SR was for the longest time based soley in Seattle and has grown from there but that is still the cradle of the game. I was wondering though, when looking at the wider world how much of Canadian culture survived? The flag of the UCAS from SoNA is a little more balanced but the one from earlier bookswas really the USA flag with a couple of maple leafs thrown on.

When looking at the map while a significant part of the USA culture survived in UCAS and CAS how about Canadian culture? From the map all that's left is Ontario, the north coast of the great lakes and the maritime provences (I think that's the right term.) Would the cowboy/frontiersman image survive? (like a cowboy bar in Connecticut) Hockey? Would Canadians be come the common seafarers for the UCAS because of their region's dependance on the waterways to connect with the rest of the nation?

Culturally, the cowboy thing doesn't really exist anywhere in Canada outside of Alberta, especially not as far east as the portions that joined the UCAS. The outdoorsy frontiersman thing would survive in some form, though - there's a *lot* of wilderness in Canada, and the climate gets pretty harsh as you move north. Any attempt to capitalize on the northern regions will need people who know how to survive there.

Hockey is a common element to Canada and the US, so I'm sure it would survive and thrive in the merged UCAS. At least, I can't see a reason it wouldn't.

Canada was very adamant about keeping their healthcare system.

Toolbox, remember there's a heck of a lot less of Canadian wilderness than what you might be use to. All Quebec is gone, everything west of thunderbay is gone. north of the great lakes you've only got a couple of hundred miles and then it's NAN territory. It doesn't come close to the bottom of Hudson bay so all that is gone too.
The US has some hockey but it's not the near relgion that it seems to be for the Canadians.

Oh yeah. Heh. I think it would stick around to some degree as a cultural element, though - the Maritimes are pretty well-known for harsh winters, especially out on the ocean.

True, but either way it would still exist and have a following in the absence of a reason why it wouldn't.

Although now that I think about it, there might be some rules issues associated with, say, using a troll goalie with a regulation net.

Check some of the older books (with more background info on sports and the media, the ones that introduced us to Urban Brawl and Combat Biking and whatnot) -- hockey may very well be gone. To differentiate the Shadowrun world from our own, the writers have always been big on pushing new sports, or modifying old ones so they're barely recognizable, or finding small sports and turning them into cultural/national phenomena (hurley in the Tir, for instance).

Or, failing that, it may've been changed into a niche sport like baseball (with players sporting cosmetic surgeries and skill/personasofts so that every game is full of classic players, with "Nolan Ryan" and "Babe Ruth" playing in near every game). So hockey in 2070+ could be the same way, with most matches actually being classic/legendary rematches, or sporting nothing but recreations of the old big names from decades and centuries gone past.

Or it could've gotten the football treatment, and be full of cybered up guys with spikes on their shoulderpads and stuff.

I would gauge that while most of Canadian culture would be melted into the larger American culture there would be some elements that would make its way into the UCAS (and cause the CAS to separate as they would see them as unamerican).
* First and foremost would be full Universal Health Care. Each citizen with a valid SIN could walk into any hospital and get free service. While there is a fee for getting health care it is paid for by the government and not the citizen at the time they need help.
* Crown corps, or government owned corporations that take up markets where free enterprise is either impossible or not feasible. An example would be power supply to your house (you can only have one company supply you power it might as well be the government).
* The introduction of multiple political parties with strict party voting in the lower house (House of Representatives) would be introduced (there is evidence of this from the Dunkelzahn election).

The basic culture of Canada is a mirror image of the northern states of the USA and I don't see any change to that in the SR universe. There are no lumberjacks, there are no fur traders, and there isn't a lot of "Wilderness" area left after the NAN carved away 90% of Canada's territory.

What about Canada's place in the Commonwealth?

Holy Drek! That is something I don't think has been brought up before. we sort of take it for granted but the UK does have some, very small, claim on Canada -check your money Canadians-Although it bacame fully indepoendant in 1982 there might be more of a reason for the maritimes to latch onto the UK than the US.

Ha ha ha...not really. Once good ol' Elizabeth the Second passes on, I honestly think there's going to be a fair amount of debate on whether we'll be retaining the Governor General and other such outdated concepts. Considering the Canada in SR was involved in something as absolutely unbelievable as participation in First Nations Death Camps, I don't think we should be too hindered by things like reality's influence on any other decisions the country makes.

Besides, the Maritimes have a lot more in common with New England than they do with the UK, and they're smart enough to know that it's better to have an ally within a hundred miles than across an Ocean. Honestly, I can't recall a single really Canadian facet of life in the UCAS in all my years of the Shadowrunning, other than those maple leaves on the flag. The developers might as well have just forgotten about us entirely and added another NAN nation, though at least they did make Quebec their own country, like pretty much EVERY RPG set more than 5 years in the future ever has.

As a person living in a border state, with family on both sides of the border, I have always been amused by comparing "Canadian Culture" to "American Culture".

North America has a number of cultural regions, and they don't much care where the U.S./Canada border line was drawn.

The Maritime Provinces and New England States have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of their respective countries. The same is true of the provinces and states around the great lakes; the provinces and states of the Pacific northwest; etc.

The one "Canadian culture" with no real analog south of the border (francophone Québec) went its own way in Shadowrun.

As for the Commonwealth, I could see it going both ways. The UCAS could leave under the argument that the USA was subsuming anglophone Canada. However as things finally shook out, I could see a number of reasons for the current UCAS wanting to be part of the Commonwealth.

The C in the UCAS is a bit of a joke as far as the official canon goes. Thunder Bay gets a tip of the hat as a smuggler's den, and Toronto is mentioned as the new Hollywood, and that's all I can recall. Canadian players usually have to make stuff up to not feel totally shafted.

The 2057 election simply indicated that the UCAS just has the worst possible electoral system in the world -- Simple majority voting with nothing to prevent someone from receiving 27% of the popular vote and winning the election to become President of the UCAS. No instant runoff, no general runoff, no percentage threshold (even one that is < 50%), no electoral college, nothing. The funny thing is that would encourage the sheer number of parties/candidates for office because there is no longer any sort of functional threshold to keep any idiot from getting elected, and as the fluff has mentioned over the years has only been countered by the fact that almost every winning ticket since the UCAS was formed and this idiot system was put into place having been two-party tickets until Steele/Boothe '56 and then two independent non-party tickets (Dunkelzahn/Haeffner, Haeffner/Daviar) in '57 and '60. This is also stupifying on a realism level that basically self-funded independent candidates (since campaign finance and ethic laws seem to have disappeared into the aether) can mount winning campaigns with no party structure for support because of the low threshold and fractured electorate.

I didn't mention '64 because officially no election happened on November 4 so it's moot (Which is another thing...). Nothing has been said about the replacement election, and nothing is know about the current situation aside from who the President is--such as who the Vice President is or what party either belongs to, although it was implied in Runner Havens that Colloton is a Republican (Which is quite original given that the last Republican candidate mentioned was also a former general).

Politics in Shadowrun has been ridiculous, and American politics are totally absurd even compared to the rest.


It could be worse. Some of us have had our homes covered and we got totally shafted.

There's a couple of bits in the SOTA 2063/4 books that detail the state of hockey. It's still going strong. Though those books were written pre lockout, so what 'strong' means could be anything.

I seem to remember some SR fluff briefly mentioning something in this regard. However, it was also implied that the "free" health care provided is something one only resorts to if they can't afford better. So while health care may be free in the UCAS, no one wants it if they can afford it.

This is not a very prevalent concept outside of Saskatchewan (and I don't even like it there...), and SR has shown that the UCAS has gone horrendously in the opposite direction. Police, Fire, Infrastructure, all of it has been privatized in SR. The megacorps would shadowrun the crap out of any crown corp that tried to pop up.

I think hockey would stay, as the parts of the former US where hockey isn't terribly popular all ceded and became the CAS. Granted, hockey isn't the phenomenon down to the grass roots level in the US than it is in Canada, but the northern states/cities still support their professional teams quite well: Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, Chicago (maybe the Blackhawks relocated?)... though I can see hockey going into the "cybered up" route.

Well, in Canada we have an unlimited party system and it doesn't quite lead to the gong show that you predict. True, someone can win the election without winning the popular vote, but their party must still win the majority of seats in the House. Even without winning > 50% of the popular vote, a party can still win a Majority Government (> 50% of the seats) in the House. It is true that technically anyone can form a political party, but one would need to gather together enough party members to run in the vast majority of ridings in order to have the possibility of winning the election. Remember that in the British Parliamentary system (which Canada uses) that votes are not cast directly for the head of the government, but for their party. The party that wins the election, by winning the most ridings/seats in the House, then gets to have their party leader assume the head of government.

Yes but the Canadian head of state (The Presidents 'equivalent' with Powa's (veto, declining bills, emergency military power, etc.)) is an appointed position, the Governor General. The Prime Minister (the afforsaid head of the leading party) does have political powers and is the de-facto head of state, but it is not the same position as the President in the U.S. I forbear to comment on the pros and cons of the different systems but clearly the Canadian politcal model broke when something in the range of 90% of its geography and 50+% (wild estimate) of its population broke away/ died.

As for hockey: I have trouble visuallising Toronto ever stopping being a hockey town... ever. You'd have to nuke it to get all the hockey out, and I'm not sure it would keep even then.

By the letter of it, true. However, the Governor General hasn't done anything of significance in the Canadian politic process in quite some time.

You're probably right, but the UCAS political must not be a carbon copy of the old US system since we've already seen differences in the SR world. However, the exact details of the political workings of nations in the SR world has very little relevance on the individual games that people are running, so its all speculation anyway.

Good for you.


That's the thing. We do know the extent of the changes. It's pretty simple: The UCAS adopted the U.S. electoral system with the single exception of replacing the Electoral College with a simple majority vote for President.

It's been stated outright and referenced in Neo-Anarchist's Guide to North America, Shadows of North America, Super Tuesday, old FASA web material about the 2057 election, Shadows of the Underworld, Target: UCAS, Portfolio of a Dragon, Sprawl Survival Guide, both State of the Art books, and the rule books.


It appears to be of some interest to some people, or else it wouldn't have come up.

Mayhap Boxing Day was retained?

Er... last fall? She Pirogued Parliament. She did it at Harpers request, but really what Pirogation means is she told Parliament to fuck off for a few months and technically speaking she ran the country. Hell, the immediate catalyst for the English Civil War was when Charles II Pirogued his Parliament.

Basically the Gov. General was the one and only reason that Harper's government didn't collapse. She also said that she would refuse to recognize the multi-party coalition which was one of the big reasons why that failed.

She shared fresh, warm seal heart with small school children last month. That's cooler than anything Obama has done, and Obama is a cool motherfucker.

The Shadowrun canon essentially negates Canadian culture and personality, and that's all there is to it, as far as official story lines will ever go.

The reality that an enduring and vibrant culture would actually have a profound effect on the one with which it merges is not reflected in the official line. You can't blame the writers... they couldn't know everything, and the view from inside an empire rarely sees much other than the empire. So those of us who would have liked it to be different live with making up our own little games at home that differ from canon.

Is this thread about describing what we think should have happened in the official story line?

Off the top of my head since the US seems to have gobbled up Canada so completely they probably simply withdrew from the organisation. At the very outside I could possibly see them getting a sort of non-voting observer status but I doubt either side would really be all that interested in that. Most likely the first option.



She turned the Canadian Parliament into a small flat-bottomed boat? Wow.

There is still a crapload of rocks, trees, and water just a few hours north of the US/Ontario border. As you go west, to Thunder Bay, you are already going through hours and hours of rocks, trees, and water. First it's "cottage country", where urban/suburbaners spend summer vacation battling black flys. Then soon it's settlements that have no roads to them, you have to come in by plane. Often by float plane. All the urban areas of note are in a thin ribbon along the boarder.

P.S. Quebec might be gone but somehow I doubt francophones have been entirely expunged. They are overall the minority outside of Quebec but there are still pockets of francophones, west of Quebec they are usually speaking a dialect of French as old as the frontier fur traders (Voyageurs) that usually were the ones that spawned then.

EDIT: Voyageurs (and similar woodsmen like these mad-paddling mofos) are a rough analogue to cowboys, certainly within the francophone and Quebec communities.

That's not how it happens.

Not only is it clear that Hocket will be alive and well in the Sixth World, but I think it's also important to note that Don Cherry will almost certainly goblinize (I mean just look at the man), and that this will only give him even more impressive shoulders upon which to wear those insanely awesome suits of his. Circa 2070, the NHL will continue to pay for his leonization treatments, partly funded by the government, on the grounds that he has become a national treasure.

Awesome! That is now officially part of SR in my world. Did he become an Ork or Troll?

One vote for Troll here.

On an even less serious note the typo (maybe) "Hocket" just makes me think hockey with rockets... YA!

Hockey is still alive in SR. I remember in one of the books still listing the original 6 teams (Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston) as still playing. I would expect the NHL to have reduced in size but there would be teams in the UCAS, Quebec, the NAN, and maybe even the CFS, and CAS.

I think Cherry would turn into a Troll. Large and loud, defiantly a troll.