The Expropriation Winter

Twenty million people are coming. Winter will not wait.

In 2050, climate disaster is pushing Europe beyond the limits of ordinary life. Under an emergency international agreement, Canada accepts an undertaking almost beyond comprehension: receive twenty million displaced people before winter closes in.

For Ottawa infrastructure planner Nnamdi, the crisis begins as a problem of capacity. Beds and water. Electricity and transport. Heat through an Ottawa winter. Buildings can be counted. Demand can be forecast. Every solution depends on something else continuing to work.

Then the people arrive.

Among them is Étienne, a French structural engineer whose credentials have crossed the Atlantic with him, even if his profession has not. While his authorization is resolved, he is assigned to general reconstruction. His pregnant wife is beside him as they try to build a life in a country that has made room for them without yet knowing what place they will occupy within it.

Elsewhere, Canadians displaced by climate disasters of their own are living through another version of the same emergency. As international arrivals move into newly created settlement districts, domestic evacuees begin asking why some communities appear easier to interrupt, move or leave waiting than others.

Across eastern Ottawa, temporary accommodation begins to acquire the shape of permanence. Arenas become places to live. Modular housing spreads around them. Infrastructure built for smaller demands is pushed towards its limits.

Then the cold arrives.

When Capital East loses power during a deadly winter emergency, decisions that once existed on planning screens become immediate human choices. Protecting one community can mean accepting greater risk somewhere else.

And beneath every calculation lies a question no model can answer:

When there is not enough safety for everyone, who has the right to decide where the danger goes?

The Expropriation Winter is the first novel in The Laurentian Fault, an upmarket speculative saga about climate displacement, belonging and the fragile systems that make ordinary life possible.