If you’re playing the Detroit map, at some point you will find someone to talk to you about moving goods across the border into Canada, granting the mission Border Interests. This gives you a new building and a crew member in a car across the river in Windsor, Ontario. 🍁
How it works …
🍁 Cars and crew management
Your new Canadian crew member can’t move from Canada into Detroit, and you can’t send other crew members from Detroit to Canada. Instead you have to use a contact point at a business on either side in order to send goods through – for a fee, of course.
It appears you can’t buy new vehicles in Canada, only fix the one your crew member came with. That means that while you can recruit people on the Canadian side, you can’t put them in a car in Windsor and have more than one person running errands over there. Anyone your Canadian recruits can only be put into a car in Detroit.
You can in theory put one in the building and the other person in the car, but that still means you only have one that can move around the map.
NOTE: If you find a Canadian hooligan (possibly one who’s interested in Business) and they happen to offer you a car, it appears they will drop it off where they are – which means you can get a second car running in Canada!
🍁 Send money to Canada
From Detroit you can send over $1500 every 12 turns (International Transfers) from specific businesses. You can allow the courier to take commission if you want, meaning your Canadian receives $1250 instead of $1500, but it seems to be optional. Saying that, when I did that on my most recent map, the relationship took a little hit and I’ve yet to be able to ask them to send more money over … and as of yet I haven’t found anyone else who’ll do it either.
If you’re friendly with a corner hooligan with connections across the river, they can once in a while offer to get $500 across the border for you.
🍁 Send goods across the river
You can also send goods from Canada to Detroit. Put whatever you want to send over in your car, then visit an available contact who will take the items and wait for you to pay them to get it across the border.
The process is instantaneous – as soon as you’ve paid, the money or goods appear in your Detroit safe house. No need to wait for next turn.
… And why that doesn’t work
As for what you’re supposed to do in Canada, your guess is as good as ours. You can’t set up new fronts there or gain territory, and you have to rely on a small amount of imported money every few months (?) to buy anything and in order to afford to send stuff back (Over The River -$750) … Yeah, we’ve talked about this on Discord and so far we haven’t figured out what the point of this function is.
🍁 Buying
The obvious thing to buy in Canada is booze. But other than Canadian Whiskey, it’s not really worth it. Sure you can buy some T2-T3 booze in Canada, but it’s much easier to produce it yourself or use a train station to import it. Booze might be cheaper, but with it being so difficult to get money across to buy anything, you’re not going to make much of a profit.
Using Vodka as an example: you buy them at $10 per bottle, $440 to put 44 bottles into my Canadian’s pick-up truck and $750 to ship over. That makes each bottle cost just over $27. It’s $30 if you sell it to a business. Sure, that means a profit of $132 if you sold all 44 to a business, which isn’t really worth it. You would gain $1452 from selling it in a speak, but at the point where you can afford to send money to Canada, that’s pocket change. The effort vs reward isn’t really there.
There is a benefit to it (in time and availability, if not cost) if you can find a place that sells T4 alcohol. Sellers seem to restock fairly quickly, so you can keep buying and shipping over while you’re waiting for a T4 op to come online in Detroit. But that will require a steady income stream in Canada to fund it – see below.
🍁 Selling and raising money
You can’t sell anything in Canada, so you can’t raise money by turning the building into some kind of operation that makes things to sell, and even if you made booze, you’d still have to get the money in to buy ingredients, and you can’t have multiple people over there, so you can’t set up more than one auto route to keep it stocked.
Booze is legal in Canada, so even if you could turn the building into a speakeasy, would it be a good return on investment? Kind of. It will take you a good two years or so in-game (96 turns if sending $1250, 80 turns if it’s $1500, a bit less if your hooligan friends let you send $500 across now and then) just to get all the money over there to build a Supper Club (to ensure being able to sell all kinds of booze available for sale on the Canadian side – check what’s available to you first), and that’s not counting having to buy all the Furniture needed. It would require really long-term planning.
So, for the sake of seeing if it could be done:
🍁 The Canadian speakeasy experiment
I let my Canadian sit tight for a number of months, not doing anything while I kept sending money over from Detroit at every opportunity. Eventually she could start buying furniture. Based on the types of booze available to buy in Canada on this particular map (Backroom Beer, Bathtub Gin, Sparkling Cider, Bottled Rum, Bottled Vodka – and Canadian Whiskey, but you can’t sell that in speaks anyway, unless you upgrade a Small Speakeasy to a Supper Club), I went with a Supper Club, had her buy some booze to get going and then waited for it to finish being built. And … yeah, it does work.
I’ve set up an auto-route for her to go around buying things to keep it stocked and earning money without me having to think about it. If I need to send things back to Detroit, I now have the money to do so whenever I want to, and can stop the auto route to let the crew member go do stuff for a while if needed.
- Hood’s Italian Packing House (a.k.a. the Canadian Supper Club)
Pick up: until vehicle has $1000 - I. P. Ray Expert Car Body Co.
Repair your vehicle - Rudi’s
Buy: Backroom Beer: as much as possible - Logan’s
Buy: Backroom Beer: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Drop off: Backroom Beer: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Pick up: until vehicle has $1000 - The Yellow Table
Buy: Bathtub Gin: as much as possible - The Red Knife
Buy: Bathtub Gin: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Drop off: Bathtub Gin: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Pick up: until vehicle has $1000 - DA Billiards
Buy: Sparkling Cider: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Drop off: Sparkling Cider: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Pick up: until vehicle has $1000 - Midway Fireproof Storage Co.
Buy: Bottled Vodka: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Drop off: Bottled Vodka: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Pick up: until vehicle has $1000 - C.G. Mills & Sons
Buy: Bottled Rum: as much as possible - Walker & Sons
Buy: Bottled Rum: as much as possible - Northern Warehouse & Storage
Buy: Bottled Rum: as much as possible - Hood’s Italian Packing House
Drop off: Bottled Rum: as much as possible
There’s no way of sending the money back to Detroit, but once you have amassed a good amount of money, you can then go around and pick up any worthwhile hooligan offers or send some booze across the river.
🍁 No guarantees the map spawns correctly
Apparently it’s also quite common for the map to spawn without anywhere to buy alcohol on the Canadian side. My first Detroit map was like this, which added to the “what’s the point?” feeling. I explored the whole Canadian section and found nothing that I couldn’t just buy much easier in Detroit.
My second Detroit map has places where you can buy e.g. Canadian Whiskey and other types of booze to ship across the border, so at least it works the way it’s supposed to.
But the whole thing is just … functionally practically useless. It’s such a shame because it’s a great idea, and makes the Detroit map have a completely unique function, but the return on investment isn’t really there, neither in time nor money.