While the Union assembly had some qualms, Lester had the answers we’d prepared, particularly in his second state of the North American Union address:
“When social order begins to degenerate, the first signs are small things: loitering, littering, broken windows, lazy people using public spaces for private functions. YARP is designed to mobilize the talents of young people who would otherwise be unemployed or underemployed to combat this kind of deterioration. Those without homes will be relocated to appropriate housing elsewhere. Those who persist in unrestricted tagging or decoration or socially nonconstructive protests and objections will be detained and reeducated in socially acceptable decorative endeavors, beautifying cities and parks …”
The dark gray YARP uniforms were sharp, too, and … within a year, all sorts of crime in the old USA had dropped precipitously, except in Washington, D.C., where YARP was precluded by a provision requested by Acting President Coulter, and in SoCal, because the NAU had decided that the better part of valor was to wait until the various factions had determined who governed what, since the Republicans insisted on balancing local budgets with a 90 percent deficit, and the Demo crats refused to cut non ex is tent spending for a state workforce that no longer existed, and CrackArmy was taking over most of the urban areas.
The U.S. Army troops were, for the most part, more than happy to transfer to the NAU unified military, with their old commanders and new funding to repair their old bases, and to fuel their tanks and aircraft. They also appreciated getting regular pay and medical benefits. Not long after that, Lester returned areas of old Mexico to “local authorities,” delegating all functions to the locals and surrounding such areas with remote automatic weapons. That had the effect of reducing drug deaths and related hospitalization costs, after, of course, the initial depopulation and the spate of acute withdrawal deaths, which weren’t covered by NAU universal health care.
With some credit available and seaway control reestablished, Qataran LNG shipments resumed, and that allowed enough power for some air-conditioning, at least in Ottawa, and in the Toronto financial centers, and the Albertans got back full-time power, and more fertilizer was manufactured and sent to Saskatchewan, and the Tar Sands Fourth Phase really got going. Lester did have to divert money to rebuild port facilities in Victoria to replace those inundated by the rise in the Pacific Ocean.
When the time came for elections in 2073, only Johnstone Byron III, filed to run against Lester. He was a good opponent, that fair-haired and wealthy do-gooder out of old New England, even if he hadn’t learned much from his first contest against Lester. He got 31 percent of the vote, most of that from the provinces of Massachusetts, New York, NorCal, and Oregon.
On the other hand, turnout was light in the Old South of the USA, but that was hardly unexpected after the 2072 hurricane that sank half of Louisiana and Mississippi, and eradicated the remains of Florida. Washington Province went heavily for Lester, since there weren’t that many liberals or Democrats left after Microsoft closed down all its plants there years earlier, and the dryland farmers of Montana, the Dakotas, and lower Minnesota really didn’t have anyone else to support.
Most of Alberta voted for Lester. That wasn’t surprising, following the Colorado River Water Wars, since after the spruce and pine bark devastation had wiped out all the Utah mountain forests and the Great Salt Lake had become a salt flat, most of the Utah population had migrated into Alberta to follow their LDS brethren. The Temple in Salt Lake City did remain a holy place, standing in the middle of a desert— a sort of American Mecca. There was only a 30 percent turnout in Saskatchewan, because most of the voters didn’t like either American candidate, although I would have thought that a few more would have supported Lester, given all the jobs his land booms had created in the northern part of the province.
Following the NAU election, it only made sense for NAU to disband the Canadian parliamentary government, and although some complained that the NAU military was overly demonstrative, particularly in Quebec, the subsequent savings certainly justified the effort, especially since bilingualism was no longer necessary in that province. And the northern relocation efforts have certainly resulted in a more equitable population distribution, and an increased labor force for the alternative minerals extraction program being pioneered by the NAU. All in all, we’ve created a more perfect union, and who would have thought it just a few short years ago?
Now that that the NAU has restructured North America into a far more productive and efficient nation, and all of those ills of the recent past are largely behind us, you can all set aside your fears about how a big and inefficient government will take over everything. Government is already smaller and more efficient. North Americans are keeping a greater percentage of their income because of the centralization of government and the elimination of local bureaucracies and excessive local elected bodies. With the new physical fitness initiatives, deaths from poor exercise and diet are down, as are the medical costs associated with them, after the initial readjustments, of course. The civic improvement brigades across all of NAU have lowered local infrastructure costs. With the integration of the Offshore Patrol, the former U.S. Navy, and the Canadian Naval Forces, there’s absolutely no need to worry about illegal immigration, not with the wide-scale deployment of the new AI-guided limpet mines. The enactment and implementation of the Freedom of Choice Acts mean that you don’t need to worry about spending your last years as a semi-sentient vegetable … and wasting your estate. With the reform of estate taxes and the revenues from FOCA violators, we’ve lowered income and property taxes, and the new educational curricula are instilling a greater reverence for the value of manual and skilled labor.
All this because of the enlightened policies of Chairman Lester … and a more perfect Union.