Canada: The Second Largest Country, with More Lakes Than the Rest of the World Combined

• Capital: Ottawa [1]
• Population: about 40 million [1]
• Area: 9,984,670 square kilometers, the second largest country on Earth after Russia [1]
• Official languages: English and French [1]
• Currency: Canadian dollar (CAD) [2]
• Distinguishing claim: holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's lakes, more than every other country combined [3]

I grew up in Montana, which means Canada was the place across the line where the road kept going. We crossed the border a few times when I was a kid, and the thing that always stuck with me was how empty it felt. Mile after mile of nothing but trees and lakes and sky. Years later I learned that what felt empty was actually just normal Canada. The country is the second largest on the planet by area, but most of it is genuinely uninhabited, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of Canadians live within about 150 miles of the United States border [1]. Stand in a town in Ontario and you are closer to Detroit than to most of your own country.

Here's the thing about Canada that broke my brain when I first read it. The country contains an estimated 60 percent of all the lakes on Earth, more than every other country put together [3]. Some sources put the count of lakes larger than three square kilometers at around 31,000, and the total number of lakes of any size at well over two million. I had to look this up twice.

This is what happens when continental glaciers grind across a continent and then melt. The Canadian Shield, the ancient bedrock that covers about half the country, was scraped, gouged, and pockmarked by ice for tens of thousands of years, and what filled in afterward was water [3]. Lake Superior, shared with the United States, is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories are both deeper than most of the Great Lakes and almost no one outside Canada has heard of either one.

Canada's coastline is the longest in the world, at roughly 202,080 kilometers, which is more than six times longer than the coastline of the United States [1]. The reason is the Arctic. Canada's northern edge is shattered into thousands of islands of every size, from Baffin Island, larger than the United Kingdom, down to specks barely big enough to land a helicopter on.

Coastline measurement is a famously slippery thing. The smaller the ruler you use, the longer the line gets, because every inlet and pebble adds distance. So Canada's number depends on which agency is doing the counting. Statistics Canada and the CIA both put it well above 200,000 kilometers either way, which puts the country at number one by a margin nobody else can touch [1]. Most of that coast almost no human has ever stood on.

Canada is officially bilingual in English and French at the federal level [1]. About 75 percent of Canadians speak English as a first language, around 21 percent speak French, and the rest speak everything else. The French-speaking population is concentrated in Quebec, where French is the sole official language of the province, and where you cross from anglophone Ontario into a place where the road signs, the menus, and the radio stations all switch over without warning.

Quebec held two referendums on independence from Canada, in 1980 and 1995. The 1995 vote came staggeringly close, with the "No" side winning by just over half a percentage point [4]. Things have cooled since, but the question of how French Quebec fits into an English-speaking continent is still part of the country's daily political weather. Back home in Montana you could drive for a week without hearing another language. In Canada, switching languages mid-conversation is just Tuesday.

Most maps of North America have a giant bite taken out of the top, and that bite has a name. Hudson Bay is a 1.2 million square kilometer inland sea that reaches almost to the middle of the country [5]. It is shallow, freezes over for most of the year, and its southern shore sits at about the same latitude as London, which messes with your sense of geography.

The town of Churchill, Manitoba, sits on the western edge of the bay and bills itself as the polar bear capital of the world [5]. Each fall, while the bay refreezes, hundreds of polar bears gather around Churchill waiting for the ice to come back so they can hunt seals again. People drive out in giant tundra buggies to watch them. The bears occasionally walk through town. Churchill has a polar bear holding facility, used the way other towns might use a drunk tank, for bears that get too curious about people's garbage.

The border between Canada and the United States is the longest undefended international border in the world, at about 8,891 kilometers including the Alaska section [1]. A long stretch of it, from Lake of the Woods, Minnesota, all the way to the Pacific, runs along the 49th parallel of latitude in a near-perfect straight line.

That straight line is not painted on the ground. It is enforced by something called the Border Vista, a six meter wide cleared strip of land that runs through forests, fields, and mountains for thousands of kilometers, kept clear by both countries' border commissions [6]. There are about 8,000 stone, concrete, or metal monuments along it. If you fly low over rural Quebec or Vermont, you can see the strip cutting through the trees like someone took a long, very tidy lawnmower to the wilderness.

Canada has the coldest national capital after Ulaanbaatar and Moscow, depending on how you measure it, with Ottawa's January average dipping below -10 °C [7]. Winnipeg, the largest city on the Canadian Prairies, regularly hits -40 in winter, the temperature where Celsius and Fahrenheit cross over and stop arguing. Yellowknife and the territorial capitals farther north get colder still.

This is a country that has built its identity around figuring out how to live in cold. Hockey is the national winter sport. Tim Hortons coffee, ice fishing huts, the snowmobile (invented by Joseph-Armand Bombardier of Quebec in 1937), and the famous Canadian habit of saying "sorry" when somebody else bumps into you all come from the same place [8]. Cold pulls people inside, and inside is where neighborhoods get made.

Canada produces roughly 75 percent of the world's maple syrup, and Quebec alone accounts for the great majority of that, with thousands of small "sugar shacks" tapping sugar maple trees every spring [9]. The province maintains a Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, an actual stockpile of barrels held by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, intended to stabilize prices when harvests run thin.

In 2011 and 2012, thieves drained around 9,500 barrels of syrup from a Quebec warehouse, worth about 18 million Canadian dollars, in what is unofficially known as the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist [9]. Most of the syrup was eventually traced and recovered. I read about this and assumed it was a joke. Turns out it was not.

Canada is best known for its huge size and natural landscapes, including its lakes, forests, and Arctic territory. It is also known for being officially bilingual in English and French, for ice hockey, for maple syrup, and for cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver that consistently rank among the world's most livable.

The capital of Canada is Ottawa, in the province of Ontario, on the southern bank of the Ottawa River across from Quebec. Ottawa is officially bilingual and houses the Canadian Parliament, the Supreme Court, and the residences of the Governor General and the Prime Minister.

Canada is estimated to contain about 60 percent of all the lakes on Earth. There are roughly 31,000 lakes larger than three square kilometers and well over two million lakes overall. The Canadian Shield, scoured by Ice Age glaciers, is the main reason for this density.

English and French are the official languages of Canada at the federal level. About 75 percent of Canadians speak English as a first language and around 21 percent speak French, with French strongly concentrated in Quebec. Many Canadians also speak Indigenous, Chinese, Punjabi, Spanish, or Arabic languages at home.

Yes. Canada covers about 9.98 million square kilometers, while the United States covers about 9.83 million square kilometers, making Canada slightly larger by total area. The United States has roughly nine times Canada's population, however, so most of Canada's land is very sparsely settled.

1. The World Factbook: Canada
2. Bank of Canada: Canadian Currency
3. Natural Resources Canada: Lakes and Rivers
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica: Quebec Referendums
5. Parks Canada: Wapusk National Park and Churchill
6. International Boundary Commission: The Boundary Vista
7. Environment and Climate Change Canada: Climate Normals
8. Canadian Encyclopedia: Snowmobile
9. Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers: Industry Statistics