. When Medvedev's constitutionally-mandated second term was over in 2017 expectations that Putin or Rutskoy would seek to claim the office again never materialized - neither man tried - and Medvedev was succeeded by businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, who also proved to be an effective leader of Russia.
Russia's social and economic improvement was, perhaps somewhat ironically, based heavily on the resource-wealth driven models practiced by Canada, Australia and South Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, taking advantage of Russia's vast mineral and energy reserves and using them as the driver to create a first-class industrial sector and the wealth being used to hugely improve the state of schooling and professional education. While in the 1990s such moves may have seemed also farciful, by the 2010s they most certainly were not as Russia took the continued advancement of its education levels and focused it probably more than any other country on Earth on the development in the STEM and technology fields, creating literally millions of highly-educated individuals who both dramatically improved their own country's economic performance but also the STEM fields of numerous other firms in countries around the world. With the focus on the STEM fields, Russian interests focused on many fields, developing everything from high-tech computers (and programs for them) to automobiles to aerospace technology, with the Ilyushin IL-96-400 being the company's first example of a truly modern airliner when introduced in 2002, but the alliance between the Ukrainian Antonov firm and Ilyushin saw the IL-96's production cut fairly short in favour of the Antonov An-218, which first flew in 2015. (While the Russian airliners at first were hugely behind Western ones in terms of amenities, this didn't last long, and they had little difficulty improving their aircraft over time.) AvtoVAZ sorted out their massive financial problems in the 2000s and began exporting cars again to the west in the 2010s, but in contrast to the cheap garbage they had been selling in previous times what came instead, starting with the new brand name Ativia (the company felt the Lada name was synonomous with garbage in the West, something that was probably true) and going with a new sporty small car, a rear-wheel-drive sport sedan and a very good sport utility vehicle, and the Marussia and A-Level companies aimed for the higher end of the car markets with the B2/B4 sports cars and the F2/F5-series sport utility vehicles, while the A-Level Futura (despite a price tag of over $250,000 when launched in 2006) became one of the decade's truly great supercars and the Kamaz truck company, already well known in Europe and the former Soviet Union, began expanding its sales across the world in the 2000s and 2010s, launching their products in North America with the Kamaz K5 Hustler smaller truck and the K11 Freightmaster Class 8 truck in 2014.
Beyond the headlines, however, was where the real work was. New steel mills and aluminum smelters replaced the lost facilities that those that were very old and needed replacement, something that grew to include the mines and production facilities. The petrochemical industries of Russia took their skills in the STEM fields and developed some of the world's best fuels and lubricants rapidly improved their abilities with regards to production, and while Russia's history with the environment during the Soviet era had been nothing short of abysmal and the multiple examples of incredible careless handling of radioactive materials - between Chernobyl, Mayak, Lake Karachay and Andreev Bay the Russians had a lot to answer for in this regard, with Lake Karachay being by far the most dangerous place on Earth for humans as its radiation levels are so high that a human would take a fatal dose of radiation in barely an hour - the Russians began to make major efforts to improve these matters, including explaining what Mayak had been created for and what the efforts there had ultimately done to the local environment. It all added up to major economic growth in the 2000s, a fact made easier still when China's Xi-era belligerence - which Russia did not approve of in the slightest - resulted in ever-greater efforts between Russia and the other Asian neighbors, first with Korea and then later with Japan, with the latter resulting in Russia building a road/railroad tunnel from the mainland to Sakhalin in the 2010s and Japanese and Russian shipping firms establishing regular runs between Sakhalin and Hokkaido in the years following the opening of the Sakhalin Link in 2017.
While South Africa's rebirth had been a long time coming and the smaller nations of Namibia and Botswana largely advanced through a combination of piggybacking on South African success and immense natural resources, the rest of Africa hadn't been that far behind. In the Commonwealth's East African nations - Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda - things were improving as well. The East African Commonwealth nations had been a source of pride at one point for the Empire but time and socialism had hampered that to a point, though the Canadian-Tanzanian construction of the TAZARA Railway in the 1970s - Ottawa having chosen to outbid the Chinese to build the line and CNR being downright eager to show off their construction abilities - made even the Pan-Africanist governments of the region see the Commonwealth as a possibly helpful influence, and Canada's Stanfield and Mulroney-era policies of providing supplies instead of money to Africa (done under the premise that this would reduce corruption) proved quite helpful to the project and its operators as well as to others, basically giving the region's leaders the tools needed to fix their own problems. With economic liberalization in these nations in the 1980s came the beginnings of major economic booms, with the economic progress usually following the infrastructure needed to make it happen, which moved across the region in the 1980s and 1990s. After Operation Messiah and Rwanda's joining the Commonwealth the improvements grew there as well, and Canada's investment authorities made sure the money was available for rebuilding. By the late 1990s the end of apartheid meant South African investors appeared across the continent and India's economic growth began to make money available for use outside of India, and East Africa's nations began a long, steady boom that grew the nations into much more than they had once been, when combined with Southern Africa's growth and the growth in places such as Cote D'Ivoire, Nigeria, Angola and much of North Africa gave rise to the idea that an "African Renaissance" was in the making, somethat that indeed seemed very true.
For Canada, the African Renaissance could only be seen as a good thing, as most of the nations involved were Commonwealth or Francophonie (both organizations Canada was a leading member of) the nations could - and did - seek out investments from Canada that just about always came with a benefit. CFB Rwanda and its giant air base helped with this as it allowed Canada (and allied air forces - RAF aircraft regularly landed and operated from there) to support and protect its Commonwealth partners, and to be fair the political stability of many of the nations in question improved markedly with their prosperity. While Canada thought rather lowly of Ugandan President Yoweri Mouseveni (and indeed Uganda's corruption held its economic growth back quite badly compared to its neighbors) they and the rest of the Commonwealth was happy to support economic growth so long as it came with social advancements. Kenya trialled an ambitious move in 2004 in this regard by announcing plans to clear out the infamous Kibera, Kianda and Mukuru slums, inviting the residents there to move out to a prepared spot and, with government assistance, build a complete neighborhood to replace the slum which included municipal water and sewage systems, electricity and refuse collection as well as far greater safety. The success of this allowed Kibera to be rebuilt as a new residential neighborhood in the years to follow.
The African nations wisely focused many of their growth resources on taking what they already had and improving it, a method that not only had great economic results but also excellent results in improving the lives of those less fortunate in their countries, causing a steep fall-off in poverty that was just as dramatic as the growth in economic results for the regions. The early focus on infrastructure, education and power and water supply was followed by pushes for growth in agricultural income and development of natural resources, while the growth of heavy industrial capacity was rather less marked than in South Africa owing to smaller mineral resources and the fact that the nations involved saw efficient growth in their service sectors. By 2020 the result of these programs was a need for a crash course in improving electricity supplies to catch up to demand and local industrial capacity to catch up with the need to maintain the newer infrastructure and consumer goods demands from the populations, the latter a more difficult problem in Tanzania and particularly Rwanda.
