One of the greatest, and most frightening powers of propaganda is its ability to delude the very people who are creating it, for a nation and its leader to fall victim to its own propaganda and to begin to believe too greatly in a perceived reputation without actually having any solid reality to back that up.
Particularly if that self-perception is a positive one, the people of the nation can hang to it beyond all reason, and the Canadian people's propensity to see themselves through rose-colored glasses nearly led to their nations' destruction.
It began at the end of the Biowar. Canada had conducted several major operations in support of her allies, most of them with great success, but her armed forces had paid a high price for them. Canadians, while at first united and supportive of striking back at those who had released a SARS virus in Canada’s largest city, eventually grew tired of the constant flow of coffins and injured young Canadians.
Thus, when the Islamic Alliance made its first approaches for peace, Canada was one of the first in the Allied Coalition to begin sending back feelers to see how real the overtures were. Making contacts and inroads in the earliest days of the growing cease-fire, Canada became a major player in the peace talks and was one of the signatories to the final agreements.
Flush with pride at what they felt was victory, now a major diplomatic player and returning to what they saw a traditional role in peacekeeping, the Canadian government began playing a larger and larger part in foreign affairs, gaining a reputation for being able to defuse just about any crisis. Successive governing parties took turns at helping in larger and ever more dangerous hot spots, holding up this record as proof of their governing skills. However this greater involvement in foreign affairs often came at the price of increasingly stagnant domestic policies.
Another pressure point was the war's aftermath. There were tens of millions of refugees after the end of open hostilities, mainly from lands where the effects of The Biowar had devastated the local economy or agriculture. Famine stalked many countries. It was not a matter of simply getting down to work, there were entire regions within many countries that simply did not have potable water or arable land. Canada, long seen as a huge land with endless space for those hardy enough to stake their claim in it, became a favorite destination for many people fleeing their own unlivable lands.
This huge influx of immigrants caused a sudden resurgence of the French Separatist movement in the province of Quebec. While always a thorn in the side of the rest of Canada, this time the Québécois movement came with a particularly nasty, supremacist air to it. It mixed a belief that their own culture would be drowned in the tide of foreign ethnicities with a belief in the superiority of their own culture, denigrating virtually all others, including other French cultural areas within Canada. In the twenty years following the war, this movement grew from a small handful of fanatics to gain major political influence in the province as French xenophobia grew with the influx of the refugees.
But it was Canada’s response to the world wide female population crisis that very nearly brought about the end of the country.
Canadians, long seen by much of the world as the "nice guys" of the Western world, praised for their ability to handle problems far beyond what it would seem their size could handle, had fallen very much in love with this reputation, especially as Canada’s influence as a peacekeeping nation began to spread once again, and Canada’s policies of open immigration and fair and equal treatment gained respect around the world. All of these were laudable achievements, but the rapidly growing imbalance between males and females was neither something a peacekeeping army nor a diplomatic negotiation could do anything about. While Canada did undertake some major birth control measures, as a nation she was very reluctant to take the measures that were becoming more and more obviously needed to the other nations of the world. Surprisingly this seemed to fall across all the major political factions, from Conservatives who argued religious and moral reasons, to Liberals and New Democrats who argued that the taking of female lives to preserve what they called an "arbitrary balance" was abhorrent and criminal.
Canada was once more looked to by an eclectic group of countries who shared the same ideas and who were resisting the increasing pressures by the more populous nations to do something drastic about the problem. Bolstered by this group, believing in their reputation to solve problems, Canada’s government took a third, and in the end disastrous, position.
At the Great Conference in New York, for the first time in more than thirty years, Canada found herself at odds with all her former allies and with many of the nations she had helped in the years since The Biowar. Sticking to it’s "kinder, gentler" self-image, Canada quickly found itself increasingly isolated and soon withdrew from the conference, not just without agreeing to the measures that the vast majority of countries agreed had to be implemented, but without any real policy to directly deal with the problem in her own lands.
"We can find a third way," was the Canadian mantra. "We created this problem with our genetic technologies, we will find a way out of it with them." This completely ignored the fact that attempts had been made for more than ten years to do this very thing without even a hint of progress, let alone any hope of a solution, by nations who had far more money and personnel to throw at the problem. They also believed that Canada’s huge ability to absorb an expanding population would give them time. Again, this ignored the fact that it was not simply a ballooning population, but that nearly 95% of all births were female.
Like every other nation, Canada was already near the tipping point. With a government that simply refused to deal with the immediate problems, those problems began to balloon out of control in a very short time. Horrific fights between women of every social station over access to the males broke out. Men increasingly found it hard to maintain even a semblance of normal lives as women by the score turned into stalkers, increasingly desperate to start families of their own. Doctors and nurses were murdered by manic mothers when told they were carrying yet another girl.
And the “Girl Rape Gang” problem in Canada became so bad that in some of the largest cities the police were no longer able to truly maintain order in the streets after sundown, leading to the assaults and deaths of dozens of males and terrible retaliatory attacks by mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the murdered men.
But it was in Quebec where the response was truly disastrous. The terrible pressures on Canadian society and the federal government's utter inability to address the problem combined with the French xenophobic reaction to the sheer numbers of immigrants settling in what they thought of as "their" province and finally pushed the average French Canadian into voting for separation and creating the Independent Republic of Quebec. The Federal government of the day, a coalition of the largest left- and right-wing parties, already reeling from their political isolation and struggling with spiraling domestic troubles, simply threw up their hands and did nothing.
The four Atlantic provinces of Canada however, were now isolated from the rest of the country. As in many countries that had areas economically depressed compared to the rest of the county, the Atlantic provinces had always supplied a disproportionate amount of Canada’s armed forces. The vast bulk of the Royal Canadian Navy was stationed on the East Coast, along with three full brigades (one of them armored) of the Canadian Army and the largest air base outside of the capitol. In addition, twenty years of smoldering resentment at being treated like vermin by Quebec politicians now boiled over into real and open anger. Three days after the Quebec referendum, the four Premiers of the Atlantic Provinces issued a call to use the Canadian Armed Forces to punch a corridor from northern New Brunswick through southern Quebec to the rest of the country.
To the shock of the politicians in Ottawa, Admiral Juliana De Chastelain, the Chief of the Defense staff, a Frenchwoman herself and a life-long career military officer, ordered a general mobilization of the Canadian Forces on the East Coast. She was quickly joined by the Chiefs of Staff for the RCAF and Army, both of whom began making plans from their own headquarters in Ottawa, against the direct orders of the Prime Minister. A majority of French men and women in the Canadian Forces followed this call, with those in Quebec itself doing as much as possible to escape with or cripple the assets under their command before the new Republic could seize them.
Within a month after the Quebec referendum, the Canadian government suddenly found itself in the middle of a civil war, and they did not truly have command of the armed forces of either side. They were left in nominal control of civilian polices and with representing Canada to the rest of the world, but their ability to truly carry out policy was very limited, particularly when CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) and the RCMP (who between them controlled the vast majority of law enforcement and intelligence assets in Canada) declared their public support for the Canadian Forces and took over martial laws duties in the remainder of the country, allowing the admiral to mobilize her full might against the Republic.
The Canadian Civil War (sometimes referred to as the Quebec Insurrection) lasted a little over three years, but as with all civil wars, it was incredibly ugly. The Republic of Quebec stood no chance. Surrounded, without a navy of its own and with a very limited air force and army, it was fighting a war on multiple fronts. But twenty years of steadily being told they were superior to all other Canadians, that all other cultures were lesser than their own and out to destroy the Québécois, had had an all too familiar effect. Along the St. Lawrence River, in their strongholds of Quebec City, Montreal and the Eastern Townships, the fanatics of a "Free Quebec" refused to put down their arms, believing that the "Bastard Anglos and their immigrant trash Quislings" couldn’t possibly defeat the a truly liberated Québécois.
Mercy was neither given nor asked for, and there were heroes and villains on both sides. The final few months, particularly the desperate street fighting in and around Quebec City were frightening bloody. While women were coming to more and more dominate every profession, the front line fighters of the Canadian Federal Forces as well as the most fanatic of the Québécois were still, at this point in history, mostly male.
The Republic of Quebec existed for less than three years, but in its death throes it had killed a full 11% percent of the male population of Canada.
When it was over, having emerged as the clear leader of the Federal side, Admiral De Chastelain was left with a country that had been virtually wrecked from the Ontario border to the East Coast. In addition, Canada had already been reeling from a government unable to deal with the female overpopulation problem. Admiral De Chastelain, now the military governor of Canada in all but name, had won the war. Now she was left with securing the peace.
The results of years of near-delusional governmental polices and the short but bloody civil war had been disastrous and frightening. It had been only twenty years since the New York conference, but Canada’s average female to male ratio had exploded to nearly ten to one, far higher than any other Western nation.
The writing on the wall was horrifying.
Canada's male population was, very simply, disappearing. Emigration of couples to countries where the balance was not so very bad--the United States, Europe, and Australia in particular--was at an all-time high and rising, as was the continuing flow of female immigration. Those males remaining in Canada were being moved--not in every case, but in ever-increasing numbers--into remote areas or into "couple-only" suburban enclaves, fenced and guarded to keep out single women. In many cases males were literally being held captive by their female partners. In the larger cities like Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver they were simply vanishing, and with them the potential for a next generation in those cities. On the horizon, as the current predominantly-female population aged and died, loomed a precipitous population crash. Canada, as a nation, could simply cease to exist.
However, Canada had long had a unique and lucky position in the world in terms of crafting policy and law. She lived between the traditions of three great nations. The nations of her heritage, England and France, and her mighty southern neighbor, the United States. For more than two centuries this had allowed her to observe what worked in all three nations, and to adopt those polices which she believed would work best for her, or to use their experience to craft unique legislation of her own. It had been the abandonment of this traditional strength, the policy of ignoring these nations' advice and examples that had gotten them into the mess, and it was turning back to it that helped dig them out.
Accordingly, De Chastelain requested aid and advice from all three nations, and reached out to the EU, to South America, to Australia, and even to those states of the former Islamic Alliance who had also fallen into chaos but had by now pulled themselves out.
This coincided with a massive groundswell of support from all sides in Canada by the women themselves. As had happened in the Islamic states, if the men who had once run the government couldn’t or wouldn’t do something to solve the problems, they would. But in Canada’s case it came at a time when finally there was a government that had the strength and the means to support them. As they had been in the war, De Chastelain and her advisors were decisive, forceful... and ruthless.
An all-new Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms was hammered out with help with legal experts from Britain and the US. For purely practical reasons, to save time and because Canadians were already very familiar with them from the American media, Admiral De Chastelain adopted a charter that was, with a few exceptions, virtually identical to that of the US. Now called the Charter of Rights & Duties, it outlined not only the rights and freedoms of all citizens, but also the duties expected of both men and women, young and old, and the stern and difficult obligations everyone now had to Canadian society. There were minor differences, the single most glaring exception being that for the next four years massive lotteries would be held each Feb 1st, and that over the following twelve months all names chosen, without exception or appeal, would be put to death as quickly and humanely as possible. De Chastelain declared that these lotteries were needed to create an immediate and drastic reduction in the female populace. Within in the next twelve months, one in twenty women in Canada would have to die. And this would have to continue for at least four years, until this had brought the female-male ratio down to somewhere around six to one. From there, similar and far less drastic polices for female population control, as were in use in Britain and the US, could be left in place.
There was powerful opposition from many in Canada who, no matter how obvious it might be to others, simply refused to let go of the Canada they knew. These were primarily bureaucrats from the old system and ardent supporters of the old political parties, and were also, for the most part, men. They staged protests, held rallies and filled the airwaves, opposing the military dictatorship they felt their land had become.
But Juliana De Chastelain did indeed have the backing of the full armed forces, and most of the police, not to mention a populace so exhausted from the last twenty years that they seemed willing (in the eyes of these older establishment people) to simply give in and do whatever they were told. While they could howl and scream all they liked, there wasn’t much they could do. De Chastelain could quite literally do anything she willed.
And she did what they simply did not expect.
She called a general election.
Running as a candidate herself, she called on everyone to vote, to decide if they were to embrace this new way forward, or cling to a now-lost past.
It was one of the larger voter turnouts in Canadian history, and it was easily the most decisive. The three traditionally most powerful political parties and their old business and bureaucratic allies were utterly destroyed in it, one of them not getting a single seat in parliament. For the first time in Canadian history there was a massive election of women, the vast majority of them from various independent parties.
In what became was to become a historic moment, in a 46-hour marathon negotiation, this pack of independents formed themselves into a single party that utterly dominated parliament--the Canadian Restoration Party--and chose Admiral De Chastelain as their new Prime Minister.
The new Charter of Rights and Duties was passed unanimously. It was not welcomed with mass cheering, but more with sighs of relief, and a determination to tackle the problem head on, eyes open and finally move forward.
Within a month of her election, every female prisoner of war, every female convict in every cell in Canada (from local weekend lockups to long-term federal prisons) had been put do death, most by firing squads made up almost exclusively of their fellow women. This actually was a significant number, as the social upheavals had led to huge numbers of female prisoners.
A massive call for volunteers went out, aided by the very public voluntary execution by hanging of the Minister of Justice. At what was supposed to be a news conference about the new Slavery Regulation Law, Melisa Effinger stripped naked and let one of her bodyguards tie her hands behind her back while another slipped a noose over her neck. Then, without a tear, seemingly without fear, smiling at the cameras, she stepped over the edge of the platform, snapping her neck and dying instantly as she hit the end of the rope. It was broadcast around the country for over a week.
There was an amazing, sudden rush of volunteers. There have been entire books written on the speculations as to why, since the self sacrifice of other public officials in other countries had not trigged such a rush of volunteers. Some of it was surely the sheer pressure of living in the Canada of that day: for many women it actually was the better choice. Commit suicide and leave behind the painful rebuilding of a shattered country as their own contribution to that very rebuilding.
Just as many believe it was the fact that these measures were working (if not perfectly, then at least effectively) in many other countries. And still others believe in the modern instinctive pattern idea, that pure instinct to ensure future generations was driving it, and, having a greater pressure on their society than any other Western nation, it was simply natural for Canadian women to react in this way, especially with the constant influence of the US media on Canadian television having shown them several years now that such an end was not to be feared, and that giving your life for the good of your people was an honorable thing to do. No matter what drove this sudden mass impulse to effectively commit suicide it has never been repeated in such numbers in any country, including Canada itself.
The lottery, the first such in Canada, filled in the ranks, until one in twenty was scheduled for mass public executions. Prime Minister De Chastelain and her entire cabinet had their names in the first random draw, though only the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans was picked, quietly going to her own death within the week.
These first executions were made public, not for titillation (though as with every other nation, this did happen, see the section below, Canada: from Victorians to Libertines) as in the US and Britain, but to show the rest of the populace their courage and what might well be required later of them. Again, entire books have been written on the calm nature of how these executions proceeded. The overwhelming majority of women simply showed up at their local police stations to turn themselves in when their names were picked. Although many of them were weeping with grief, they still went.
And there were a huge number of simple suicides of women who had been picked in the lottery. A husband and children coming home to find a wife in the tub with her wrists slit became a common occurrence, with a note saying how much she loved them, and encouraging her daughters to not wait for the lottery, to do the same. A ‘Dear John’ letter came to have an entirely new meaning in Canada.
But this mass rush to execution, the crushing need to catch up and reduce the imbalance, created another problem that had been foreseen but, because of insufficient time, had not been dealt with.
The majority of executions were carried out as humanely as possible. Mass hangings and firing squads were held in the smaller towns and villages. Mass gassings-- the US had managed to develop a two stage gas system that was virtually painless, a few breaths and the condemned was unconscious, then the lethal levels were pumped in--were common. Mass electrocutions using grids were used as well. Other alternatives, while not as efficient as the gassings, were in place where gassing facilities could not be built quickly enough but where there were just too many to shoot.
But inevitably, with some 4,500 executions per day in a country only just beginning to come to terms with what it had to do there were also hundreds of botched executions in the first few months. All too many women, a significant portion of them volunteers, died truly awful, drawn out and painful deaths, including a particularly horrific incident when more than 500 volunteers were burned alive by a malfunctioning electric grid, live on camera.
These horrors did not bring an end to the acknowledgment, mostly by the women themselves, that large numbers of women would still have to die. But nobody in power wanted to see these women (especially those who had volunteered or at the very least bravely faced their own deaths) suffer more than was needed. There was also the worry that if this continued, there might indeed be a huge drop in those calmly joining the ranks, and that the police and armed forces would need to be mobilized in strength to force women to the executions.
Very quickly a large group of professional executioners was organized, most of them hired from foreign lands, to help dispatch those to be executed. This first set of experienced foreign teachers brought their widely varied methods of killing with them and taught them to their Canadian colleagues, giving Canada an oddly diverse mix of official executions of all stripes. These officially trained and certified executioners wore (and continue to wear) a special medallion which came to be known as the Blood Leaf. It became the symbol of who they were, and the skills they had in dispatching the condemned. As word spread of these skilled executioners, the Blood Leaf became at one and the same time a symbol of fascination and trepidation for those who might some day be under their care. Anyone who worn one, man or women, was a well trained, highly skilled and in all likelihood, very experienced killer.
The first four years were of course the hardest. The heartache of families already torn by war was often multiplied by these measures. But the easing of the pressures on Canadian society were noticed with the first year, especially as summary executions of the female rape gangs allowed the police to once again gain control of the nighttime streets of the major cities. The rebuilding program, financed by massive resource sales to the other developed nations now clamoring for raw resources, also had its effects as the rates of unemployed fell and industry began to gear up and recover, and the new social order began to take hold.
As things began to improve, as a light at the end of the tunnel emerged, Canadian society was galvanized as it hadn’t been since the early days of The Biowar. The vast majority of the people moved as one to try to bring their country out of the darkness--certainly not into a golden age, but away from self-destruction.
It was not without pain, or fighting or arguments. It was not easy. But the literal rivers of blood that had been spilled in the war, and the thousands of sacrifices being made by Canada’s women to secure this painful peace were always kept in mind. Not only as constant government advertisement and propaganda, but also are a purely cultural phenomenon. The price of the current peace and the continuing recovery had been too high to simply let it fall apart again. That horrible price had at last united and awakened a fractured and self-deluded people.
Prime Minister De Chastelain stayed in power for nine years, through two more landslide elections. To the end she was as tireless, intelligent, willful, decisive and as ruthless as ever. She was not loved. She was not a loving mother figure, but a life-long military commander and it was in this model she governed. But she was greatly respected, all the more so when, during the years of the lottery, two of her own daughters were picked. She did nothing whatever to even try to prevent their executions, even being present when both her children were killed.
Her personal style of leadership, one of duty, responsibility, honor and dignity… (which she demanded of every member of her cabinet) had a powerful effect on her fellow females, and on the country in general. She stayed in place long enough to assure that Canada had stabilized, that her legal, political and law enforcement models had stood the initial painful tests and her people were now ready to move forward on their own.
She stepped down in the first month after the third electoral victory, declaring she had to do so before she became any more of a cult figure then she already was, while the good she had done was still in place. Then, as virtually anyone who knew her had known she would do, as her last act in office she calmly ordered her own execution. Live before the cameras she went back to her old post in Halifax. Standing on the docks of McNabe’s Island in the middle of the harbor in full dress uniform, straight and unbowed, her face showing no fear, she herself ordered the squad to fire. As per her last orders there was no great state funeral, just a military tribute and then burial at sea.
That was forty years ago, and it is now been nearly one hundred years since end of The Biowar and the long aftermath that destroyed the old Canada. Left in its place was this newer, darker, and yet at the same time much stronger and far more united Canada.
And even though the generation that suffered and died to create it has all but died out, the nation, and her people, have still not forgotten the awful price that was paid for it--because that price continues to be paid, in blood.
The National Police Service Oath (Sworn by all members of the service on the day of their graduation or acceptance into The Service, after which they are presented with their badge)
Before these witnesses and in the presence of those who have sworn before me, I swear this oath:
I am a servant of The Law.
I will place no power before It.
I will put no being above It.
To the Innocent: I will be your defender.
To the Victim: I am your avenger.
To the Criminal: I am your ruthless pursuer. You will be punished.
I will enforce the Duties of The Charter.
I will protect the Rights of us all.
I will do this without seeing color or gender or creed.
I will obey the lawful orders of my superiors.
I will impeach any member who violates these oaths.
If need be, my life shall be forfeit in the protection of my people and in the defense of our peace.
I swear this oath to my people, to my country, to myself and to the thousands who have paid the ultimate price so that I may Keep The Peace.
The formation of the National Police Service came as another aftermath of the Canadian Civil War.
It is commonly believed that Prime Minister De Chastelain founded the National Police Service. In actuality, while she and her cabinet proposed the idea, it was actually the surviving senior officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Sûreté du Québec, and the Chiefs of the Defense Staff, along with a group of legal and law enforcement experts from across Canada. It was not the creation of any single person, but an amalgam of the ideas of all of these people and drew heavily on the traditions of all their agencies.
As the new order began to be put into place, Prime Minister De Chastelain and her cabinet recognized a need to organize a national agency of some sort to control the executions and to ensure they were carried out legally, and to make sure that only authorized executions were carried out, to keep the efforts of the Ministry of Population Control moving along when needed.
They also saw the terrible possibilities for fraud and murder inherent in this new system. They wanted no woman to die against her will who did not deserve it or had not had true due process.
No matter how Draconian the new laws had become, the CRP (Canadian Restoration Party) wanted no one denied their rights, however limited some of them had had to become. And they wanted to make sure that those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice died well--perhaps even more than well. Part of this, naturally, was an understandable desire that should THEY fall under this system that they would be treated with dignity and an even hand.
But for the most part what the founders of the National Police Service wanted, what they knew their society would need, was a fair and even hand for everyone. Having fought the bloodiest war in Canadian history, they wanted an equitable society that wouldn’t lead to the same pressures and troubles that had led to war in the first place.
The Québécois had had, while manipulating their own people into a fascist frenzy, many legitimate complaints. And as with virtually every capitalist nation on earth, in Canada before The Biowar there was massive inequality between the ordinary citizens and the richest and most politically powerful of them. It was the perception by the ordinary people that their politicians (and the law enforcement officials that carried out their will) would only do what was right for this privileged class that had been a major contributing factor to so much of the nation picking sides and taking up arms in the civil war. There quite literally had been nothing to lose.
The RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, had long been the federal police force of Canada, but unlike most nations, this federal force also did the policing for almost all of rural Canada, and for most of the small villages and cities. Only the very largest cities and regions, along with the two largest provinces, had their own police.
The Mounties had suffered from some truly terrible scandals, from the early decades of the 21st century right up to and during The Biowar. They had also enforced many of the sternest measures of De Chastelain’s martial laws. This had left a sour taste with many Canadians, even after the war had been won. But the government knew they simply couldn’t afford to throw away tens of thousands of trained peacekeepers, nor did they want the valuable field experience to be lost.
In the end, it was decided to leave the Mounties in place, but to totally change their image, and the training of the next generation that would eventually be the senior members of the force. The RCMP was officially disbanded, and all it’s various divisions and agencies rolled into a single, unified police force--The National Police Service.
From its inception, by design, this new agency ended up attracting a different sort of "cop." To qualify to join the force, the candidates had to pass some very high entry and training requirements. This was not a few weeks of training and then off to the streets. The Canadian Police Academy was a two year course, and there was another year of probationary status before one was a full member. Some 30% of the students washed out, the vast majority due to failing class work, not the physical tests.
Because they were taught by men and women who had disobeyed their own government to save their country, recruits were instilled with a strong streak of independence from politicians. While it was Parliament's job to create and pass the laws, to craft the regulations that would apply to all Canadians, it was the job of the NPS to bring those laws to the people, and to make sure they were fairly and evenly applied. Drawing on their own military backgrounds the Chiefs of the Defense Staff ordered the first generation of teachers at the academy to instill in their students the ideals of justice, integrity, truth, duty and honor. The models of community policing, where the officer stood out because of her uniform yet was also "one of our own" were trained and taught over and over--so that these women and men would be valued parts of the community and could foster an image of being keepers of the peace among their fellow Canadians, far more than simply being the bully with a badge and gun that so many had come to be in years proceeding The Biowar, to make being "a peace officer" more than mere hollow words, to graduate only those that believed it and who would then pass it on to the next generation of police. To have not just "cops" but those believed that this was the best way that they could serve their country. To take take the oaths they sworn upon graduation as something more than a meaningless ceremony, that it really was a trust, and that it was their duty and their privilege to help preserve and keep the peace.
Many (though far from the majority) of the students were also trained as official executioners, which allowed the federal government to dispatch expert and skilled executioners to every corner of Canada along with a well trained and highly disciplined peacekeeping force, so that is was not just the big cities who had access to their services and the benefits of community policing. This also had the not coincidental effect of making sure that those under their protection also understood that while the National Police Force was sworn to being peacekeepers, that when called upon to do so they could and would use force to protect that peace.
Humans are humans, and there will always be exceptions, always corrupt and criminal cops, but in the forty years since their formation this specialized force has grown into a powerful policing agency; it has managed to recapture some of the old dash and image the RCMP had once had, and has a reputation for professionalism and integrity. This single national police force strives to be "peacekeepers," not "‘enforcers," to use their authority and what it represents as a scalpel, not a club. They have became parts of their communities, and, as with the old Mounties, a symbol of Canada to both Canadians and world at large.
This new force combined old and new in their new uniform. The famous "Red Serge" was kept as the full formal dress uniform, but a new red and black uniform was adopted for everyday dress, making them stand out in a crowd, prominently displaying the law and authority of the government. Because of the red tunic that is part of the everyday uniform, they are universally known by a nickname. Whereas once Canadian police were called the Mounties, the police of this new era, are known as "The Redcoats."
The rapid progression from simple executions to titillating displays to out and out erotic executions and their various offshoots have been detailed elsewhere and we will not bother to go over them here again.
Canada, while lagging well behind her massive southern neighbor, was really no different than the US or Britain or any other nation who eventually not only accepted what was needed, but in many social circles actually embraced it.
What was a bit surprising was how quickly and thoroughly it was embraced.
Canada had been, for close to two centuries, hidebound to a great extent by her Victorian foundations. While Canada, both before and after The Biowar, was well known for her liberal polices such as legalized gay marriage, in many overt sexual matters Canada was extremely reserved. Part of her national character was to try to embrace different sexualities and needs, yet at the very same time asking every single one of her citizens to deeply repress those needs. She tried, at one and the same time, to be both sexually liberated and sexually reserved. It made for a very schizophrenic legal system… where one day a man might be arrested for pictures he had drawn, while another might be released for taking pictures of actual underage children because they were art, not porn. It left the legal system in limbo much of the time, and left it greatly up to the now defunct Crown Prosecution Service, allowing individual prosecutors and provinces and territories to decide what was merely socially unacceptable and what was out and out illegal.
The aftermath of the Bio and Civil Wars changed all that.
Oddly enough, it was the French who led the charge. The left wing portion of Quebec society had traditionally been far more sexually liberated than their right wing cousins, and vastly more so than English Canada. These Quebecers had had an even harder time in the extreme right wing atmosphere of The Republic of Quebec. Considered to be even worse than Anglos, mostly non-Catholic, many of them openly gay or bisexual (or supportive of them), and many of them openly challenging the attitudes of the Québécois, they were treated as traitors. Generally part of the well educated classes in Quebec, and for the most part living in the western areas of Quebec, they fled in huge numbers before and during the war. They often proved to be valuable assets to Admiral De Chastelain during the war, working against what they saw as the lunatics that had seized their government.
After the war, many of them volunteered for the new National Police Service, and they ended up having a powerful influence on it. Their generally high education level and history of service made them natural picks for the academy. They mixed in with their still far more reserved Anglo colleagues, who found that these liberated young French men and women were, simply put, a great deal of fun.
This French sense of "Joie de Vivre," of seizing the day, was particularly powerful for the female students. After all, they had not yet graduated the academy…and the four years of a lottery with no appeals had not yet passed. They were as likely as any other women in Canada to be taken for execution. What meaning does a parent's restriction to be "a good girl" really have when the next day you might have your head cut off? Why not experience as much as you can, while you can? If you have a good body (and the academy students certainly did, and still do) why not enjoy whatever you want as much as you can? Their motto became, work hard, then play hard, and be damned to feeling guilty for taking pleasure in it.
It certainly didn’t take long for this "Joie de Vivre" to start to become a catch phrase with the first generations of students. When they graduated, moving out into communities across the country, they brought this with them.
And it was not only the Redcoats, spreading across the country, who brought it. For many of the Federal French their homes were gone; why not stay where they were? Opportunities were opening up everywhere as the PM’s office began the work of culling the female populace while at the same time rebuilding the virtually destroyed eastern areas of the country. Again, they brought their far more relaxed sexual and social attitudes, this sense of taking pleasure in simply being alive. Rapidly the guilty Victorian attitudes faded away, driven not only by Joie de Vivre, but by the pure pleasure and fun to be had from such an attitude.
It is a pattern that has been repeated in many places. It's very rare for a conservative culture to resist a liberated one, and perhaps it was simply time for 150 year old attitudes to die. And, along with the liberation in sexual attitudes, there arose a sudden huge interest in the more erotic forms of execution. Nowhere was this interest keener than among the Redcoats themselves, who were hardly unaware of the various techniques being used in the United States and in Europe--especially, in France--and who knew, from these foreign sources, that quite a few condemned women preferred an erotic execution, even if it was protracted and painful, to the cold and impersonal ones they had been conducting. Gradually, in executions that were conducted out of the public view, many of the Redcoats began perfecting these skills. Some, having emigrated from other countries, already had them.
But people talk, and rumours began to circulate--especially among the women who might one day face execution at the hands of the Redcoats. Across Canada, it was being whispered that many a Redcoat not only knew how to rig a noose correctly, but also was likely to have other skills.
This left the realm of rumor and became very public when a Redcoat executioner, who was performing a mass hanging, was asked by one of the women to spare her a death on the gallows, to allow her instead to die in his arms, to make love to him, right there in public, while he used a knife to put her to death.
And he had accommodated her. He had thrown the switch on the gallows, hanging the other forty women on his schedule that day, and then took the now-smiling woman in his arms, pulling from his belt the razor knife he used for cutting the ropes.
It was not live, but it was recorded. It took the woman close to twenty minutes to die, and she cried out in pain several times, but throughout she held her killer close, kissing him many times as she died in his arms. In the end she was in his lap, her legs around his hips, blood soaking them both, her body shaking in what many believed to be a truly massive orgasm while the Redcoat ran his dagger slowly into her heart.
After that, it took very little time for the women who were volunteering to begin making requests for special executions, to be killed in a certain way. And there were massive calls for these "accommodated deaths" to be broadcast, so that all could see something more than a mass execution. As the sexual liberation had, this liberation of method spread very quickly, almost out of control in fact, with more requests that any given Redcoat could easily handle.
At that time, many of these "accommodated deaths" were technically illegal, and, as usual, there were calls from some to prosecute the Redcoats involved or at the very least remove them from duty. But PM De Chastelain was hardly an idiot, and she had not missed the fact that volunteerism in Canada had increased sharply when "accommodated deaths" became common. Beyond that, she was herself French and was not unable to see the appeal of this.
And the sexual and erotic liberation was gaining a huge momentum in a populace who desperately wanted something to laugh about, some little spot of joy after the last ten years. There was a sense in the air, almost tangible, that the allowing of erotic deaths and the relaxing and removing the legal restrictions on sexual matters could not be resisted… and that to try to resist it would be more than foolish, and De Chastelain was nobody’s fool.
In only two months, the Charter was once again rewritten, again using the American model as a base. What happened in Canada has been described by some as an Erotic Explosion, though many Canadian’s prefer to call it an Erotic Liberation. Repressed for decades, yet receiving the glaring twenty-four hour broadcasts coming from the US, Europe and Asia, Canada was quite simply ready to burst.
And she did.
Almost overnight strip clubs became sex clubs, and what had been a bit of a dying business became a major overnight success. In high-schools across the nation, teachers and students (in every possible combination of age and sexual orientation) came out of the closet so to speak, many of them getting married in the first few months when it became legal to do so. Polygamist marriages rose in huge numbers, again often with members that would have had the whole family arrested only a few years before. Nude beaches, once a rarity, rapid sprung up anywhere the French moved too, often without a word of protest.
And the Goodbar Chain launched what could almost be described as an invasion, opening up new clubs in virtually every large city, and other, smaller, executions houses opened up as well.
Along with this, side by side, came a great wave of publicized executions, with both private and Redcoat executions being televised at first, and then, as facilities were created, putting shows for live audiences. Unlike many other nations, Canada didn’t end up with a distinctly "Canadian" way of executing its women; the influence of the varied executioners from around the world persisted and soon her television and movie industry became well known for its wide variety of methods. This, along with the fact many of the executioners were Redcoats, even led to an odd tourist phenomenon. The Mounties had been immortalized as symbols of Canadian culture in numerous Hollywood movies and television series, which often feature the image of the Mountie as square-jawed, stoic and polite, yet with a steely determination and physical toughness that sometimes appears superhuman. Coupled with the adage that the Mountie "always gets his man," the image projects them as fearsome, incorruptible, dogged yet gentle champions of the law. While this image was massively overblown, it was still a powerful one, and the first Redcoats had been almost literally brainwashed into actually trying to uphold this image as a symbol of both the power of the law and the government, yet also one who could be trusted to do what was right.
This was translated into a modern setting where the idea that every Redcoat was a skilled erotic executioner, and that any women who wanted a truly spectacular death might well want to seek one out.
This was, as is the case with most media about police, complete rubbish; the vast majority of Redcoats were really nothing more than very well trained police. But the image persisted, especially since it was actually completely legal for any Redcoat to execute a woman who requested her own death. Redcoats, especially those wearing the Blood Leaf, often found themselves the center of admiration of visiting tourists from around the world. And even to their surprise, as often as not actually being asked if the stories and tales were true--and if they wished to demonstrate their skills. Eventually it became one of the primary side benefits of wearing the NPS uniform. The old saying that the Mountie always got his man changed to that the only Redcoat who sleeps alone is one who wants to sleep alone. And for those who wore the Blood Leaf and who had the correct mindset, who actually enjoyed the use of their particular skills, it transformed a stern duty into something much more personal and profound. While only a few years before this might have caused trouble for the Redcoats, in the newer Canada it was simply accepted. So long as it didn’t affect their work, so be it. It only took a single generation for the old sexually repressed and quite conservative Canada to vanish, coinciding with a nation that not only had come to accept what had to happen, but had actually embraced it.
The Canada that has been left by all of this is one that the grandparents of today’s people would hardly know--yet if they could ask their descendants, many wouldn’t have it any other way.