Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

29 UN ESSAIM

UNPROFOR swarmed into Canada’s western provinces simultaneously from three directions: from British Columbia’s western seaports, by road across the U.S. border, and by road from Ontario. Once they had control of the highways, they took over airports, seaports, and railroads. Because the rioting and looting had been less widespread than in the U.S., and the power grids suffered only limited interruption, reestablishing commerce went fairly quickly. The key ingredients were liquid fuels—gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, and propane—all of which had been disrupted by the Crunch.

UNPROFOR’s strategy for western Canada could be summed up in the phrase: Control the Roads. Checkpoints, manned by mixed UN and RCMP contingents, were set up on all highways.

The parliament met in a marathon emergency session in response to the global financial crisis. By means of some back-channel maneuvering and building a fearmongering coalition, the new Canadian Le Gouvernement du Peuple (“People’s Government,” or LGP) took power. They promised to “restore law and order to the streets,” and to “create order and fairness to the markets.” The new prime minister was Pierre Ménard, a strongly pro-UN socialist/collectivist and dyed-in-the-wool statist. Even before trucks began rolling in with foodstuffs, the LGP took advantage of the stable power grid in most of Canada and launched Progressive Voice of Canada (a.k.a Progressive Voix du Canada or PVC), operating on the old CBC transmitters and using their old studios. Annoyingly, more than half of the broadcasts were in French. And even more annoying, the broadcasts were pablum propaganda: promising the world, and sprinkled with charming human interest stories about how the benevolent LGP was making everyone’s lives beautiful. The truly laughable part of PVC was that it featured a lot of the same newscasters and radio show hosts who had been on CBC before the Crunch. Now they were dutifully parroting the LGP party line.

Alan McGregor said dryly, “Well, before I suspected they were a bunch of Bolsheviks, but now they’ve really come out of the closet, haven’t they?”

Not to be outdone, Stan said, “The thing about listening to PVC is that it gives me the uncontrollable urge to go dig up my own PVC.” (Stan still had his banned Mini-14 buried in a watertight length of eight-inch-diameter PVC water pipe, beneath his house.)

The one-dollar bill of the new LGP currency featured a portrait of an obscure 1950s French-Canadian socialist UN delegate with a distinctively round “moon” face. Because the old Canadian one-dollar coins had a picture of a swimming loon, and had been nicknamed the Looney, and then the bimetallic replacement one-dollar coin was nicknamed the Tooney, it was only natural that the new bill would be called the Mooney.

The citizenry was happy to see some commerce restored, but one of the immediate shocks was that their lifetime savings in the old dollars were now worth a pittance. With the exception of small change and the Looney and Tooney coins, the old dollar lost its full legal-tender status. The old paper dollars could be exchanged at banks for the new bills, but at a one-hundred-to-one ratio. Meanwhile, all deposits in bank accounts had two zeroes lopped off. In the case of the McGregors, their $81,220.52 balance at RBC became an $812. 20 balance. The same thing happened to their Registered Retirement Saving Plan (RRSP)—an account similar to a 401(k) in the United States. The net effect was that they’d had 90 percent or more of their lifetime savings inflated away; and everyone implicitly knew that inflation was a hidden form of taxation. Somehow it was the government-enmeshed bankers, brokers, and bureaucrats who came out of it with a profit and a smile.

For the average workingman, the new economic order seemed strange. The new “living wage” was set at $1.20 new dollars a day. And while rents and groceries seemed less expensive with the shift of two decimal places under the new currency scheme, their real prices were actually higher. The most painful thing for farmers, ranchers, and commuters was that gasoline and diesel were both “fair market” priced at twenty-two cents per gallon. But when 62 percent of those prices was paying an “Economic Recovery Tax” levied by LGP, then everyone naturally asked, “How truly fair is this market?” Very few people could afford to pay five Moonies for a tank of gas.

About the only good news for the McGregors was that Alan’s coin collection would now buy a lot of groceries, and that their property tax bill dropped two zeroes. But there was already talk of property reassessments. LGP began sticking its nose into many aspects of life by pegging wages and prices. All land transactions—even within families—had to be approved by a fairness monitor, and it was soon rumored that they didn’t get out their approval rubber stamps until some cash (“le pot de vin”) was slipped to them.

Private transactions in gold and silver were officially banned. By law, any holders of bullion and miners could sell their refined metals to the government only at the “Free Trade and Fairness Balanced” official prices, which were quite detached from reality. Of course black market gold and silver transactions flourished, despite the government’s threats of fines and lengthy prison sentences.

The bankers would still accept deposits of the 1962 to 1981 mint date Canadian nickels (which were 99 percent nickel) and both pre-2000 dimes and quarters (which had various compositions of silver and nickel, depending on their vintage) at face value. But nobody was surprised to see that once accepted, hardly any of those older coins were returned to circulation. Somehow, they just “disappeared.” Only the later-issue copper and steel tokenlike coins were recirculating. Alan McGregor could see through this smokescreen, so he held on to all of his pre-2000 coinage. He liked to say, “Gresham’s law can never be repealed.”

There wasn’t much of it going on in the western provinces, but they heard on the shortwave that European investors were snapping up prime farmland in Ontario for a pittance, using their new euros. The new euro had a fixed exchange rate of 4.5 to 1 to the new Canadian dollar. This made a hectare of Canadian farmland worth only about 20 percent of the price of comparable land in Europe.

The LGP was clearly either firmly in league with the UN, or an outright puppet government. From their first few days in power, they requested the “temporary assistance” of UN military police and “technical experts.” Not surprisingly, most of these UN troops dispatched to Canada were from France. (There were also smaller contingents from Holland, Chad, and Morocco.) The UN troops were under their own command structure, which was dubbed the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Security Assistance Command.

Along with the LGP’s much-heralded beneficence also came its new bureaucracy. It seemed as if Bloc Québécois had magically staged a coup. Every school that reopened had a French-speaking principal. These were snooty easterners with ubiquitous red maple leaf pins on their lapels and purses, a symbol that was fully co-opted by the new government and the Agenda Nouveau. By decree, all school students in the western provinces had two hours of French instruction daily, in a curriculum with a simplified vocabulary. Their goal was all too transparent: They wanted compliant “worker bees” who understood enough French so that they could understand orders, and a statist mind-set, so that they would accept orders unquestioningly.

Although news of it emerged slowly, there was a none-too-subtle long-term Francophone transition plan. Starting with the following academic year, all kindergartners would have 100 percent French instruction, and that mandate would advance one year, per year, so that after twelve years, all primary and high school students would gradually transition to French-only instruction. The obvious historical analogue to this mandatory language shift was in Alsace-Lorraine, where successive waves of invasion attempted to mandate public school instruction in German. In the case of western Canada, the shift in language would be more gradual.

Phil made a habit of saving recordings of shortwave broadcasts. To do this, he used an Olympus DS-50 compact digital recorder that he’d bought for his use as a DCS agent. But that had mainly sat unused in his glove box because of the SCIF rules on bringing in personal recording devices. Since the impedance of the radio’s headphone matched that of the recorders’ microphone input, all that he needed to make the recordings was a “male-to-male” ministereo plug cord.

To hook up the recorder to his shortwave, he used a Y headphone splitter and a “male-to-male” stereo miniplug cable. That way he could listen with his headphones and record at the same time.

In a meeting with his nascent resistance cell, Phil reported, “There’s a ham radio guy I’ve heard who is using no callsign, but from his procedure he is obviously a ham. I gather that he is a Canadian, but he is now a refugee somewhere in Montana. He’s displayed the cojones to repeatedly broadcast at twelve-point-something megahertz the planned deployments of UNPROFOR—their whole order of battle. If he and his OB documents are legit, then in western BC we’ll soon be facing two French units…”

He paused to turn to some handwritten notes in his binder, and then read aloud: “‘One brigade of Infanterie de Marine (IMa) from the Troisième Régiment d’Infanterie de Marine (Troisième RIMa) and a helicopter detachment of Aviation Légère de l’Armée de Terre, or ALAT.’ Literally, that can be translated ‘Light Aviation of the Land Army.’”

He closed the binder and continued, “On my laptop, I did some checking using my Wikipedia archive CD and I read that the Troisième RIMa has most recently been garrisoned in Vannes, a small city in western France. But the IMa’s main responsibility for many decades has been policing brushfire wars in their former colonies, so these aren’t just rear-echelon troops. Many of the NCOs in these units have probably seen combat in Afghanistan—with Task Force Korrigan—and in Mali fighting the Tuaregs. So these guys won’t be pushovers. Not on a par with the U.S. Marines, but still Marines. Tough guys. The ALAT troops are more technical, but they can rain down death from the air. They use Gazelle, Puma, and Eurocopter Tiger ground attack helicopters. I’m not sure which model that they plan to base in western Canada, but because of their great mobility and firepower, any of them will be significant threats.

“Supporting UNPROFOR will be some quisling elements of the RCMP. These guys will be loyal to Ménard. So they’ve got their own Maynard to idolize. How ironically coincidental.

“I should also mention that we’ll be in a different situation than the resistance down in the States. They’re doing their fighting in the midst of a grid-down collapse. But here, the hydro grids are up—although the economy is still a shambles—which will cause some peculiarities. For example, the UN garrison and motor pools will all be lit up with security vapor lights.”

Alan interrupted, “We have to be careful about directing any fire on RCMP cars, because these are local cops, and we don’t want the local populace turning against us. So I think that we should concentrate on sabotaging the RCMP’s vehicles and radio towers. If we keep them immobile and incommunicado, then they won’t be much of a theat. But if we start picking off Mounties, then we’ll turn their relatives into UN loyalists.”

The land units of the Canadian army—including reserve units—had all been disarmed and disbanded a year before, when UNPROFOR declared them “unreliable.” Nearly all of their vehicles and weapons ended up in the hands of UNPROFOR—although two Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) and Lord Strathcona’s Horse (LdSH) armories suffered “mysterious thefts” of nearly all of their small arms in the days just before the announced armory takeovers.

The French UNPROFOR troops were fiends for planting land mines in large quantity, and making intricate maps of where they had been planted, complete with GPS coordinates. But the region was so lightly populated that the majority of the inflicted casualties were on deer, and the main beneficiaries were bald eagles, ravens, and other scavengers.

Their favorite method was to use a land mine–planting machine to bury mines alongside roads. The placement of these mines was so regular (usually with mines spaced exactly four meters apart) and so obvious that the resistance soon learned how to dig them up and defuse them.

The resistance quickly learned—the hard way—to check for stacked mines, where a pressure-release mine was buried beneath a standard mine, to act as an antihandling device.

A resistance cottage industry was quickly established using a sheet metal brake and tin snips to make disarming clips for the mines. Disarming pins were usually just wire from paper clips. Hundreds of the plastic-bodied mines, of four different types (three antipersonnel and one antivehicular), were collected. Many of these were disassembled and their explosive charges and detonators were repurposed into homemade Claymore mines and various types of IEDs.