Canada, the Corpo-State

Don't let the maps fool you. Canada no longer exists. Instead, the largest country on the American continent has become the newest plaything of the world's megacorporation: the largest enterprise at corporate nation-building ever attempted. Corporations own seats in Parliament, participation in political life is determined by productivity and property value…

After going through a refugee crisis, a separatist rebellion, many many food crises and a corporate coup d'État, Canada has just begun to regain its footing as an economic powerhouse. In Europe, in the NUSA and in Japan, they speak of Canada as a cornucopia, a developed economy to invest in and siphon profits out of.

Meanwhile, on the streets, agrocorps move workers around the country to maximize profit, overworked people in corporate towns are paid in Petrochem-Fun-Bucks and the others live on the streets, waiting the next contract. People die because they can't pay the antibiotics they need to save their arm from the infected Biomonitor they had to install on the cheap to work for EuroBank.

They call those who lived through the collapse and through the Long Crisis the cyberpunk generation. They are desperate, hungry, angry, armed and, most importantly, they remember that things don't have to be like this.

Welcome to the Dark Future

Montréal, Canada is the setting that I use for my Cyberpunk 2020 and RED games. There are many reasons as to why, but I, as a Game Master, have a tendency to want to invent my own things and strive to cover themes that I relate to more. Night City, as a place, as its own themes and struggles and locations, and I wanted to give myself the room to be creative on my own terms.

My goal with this lore dump was to create something that was mine but that still fit within the greater world of the Cyberpunk games.

This is not a complete "lorebook" for Canada in the Cyberpunk 2020 timeline: I might have invented a timeline and invented a lot of details for specific regions of the country, but there is so much left to be discovered by my fellow Canadians. I hope that this will inspire you to create games in this region. If you do, I hope you will share it with me.

So yeah.

Burn corpo shit, chooms.

Cédric Duchaineau

What the lorebooks say about Canada.

While I did try to follow “canon” information from Cyberpunk 2020 books, such as presented in Home of the Brave and in the official timelines, there is little information available on Canada.

In Home of the Brave, the only details we have about Canada is this:

• In 2002, Canada and the USSR are hit by a mutated virus. Canadian crops are severely hit, causing a massive food crisis.
• In 2020, the majority of fresh food is imported into the US: the breadbaskets of the world include Europe, Canada and OldSov Republics.
• This quote:
  • Canada was one of the countries least affected by the Collapse. Vast resources and a small population made life easier. The slow rise in global temperature made Southern Canada an agricultural paradise. Being such a stable area, most of the major corporations set up large operations across the country. Open Corporate military force kept the American Nomad population from streaming over the border. Many of the smaller Nomad Families did find their way into Canada, but only with the full cooperation of the corporations in question. Many of the small families were hired and trained wholesale. CHOOH2 production is now one of Canada's largest agro-exports. The new luxury market in hardwoods is its largest growing industry. But the true scope of the Canadian economy encompasses all of the major corporations, products and services of the world. The national government is all but gone, replaced by the corporations

With that in mind, let's begin.

Next article: Welcome to the Dark Future (1994-2020)