Canada is colloquially known as the “corpo-state”, but, in recent years, we’ve seen the nickname “the plunder state” surface and get some traction. I’m biased, of course, but I find this description quite appropriate.
After the corporate coup of 2004 and the introduction of the new constitution, foreign capital took over Canada. During the coup, the government allowed basically every Canadian company to get bought out. Over 90% of all CHOOH2 farms, refineries and distribution centers were bought out by the American Petrochem corporation and other power players like OTEC. All grocery brands became subsidiaries of All-Foods. Farmland and private land was seized or bought on the cheap and basically given away to All-Foods, Biotechnica or Petrochem. Whole abandoned towns became the property of Eurobank and other American and Japanese investment firms overnight. Most Canadian corporations were sold, dismantled or were folded into much bigger corporations. The Canadian companies who made it out of the coup without folding can be counted on a single hand.
It’s not that bad, though. Although corporations run Canada, it still boasts a living condition that compares with most « rich » states: it might not be as educated or as safe as the European Heartland, but it is certainly less chaotic than the United-States. Canada is on a lifeline of foreign investments, but that doesn’t mean that its economy collapsed. Canada was (and remains) one of the world’s biggest economies.
That’s what makes it valuable, you see: Europeans can drop a few engineering firms in Ontario or in Moncton without having to worry about lacking qualified labor AND without having to worry about all those pesky European worker protection laws. American, Japanese and European corporations use specialized laborers to mine out rare earth minerals, uranium and iron in the Great White North and then ship it all out to build computers in Taiwan or Vietnam. French and German Engineering firms can argue on who will get to build the new highways that will lead to Yukon ghost town number 12661.
Canada is constantly plundered by foreign corporations, who happily take advantage of the collaborative government to extract money from a whole nation’s worth of taxpayers. It’s a pretty kushy situation, and basically everyone with a bank account is in on it in 2020.
In 2004, the Canadian Parliament threw the old constitution out the window and wrote an entirely new one from scratch. This historical event remains the most blatant corporate nation-building initiative… ever.
The Canadian Federation is a decentralized oligarchy comprised of a two-tiered government system. You have the federal level, and then you have the Consulate level. Consulates work like the provinces used to, but with more responsibilities.
To explain how Canadian politics work, we actually have to start from the “bottom” (ignoring municipal governments, because that is boring) by talking about the Consulates. The Consulates share most of their borders with the provinces and territories of Old Canada.
Yes, the term “Consulate” is very weird, thank you for noticing. It comes from “Consul” the political position from the times of the Roman Republic. Rumor has it that the guy who wrote the new Constitution studied history and went a bit LARP-crazy. It remains a mystery how that term got adopted into a modern government, but, if I dare say so, it is very telling on the mindset of the people who invented it. Anyway.
In 2020, there are 16 consulates. There were originally 13 consulates, one for every province and territory, but. in 2008 they expanded the number of consulates to separate the Canadian metropolises from the more rural areas. The consulates are, from East to West:
Newfoundland and Labrador
Nova Scotia
Prince Edward’s Island
Halifax
New-Brunswick
Québec
Nunavut
Greater Montréal
Ontario
Greater Toronto Area
Manitoba
Saskatchewan
Northwest Consulate
Alberta
British-Columbia
Yukon
Greater Vancouver
Consulates are responsible for levying consulate taxes, maintaining healthcare corporations, prisons, education, land management, police enforcement and upholding property and civil rights. The Consulate Council writes legislation, the Consul (or Consuls) have executive power and the courts hold judicial power.
Try saying that 10 times fast. The Consulate Councils are the whole point of the new system. You see, positions in the consulate councils aren’t elected, but “earned” by “the most productive societies on the territory.” Sounds confusing? Well, in normal human, it translates to “the 9 to 15 biggest corporations in each consulate get to sit on the council and write the laws.”
Each consulate decides for itself how many seats its council has. These seats are then filled by representatives from corporations with the highest estimated value in the consulate. The calculation for which corporations gets to have a seat is based on the bi-yearly profit of a corporation, the value of the real estate it owns, the number of employees it employs and other such nonsense. The most highly valued corporations are then invited to send a representative to the council.
Councils have between 9 and 15 seats, with the Northwest Consulate having the smallest council with 9 and the Greater Toronto Consulate having the biggest council at 15 seats. On average, Canadian consulate councils have 12 seats. The Consulate Council in each consulate writes new legislation, debates them and votes to adopt them.
The boring description is over but let me summarize how it works in practice.
You get fucked over.
Consulate Councils are great at letting Canadians to pretend that they live in a democracy: the debates are televised, the political analysts bicker online, the laws are often amended… but, at the end of the day, the councils are a debate club where the richest of the rich argue about how the law that screws the poor over should benefit them slightly more than the others.
The position the whole system is named after! Consuls are elected by popular vote (among citizens) and are the executive branch of the consulate governments, they appoint Directors for Consulate Ministries and Consulate Corporations and make sure to not shake the boat too much. Relatively speaking, they don’t have that much power to do things without the Council.
One of the most important roles of the Consuls is to be summoned into the councils of their consulate as tiebreakers. A council can decide to summon the consuls to vote on specific legislation to break gridlocks or to reach super-majorities. So, while consuls don’t have a lot of power directly, who the consul is matters a lot to the rich and powerful.
Consulates with an odd number of council representatives often choose to elect two consuls instead of one, to ensure that council votes cannot tie because of the presence of a consul. That’s notably the case in the consulates of Montréal, Saskatchewan and Nunavut, which all choose to elect two consuls.
Like in the old Canada, the Federal Government oversees a variety of nation-wide services, such as National Defense, Foreign Affairs, Federal Taxes, the Postal Service, and criminal/copyright law.
Yes, Canada has presidents now. The position works more like in the United States than it does in a parliamentarian system: every 4 years, a new election is called to fill the presidency. Only citizens can vote for the President. The president is responsible for the executive branch of the federal government.
Surprisingly, one of the things that remained untouched throughout the coup was the Canadian judicial branch. That was mostly because, while corporations wanted a government that worked explicitly for them, they still needed a relatively independent court to have arguments in. So, the guys who came up with the new system somehow convinced themselves that it made sense that only a third of the government derived its power from the British Crown, while the other two thirds were derived from… money, I guess? That part wasn’t clear, but anyway, they make it work.
The system might’ve stayed the same, but the people in the system were not allowed to stay. At least a third of provincial and federal judges were removed in 2005 and a lot of court rulings were deemed unconstitutional, so that new judges and lawyers couldn’t point at past Canada’s rulings about work rights, human rights and other stuff like that to modify the laws in ways that would negatively affect profits.
The Federal Parliament is composed of 196 representatives which are elected from… surprise! – the corporations which have been awarded seats in each consulate councils. Every consulate sends representatives to the Federal Parliament based, of course, on the value of the corporations in their consulate. The “Old Consulates” (the 10 original provinces and 3 northern territories) send representatives from the 12 most valuable corporation in their consulate, while the “urban consulates” (Halifax, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver) each send 10.
Then, like in the Consulate Councils, representatives sent by corporations write, debate on and vote on federal-level legislation. It looks a lot like democracy, except for the fact that is really isn’t.
This system is the direct result of the corporate alliance that overthrew the government in 2004: each of the Big Five (Militech, All-Foods, Petrochem, Biotechnica, EuroBank) were unwilling to create a system that could possibly allow one of the other corporations to gain complete control over what was literally the biggest corporate colony in the world. They agreed on a system where each corporation could only control a small percentage of all seats in Parliament. They might be evil, paranoid, greedy corporate ghouls, but they are smart evil, paranoid, greedy corporate ghouls.
Besides, while corporations might very violently disagree with each other, parliament still chugs along at a steady pace and always manages to avoid gridlock. Regardless of the petty details of the laws and the corporate drama, these people are all on the same side. The corporate party is in charge in Canada.
Every two years, on the first of July, the calculations for which corporations are awarded seats are redone. This affects both the consulate governments and the federal government. The recount is always a tense affair. Assassinations, bribery, blackmail and more assassinations are popular tools to influence exactly how the recount will be calculated. People have died just so a corporation could change one detail in the calculation formula. People have been tortured to make sure that corporate properties are “accidentally” undervalued in the recount. It is a mess. It gets turned into a sort of blood sport, too: recount season looks a hell of a lot like election coverage on TV, except that the media focuses on the body count and speculates wildly about the behind-the-scenes drama.
To summarize how Canadian politics works, here is a post recount analysis from a political analyst, for the Montréal Update, written on the day of the recount.
The results of the recount have finally been revealed and some noticeable differences have appeared. The Big Coalition of the Land Protection Conglomerate and Continuous Growth Initiative remain in power, but is looking increasingly shaky, as the Industrialist Party and Japanese Bloc make gains.
A political party comprised of representatives from massive farming corporations Petrochem (14 seats), All-Foods (13 seats), Biotechnica (13 seats) and Consolidated Agriculture (10 seats). This party focuses on ensuring that exploitation of Canadian farmland remain constant and profitable.
An alliance of real-estate owning megacorporations such as Eurobank (16 seats), Militech (15 seats), OTEC (6 seats) Trauma Team International (5 seats) and the Hilliard Corporation (5 seats), the Land Protection Conglomerate’s interests are to maintain real-estate taxes to a bare minimum and reduce renter protections. The champions of the Canadian corporate town model.
The urban focused Industrialist Party aim to continuously improve the efficiency of industrial areas and manufacturing plants, facilitate employee recruitment, and facilitate shipping operations with the US and Europe. Representatives from industrial leaders in Canada such as Euro Business Machines (9 seats), Biotec (6 seats) OrbitalAir (5 seats), SovOil (4 seats) and many more are a part of this party. In the 2020 recount, the industrialists have managed to gain new seats due to EBM investments in the port of Halifax and due to the opening of a new IEC cyberware manufacturing complex in Southern Ontario.
A breakaway faction of the Land Protection Conglomerate since 2015, the Telecommunications Alliance includes media conglomerates Bell-Québecor (11 seats) and Diverse Media Systems (6 seats) as well as telecommunications providers DataTel (6 seats), and WorldSat (5 seats). The Alliance has become a key player and tiebreaker. It has led the way in an infrastructure project in improving communication infrastructure and championed laws to increase the cost of NET access just last year.
As Japanese investments into Canada have started displacing European and American corporations, Japanese megacorporations banded together instead of collaborating with the established coalitions. The West Coast has been seeing the most of these investments, but the Maritimes and Montréal have become the new targets of Arasaka, as new operations centers and airports open to cater to the Canadian market. Arasaka caused a media storm earlier this year when it bought itself a massive training and administrative campus in Montréal, pushing out Militech from the Greater Montréal Council. Arasaka (7 seats) now leads the Japanese Bloc, supported by Fujiwara Bank (5 seats), Mizutani (3 seats) and Kiroshi (1 seat)
Canadian Citizens. Which is to say, not you. Yes, even if you were born in Canada and if you’ve lived your whole life here.
The criteria for being a Canadian citizen go as follows, according to the official Canadian documentation:
“To be eligible for Canadian Citizenship, Canadian Residents must meet one of the following criteria:
You might have noticed, but these criteria can only be met in a few ways. Namely: by already being rich or through nepotism. There are slightly less than 1 million Canadian Citizens in 2020. The Citizenry only grows by a few thousands each year. Most of the growth comes from the American Business Class, Canadian Nouveau-Riche or European Goldenkids. There is a whole media circus around Canada’s political life, made to make Residents believe that their voice matters, but it really doesn’t. Besides, at least a third of Canadian Citizens don’t even live in Canada full time, they just vote in the elections to ensure that the President of the Consul won’t negatively affect their Canadian investments.
There is an exception to this: Canadian employees in the biggest corporations also have “the right to vote.” That’s part of the privileges that the corporations granted themselves, you see. All employees of corporations who have achieved representation in Parliament or in a Consulate Council can also vote. Of course, the employees themselves are not the ones actually voting. Each corporation is free to decide how it grants the right to vote to its employees. Some corporations choose to vote as a bloc: nobody excepts the regional CEOs get a say. In some corporations, like at Biotechnica, middle managers vote for their team. At Militech, all employees vote freely. I mean, they’re all fed Militech propaganda all day, so 90% of the employees vote for the candidate their CEO happened to vote for, but y’know, they’re free to do it.
There are a few million more “people” voting in the elections than there are citizens. This pads the numbers and allows the gullible people to think that a lot of people have a say in the elections.
Canadian Law enforcement is not unlike most European countries and what you can see in the Continental United States. Federal-level agencies such as the RCMP and the CSIS maintain order supported by local and consulate police forces, like Montréal’s SPVM, the Halifax Consulate Police Service or the Ontario Consulate Police.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is the federal police force of Canada. It is the biggest police force in the country, with over 55 000 employees, of which around 20,000 are officers. The RCMP operates cyberpsycho intervention teams, counter-terrorism units, a netcrime division, orbital control units and fights organized crime. The RCMP also acts as the standard police force in consulates with a small population, like Nunavut, the Northeast Consulate, Yukon, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Prince Edward’s Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. The RCMP is also involved in answering to inter-consulate crimes.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, meanwhile, is a much smaller organization that focuses on counterespionage and intelligence gathering for the RCMP and regional police forces.
Although the local law enforcement agencies provide for most of Canada’s law and order needs, foreign agencies can be granted the right to intervene in Canada. The FBI and Interpol, specifically, have offices and work with (and sometimes over) the RCMP and CSIS, as politicians and corpos often find these services better funded and better able to deal with awkward problems quickly.
Finally, law is enforced by regional police forces, which operate in most heavily populated consulates. This is notably the case in the urban consulates and in some old consulates like Ontario, Quebec, British-Columbia, Alberta, New-Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
Most of these regional services have kept their old names through the change of government, except, of course, in cases where “Province” was part of the name. The Ontario Provincial Police, for example, became the Ontario Consulate Police.
Most of these regional services are quite big and can respond to almost all types of crimes within their jurisdiction. However, some of the smaller regional police forces (like the police in New-Brunswick and Nova Scotia) often rely on help from the much bigger RCMP for specialized interventions (such as smuggling, organized crime or netcrime prevention).
The funding of Canadian police forces, be they regional or federal, fluctuates wildly from year to year, mostly because of corporate meddling. What often happens is that funding will be held in the council or in parliament, as member corporations want to change up the corporation who gets to supply the police forces. Debates around who will get the procurement contracts are omnipresent. It sometimes happens that a police force switches sidearms once every year, as different arm manufacturers overturn the prior procurement contracts to benefit themselves.
Because of the politicking that happens around these organizations, it is not rare to see police forces go directly to corporations for funding. The service will usually trade funding for political favors or for sponsorships. Police services will offer special protections for corporations who directly fund them and even, in some case, wear their sponsor’s logos.
The Canadian Armed Forces boasts over 60 000 active personnel and is composed of the Canadian Army, Canadian Air Force and Canadian Navy. It suffers from the same politicking that police forces do, as corporate weapon dealers constantly argue that Canada should adopte better equipment and weapons. The result is a chronically underfunded military force that also happens to have too much equipment, which they are contractually not allowed to use. This has led to the growth of a lucrative and bustling black market, as military functionaries and officers often “lose” top-of-the-line aerodynes, tanks, and long-range missiles, which always magically end up being used in wars on the other side of the world.
