Twenty million people are coming. Winter is coming first.
In 2050, a climate-ravaged Europe is running out of places where ordinary life can still be sustained. Under an emergency international agreement, Canada accepts an undertaking almost beyond comprehension: receive twenty million displaced people before winter closes in.
For an Ottawa infrastructure planner, the challenge begins as a problem of capacity. Beds. Water. Electricity. Transport. Heat. Every building can be measured. Every dependency can be modelled.
Then the people arrive.
Among them is a French structural engineer who once designed major projects and now finds himself carrying materials as an emergency labourer, his pregnant wife beside him as they try to build a life in a country that has room for their bodies but not yet for who they were. Nearby, Canadians displaced by climate disasters of their own watch newly arrived families enter shelters while they are told to wait.
Resentment grows. So does the city.
A vast emergency settlement rises across eastern Ottawa. Workers improvise. Communities form. Old jurisdictions bend. Indigenous land agreements, provincial electricity systems and federal emergency powers collide with the brutal arithmetic of keeping millions alive.
Then the temperature falls.
When a cascading power failure plunges the settlement into darkness during a deadly cold snap, every compromise made in the name of survival comes due. Engineers, workers, officials and ordinary families must confront 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 epic speculative saga about climate migration, infrastructure, family, power and the fragile systems that hold a civilization together.