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.
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
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:
With that in mind, let's begin.
Next article: Welcome to the Dark Future (1994-2020)