Toronto

Canada’s largest city, the fourth largest metropolis in North America, Toronto’s importance to the country cannot be understated: it’s the center of culture, media, finances, and trade. If you were to take New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and combine them into a single city, that city would be as prominent to the United States as Toronto is to Canada. One in every six Canadians lives in the metropolitan Toronto region. Naturally, the rest of Canada resents its power and status, calling it “the self-styled Center of the Universe.”
Toronto’s long super-heroic heritage dates back to the post-World War II period. The original Canadian Shield was buried in Toronto at the end of the WWII, and many young superheroes flocked to Toronto in the wake of the baby boom. The Silver Age Canadian Shield was the most prominent of those, but others included the Rocket Rocker, the Terrific Titan, Mister Disguiso, and even the ’70s most amiable (if not the brightest) hero, the Beaver.
Today, Toronto is one of North America’s leading centers of super-normal activity. Most of the big name heroes have passed on, but a new generation of superheroes, such as the Golden Sojourner, have picked up the torch.

GLOBAL

Toronto is also the headquarters for GLOBAL, Canada’s most idealistic security agency. Bankrolled by a wealthy and mysterious private investor (who draws his wealth from a number of sources, some located on parallel earths), GLOBAL is a small group of well-trained agents and superhumans who serve as an independent peacekeeping force around the world. They intervene only when invited (they serve as an alternative to UNISON for organizations and factions that distrust the UN) or in the face of humanitarian disasters. They’re trained to handle conflicts with diplomacy first, but defend themselves when attacked. GLOBAL is still led by the Fighting-Canadian, who seems unchanged since his first appearance in the 1940s.
GLOBAL headquarters is a dome on the Toronto waterfront, built around an artifact called The Terminus Shard. It is a giant piece of black metal of unknown composition, which plunged into Toronto in 1991, and was the focal point for Omega's forces during the invasion. No one knows if it’s a weapon, a recording device, an encased entity, or something else completely, but GLOBAL has made keeping it from falling into the wrong hands one of their highest priorities.

Canada’s most notorious supervillain is the Mad Maple. Known for his nationalism, formidable cold powers, prolific output of letters to the editors of various magazines, obsession with fonts, and a “death to America” attitude that makes most zealots look warm and fuzzy by comparison, the mad one is Canada’s poster child for super-villainy.
For a decade, the Mad Maple has embarked on one ill-advised scheme after another to bring down the United States. He hired a mad scientist to construct a hysteria ray and aimed it at American cable news networks. No one noticed. He attempted to kidnap Mary Pickford (“America’s sweetheart”) only to learn she was actually Canadian (and, also, dead for thirty years). He took a smarmy, drunk Canadian pop singer and saturated America’s air waves with his latest single and lame dance moves, in hopes of creating “the maple fever phenomenon.” Unfortunately, the days of broadcast television were over, and no one received his signal. He tried to dry up America’s supply of beer, believing that would force them to turn to Canadian beer (which is too strong for Americans to handle, leading to the collapse of their country). The plan failed due to fairly dramatic logistical miscalculations. Even he admits he doesn’t know what he was thinking when he cooked up that scheme. But still, he keeps on trying. And. He. Never. Shuts. Up.
The Mad Maple is not the only great Canadian supervillain, of course. Stormwing is a corrupted thunderbird who attacks anything he believes harms the environment. Major Menace is a paragon, once the leader of Team Evil in the 1960s and 1970s, now an embittered and battered supervillain whose best years are behind him. H.E.C.T.O.R. is an agent in advanced battle armor who believes that superhumans foster weakness and societal decay; he leads a power armor squad called the New Trojans. Coffin Clown is a mutant powerhouse who preferred acting to heroics, but whose failures eventually led to psychotic rampages, wholesale destruction that he views as slapstick comedy. Eve Violence is an energy projector and villainess from Quebec whose mystical pact gives her control over fire. She’s a mercenary who will do any job for anyone for the right price and also an “old flame” of Ellis, the Devil's Own.