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WORD HISTORY Linguistically, mountains can be made out of molehills, so to speak: words denoting a small thing can, over time, come to denote something much larger. This is the case with Canada, now the name of the second-largest country in the world but having a much humbler origin. Apparently its history starts with the word kanata, which in Huron (an Iroquoian language of eastern Canada) meant "village." Jacques Cartier, the early French explorer, picked up the word and used it to refer to the land around his settlement, now part of Quebec City. By the 18th century it referred to all of New France, which extended from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and down into what is now the American Midwest. In 1759, the British conquered New France and used the name Quebec for the colony north of the St. Lawrence River, and Canada for the rest of the territory. Eventually, as the territory increased in size and the present arrangement of the provinces developed, Canada applied to all the land north of the United States and east of Alaska.
For more information on Canada, visit Britannica.com.
A self-governing dominion since 1867, much of Canada was colonized by the British and the French. Ships from the west country probably located the Grand Banks fisheries even before John Cabot's explorations of 1497. Despite official discouragement, Newfoundland became the first overseas British colony.
In 17th- and 18th-cent. usage, the name Canada referred primarily to the St Lawrence lowlands. Here the British involvement is usually dated from Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham (1759), but this was not the first British attempt to capture the colony. In 1629 the Kirke brothers seized the fort at Quebec. It was returned to the French three years later. More unsuccessful attacks took place in 1690 and 1711.
From 1670, through the Hudson's Bay Company, England claimed sovereignty over Rupert's Land. The expanding fur trade led the company to set up posts in the far north and on the west coast, establishing British claims to this region. In the long-running 18th-cent. conflict with France, the British acquired Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia, in 1713. Unable to secure allegiance from the Acadian population, British authorities deported them.
With the 1763 treaty of Paris, British control over North America was unrivalled. The attempt to integrate the French catholic population formed a major objective during the next century. The Quebec Act (1774) guaranteed religious freedoms and legal customs, but in doing so, it heightened tensions between Britain and its colonies to the south.
When conflict between Britain and its other North American colonies broke out, Nova Scotia obeyed the military garrison at Halifax. Quebec maintained its allegiance for fear of the more radical protestants of the rebel colonies. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, loyalist refugees streamed north. The arrival of the Anglo-American refugees created new exigencies. Nova Scotia was divided into two colonies, New Brunswick and peninsular Nova Scotia. Prince Edward Island had already acquired a separate administration in 1769, and Cape Breton Island enjoyed a separate status as a refuge for loyalists for 40 years. In 1791, Quebec was divided along the Ottawa river to create Upper and Lower Canada. Henceforth, Upper Canada contained primarily an English-speaking population.
The North American colonies were more of strategic than economic importance to the British. With the fisheries secured, the colonies served two other purposes. They provided primary resources, such as wheat, timber, and minerals: they also offered a place for British emigrants. After 1815, Highland Scots and northern Irish flocked to Canada. These huge influxes exacerbated tensions between colonial politicians and the mother country and were important factors in the rebellions of 1837-8 in Lower Canada. A third constitution, the Union Act, tried to address the problem, uniting the two Canadas, in the hope of swamping the French-speaking population. However, French-Canadian politicians made alliances with reformist English-speaking colleagues to defeat the attempts. The fourth constitution, the British North America Act of 1867, rejected the assimilationist policy, by separating again Upper and Lower Canada, and joining them with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The four provinces received important degrees of autonomy, within a federal system. This constitution has proved the most successful. But Quebec separatism, as demonstrated by the referendum of 1995, remains strong.
With the BNA Act, the name Canada extended to take in the provinces involved. Other territories were either annexed or joined the federation subsequently: the Northwest Territories through purchase from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870; Manitoba (1870); British Columbia (1871); Prince Edward Island (1873); the Arctic Islands (1880), Yukon (1898); Alberta and Saskatchewan (1905); Newfoundland (1949). Constitutionally equal in status to Britain according to the statute of Westminster (1931), until 1949 the final court of appeal for Canada remained the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
Between 1902 and 1912 alone, over 1.5 million British emigrants left for Canada. More immigrants arrived following the Second World War. Cultural and emotional links to Britain in English-speaking Canada remained strong and Canada contributed greatly to the allied war effort in both world wars. However, following the Second World War, Canadian politicians and diplomats have attempted to carve out a separate space in world affairs.
By 1994 the population had reached nearly 30 million. Since the Second World War trade between Canada and Britain has levelled out at a lower, but not inconsequential, level. As the economic clout of the USA has expanded, so has its influence over Canada. The passage of the Free Trade Agreement in 1989 (and later the North American Free Trade Agreement) recognized and indeed enhanced Canada's continental orientation.
News of Daguerre's and Talbot's inventions arrived in the spring of 1839. The first known Canadian daguerreotypists were amateurs and itinerants, but by the summer of 1841 commercial studios had opened in major centres. Over the next decades, photographers in garrison towns and colonial capitals supplied British military men and government administrators with souvenirs of their tours of duty. Immigrants, fortune seekers, and genteel travellers took photographs, and purchased others to send home from commercial photographers who operated in the larger towns and cities. Smaller centres and outlying districts were served by travelling photographers who announced their arrival in the press and set up shop in the local hotel.
As the daguerreotype process gave way to wet-plate photography, the medium's role in the recording and shaping of Canadian history changed. Increasingly part of the rituals of public and private life, the professional photographer captured ceremonial occasions, commemorative events, and celebratory gatherings as individual and group portraits were adopted as a way to mark rites of passage, record historic meetings, symbolize social cohesion, and express corporate pride. Landscape photographs collected in albums, and stereoscopic views issued in series and viewed through a hand-held device, were a source of both education and entertainment.
Beginning in the late 1850s, photography was used to document the construction of such monumental public buildings and engineering projects as University College (Toronto), the Victoria Bridge (Montreal), and the Parliament Buildings (Ottawa). In the same period, Humphrey Lloyd Hime, Charles Horetzky (1838-1900), Benjamin Baltzly (1835-83), and the men of the Royal Engineers struggled with heat and dust, overturned carts and capsized canoes, bulky equipment and messy chemicals, to produce a remarkable record of people and place in conjunction with the boundary, geological, and railway surveys in the Canadian West.
Especially in the more remote outposts of Canadian society, photography throughout the 19th century was largely a male pursuit. However, some women established businesses, while others worked as camera operators, darkroom assistants, and retouchers, for example in the Montreal studio of William Notman. When ‘Mrs Fletcher’ arrived in Quebec City from Nova Scotia in 1841, she announced herself as a ‘Professor and Teacher of the Photographic Art’ and encouraged women to take up photography as a means of securing independence in an ‘honourable, interesting and agreeable’ profession. Other women professionals included Hannah Maynard (Victoria), Élise L'Heureux-Livernois (1827-96; Quebec City), Alvira Lockwood (1845-1923; Ottawa), and Rosetta Carr (1845-1907; Winnipeg).
Although primarily practised by professionals at first, photography was a topic of popular interest, scholarly discussion, and amateur experimentation, with information exchanged through professional associations, academic communities, and social circles, in particular the Art Association of Montreal and the Canadian Institute in Toronto. A particularly active pocket of early amateur photography was the Hudson's Bay Company post at Moose Factory, where a group of employees produced a record of aboriginal and company life around Hudson and James Bays during the 1860s and 1870s. Francis Claudet (1837-1906), son of the noted London daguerreotypist Antoine Claudet and manager of the government assay office and mint at New Westminster (1860-73), was typical of the amateurs who practised photography while on a colonial posting.
The advent of the dry plate in the 1870s freed photographers from carrying portable darkrooms and opened up new applications, particularly for exploration and travel. During his extensive travels for the Geological Survey of Canada in the West after 1876, George Mercer Dawson (1849-1901) used dry-plate photography as an integral part of his fieldwork. Other advances towards the close of the century profoundly changed the way photographs were taken and viewed. Shortly after George Eastman launched his first Kodak in 1888, the amateur Robert Reford set out across Canada by train carrying the hand-held ‘box’ camera loaded with a 100-exposure roll of celluloid film. Also appearing for the first time in 1888, The Dominion Illustrated (Montreal) heralded the modern era of photomechanically reproduced illustrations. The half-tone process, pioneered by William Augustus Leggo (1830-1915) and George Desbarats (1838-93) in the Canadian Illustrated News as early as 1869, finally allowed photographs to be reproduced cheaply and accurately in text-compatible form. This new form of pictorial illustration, first in black-and-white and later in colour, added veracity and immediacy to published images, and was enlisted to nurture a new sense of Canadian nationhood. The strong tradition of photojournalism, which began with photographs of the aftermath of the Desjardins Canal rail disaster of March 1857, continued in the work of staff photographers supplying images to major newspaper and wire service agencies throughout the 20th century.
Interest in amateur and ‘art’ photography was nurtured, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by camera clubs and salon competitions, and a number of Canadian photographers, most notably Sidney Carter and John Vanderpant (1884-1939), achieved international reputations for their pictorialist work. The Canadian International Salon of Photographic Art, organized by the National Gallery of Canada between 1934 and 1941, and the wartime work of the National Film Board founded by John Grierson (1898-1972) in 1941, both validated and fostered interest in fine art and documentary photography respectively. In the years that followed, the increasing interplay of photography, film, and television nurtured a growing awareness of the power of visual communications which assumed new intellectual proportions with Marshall McLuhan's identification of medium and message.
The last decades of the 20th century witnessed a rise in interest both in the history of photography and in photography as a fine art, with the publication of Ralph Greenhill's Early Photography in Canada (1965), the establishment of the photography collection at the National Gallery of Canada (1967), and the creation at the National Archives of Canada of the Historical Photographs Section (1964) and the National Photography Collection as a separate division (1975). The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, created in January 1985 as an affiliate of the National Gallery of Canada, traces its origins to the Second World War and the work of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board. The Photographs Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture was begun in 1974, the same year that the Photographic Historical Society of Canada with its publication, Photographic Canadiana, was founded in Toronto.
Technical, art, commercial, and critical periodicals which have fostered popular and scientific interest in photography since the short-lived Canadian Journal of Photography (1864) include Photo Life (Vancouver/Toronto), Photo sélections (Montreal), Photo communiqué (Toronto), OVO (Montreal), Blackflash (The Photographers Gallery, Saskatoon), and The BC Photographer. This literature serves a diverse audience of photographers, collectors, curators, and critics, and supports the study and criticism of photography now taught at a number of colleges and universities across Canada. Mois de la Photo, Montreal's major international biennale, and Contact, Toronto's annual photography festival, promote the medium and articulate current trends.
Significant contributions to the history of photography have been made by Canadians. Pierre Gustave Gaspard Joly de Lotbinière (1798-1865), a Swiss-born French-Canadian seigneur, was the first to photograph the Parthenon in Athens, and his daguerreotypes of Egypt, Nubia, and Syria were published as engravings in France. William Augustus Leggo invented a photo-lithographic process and patented a number of improvements to the photo-electrotyping process during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Édouard Deville (1849-1924), Surveyor-General of Canada, perfected the first practical method of photographic surveying, wrote one of the first English-language texts on the subject, and transformed photogrammetry with his use of a survey camera and stereoscopic plotting instrument for mapping in the Rockies and along the Alaska-British Columbia boundary between 1886 and 1923.
Modern Canada developed in the photographic era. From the Union of the Canadas onwards, photography grew from a curiosity to a commonplace, with photographers—amateur and professional, government and commercial—producing an extensive record of people, places, and events. More importantly, these images played a role in shaping individual and collective notions of landscape and identity, history and memory, nationhood and empire, helping to make British North America seem a smaller, more familiar place.
— Joan Schwartz
See also native peoples and photography.Bibliography
The first professional ballet company in the country was the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which began in 1939 on a semiprofessional basis. The foundations of ballet in Canada were developed in the late 1940s when schools throughout the country sent performing troupes to the Canadian Ballet Festival (1948-54). In 1951 the National Ballet of Canada, closely modelled on Sadler's Wells Ballet, was formed in Toronto; it became the biggest and most important company in the country. The following year Montreal followed suit with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. The companies based in Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal remain the top three, although smaller regional troupes sprung up across the country in the wake of their success. Up until the 1970s Canadian ballet dancers like Lynn Seymour and Jennifer Penney found greater opportunities abroad, but the emergence of dancers like Veronica Tennant, Frank Augustyn, and, especially, Karen Kain, signalled the arrival of popular stars who made their entire careers at home. Canada also has a thriving modern dance culture. Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers was founded in 1964; La Groupe de la Place Royale in 1967; Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968; and Anna Wyman Dance Theatre in Vancouver in 1971. Today some of the top artists in the field of independent modern dance live and work in Canada, among them Édouard Lock, Robert Desrosiers, Margie Gillis, and Danny Grossman. Through its international dance festival (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), Montreal has become one of the most important centres for modern dance in the world.
Canada is a federation of 10 provinces-Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia-and three territories-Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and Yukon. Canada's capital is Ottawa and its largest city is Toronto. Other important cities include Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Quebec.
Land
Canada has a very long and irregular coastline; Hudson Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence indent the east coast and the Inside Passage extends along the west coast. The straits between the islands of N Canada form the Northwest Passage, but until the 21st century the passage was ice-clogged year-round. During the Ice Age all of Canada was covered by a continental ice sheet that scoured and depressed the land surface, leaving a covering of glacial drift, depositional landforms, and innumerable lakes and rivers. Aside from the Great Lakes, which are only partly in the country, the largest lakes of North America-Great Bear, Great Slave, and Winnipeg-are entirely in Canada. The St. Lawrence is the chief river of E Canada. The Saskatchewan, Nelson, Churchill, and Mackenzie river systems drain central Canada, and the Columbia, Fraser, and Yukon rivers drain the western part of the country.
Canada has a bowl-shaped geologic structure rimmed by highlands, with Hudson Bay at the lowest point. The country has eight major physiographic regions-the Canadian Shield, the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the Western Cordillera, the Interior Lowlands, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands, the Appalachians, the Arctic Lowlands, and the Innuitians.
The exposed portions of the Canadian Shield cover more than half of Canada. This once-mountainous region, which contains the continent's oldest rocks, has been worn low by erosion over the millennia. Its upturned eastern edge is indented by fjords. The Shield is rich in minerals, especially iron and nickel, and in potential sources of hydroelectric power. In the center of the Shield are the Hudson Bay Lowlands, encompassing Hudson Bay and the surrounding marshy land.
The Western Cordillera, a geologically young mountain system parallel to the Pacific coast, is composed of a series of north-south tending ranges and valleys that form the highest and most rugged section of the country; Mt. Logan (19,551 ft/5,959 m) is the highest point in Canada. Part of this region is made up of the Rocky Mts. and the Coast Mts., which are separated by plateaus and basins. The islands off W Canada are partially submerged portions of the Coast Mts. The Western Cordillera is also rich in minerals and timber and potential sources of hydroelectric power.
Between the Rocky Mts. and the Canadian Shield are the Interior Lowlands, a vast region filled with sediment from the flanking higher lands. The Lowlands are divided into the prairies, the plains, and the Mackenzie Lowlands. The prairies are Canada's granary, while grazing is important on the plains.
The smallest and southernmost region is the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands, Canada's heartland. Dominated by the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, the region provides a natural corridor into central Canada, and the St. Lawrence Seaway gives the interior cities access to the Atlantic. This section, which is composed of gently rolling surface on sedimentary rocks, is the location of extensive farmlands, large industrial centers, and most of Canada's population. In SE Canada and on Newfoundland is the northern end of the Appalachian Mt. system, an old and geologically complex region with a generally low and rounded relief.
The Arctic Lowlands and the Innuitians are the most isolated areas of Canada and are barren and snow-covered for most of the year. The Arctic Lowlands comprise much of the Arctic Archipelago and contain sedimentary rocks that may have oil-bearing strata. In the extreme north, mainly on Ellesmere Island, is the Innuitian Mt. system, which rises to c.10,000 ft (3,050 m).
Canada's climate is influenced by latitude and topography. The Interior Lowlands make it possible for polar air masses to move south and for subtropical air masses to move north into Canada. Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes act to modify the climate locally. The Western Cordillera serves as a climatic barrier that prevents polar air masses from reaching the Pacific coast and blocks the moist Pacific winds from reaching into the interior. The Cordillera has a typical highland climate that varies with altitude; the western slopes receive abundant rainfall, and the whole region is forested. The Interior Lowlands are in the rain shadow of the Cordillera; the southern portion has a steppe climate in which grasses predominate. S Canada has a temperate climate, with snow in the winter (especially in the east) and cool summers. Farther to the north, extending to the timberline, is the humid subarctic climate characterized by short summers and a snow cover for about half the year. The huge boreal forest, the largest surviving remnant of the extensive forests that once covered much of North America, predominates in this region. On the Arctic Archipelago and the northern mainland is the tundra, with its mosses and lichen, permafrost, near-year-round snow cover, and ice fields. A noted phenomenon off the coast of E Canada is the persistence of dense fog, which is formed when the warm air over the Gulf Stream passes over the cold Labrador Current as the two currents meet off Newfoundland.
People
About 28% of the Canadian population are of British descent, while 23% are of French origin. Another 15% are of other European background, about 26% are of mixed background, 6% are of Asian, African, or Arab descent, and some 2% are of aboriginal or Métis (mixed aboriginal and European) background. In the late 1990s, Canada had the highest immigration rate of any country in the world, with more than half the total coming from Asia, and immigration has continued to contribute significantly to the nation's population growth. Over 75% of the total population live in cities. Canada has complete religious liberty, though its growing multiculturalism has at times caused tensions among ethnic and religious groups. About 43% of the people are Roman Catholics, while some 23% are Protestant (the largest groups being the United Church of Canada and Anglicans). English and French are the official languages, and federal documents are published in both languages. In 2001, about 59% of Canadians cited English as their mother tongue, while 23% cited French.
Economy
Since World War II the development of Canada's manufacturing, mining, and service sectors has led to the creation of an affluent society. Services now account for 68.5% of the GDP, while industry accounts for 29%. Tourism and financial services represent some of Canada's most important industries within the service sector. Manufacturing, however, is Canada's single most important economic activity. The leading products are transportation equipment, chemicals, processed and unprocessed minerals, processed foods, wood and paper products, fish, petroleum, natural gas, electrical and electronic products, printed materials, machinery, and clothing. Industries are centered in Ontario, Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Alberta. Canada's industries depend on the country's rich energy resources, which include hydroelectric power, petroleum (including extensive oil sands), natural gas, coal, and uranium.
Canada is a leading mineral producer, although much of its mineral resources are difficult to reach due to permafrost. It is the world's largest source of nickel, zinc, and uranium, and a major source of lead, asbestos, gypsum, potash, tantalum, and cobalt. Other important mineral resources are petroleum, natural gas, copper, gold, iron ore, coal, silver, diamonds, molybdenum, and sulfur. The mineral wealth is located in many areas; some of the most productive regions are Sudbury, Ont. (copper and nickel); Timmins, Ont. (lead, zinc, and silver); and Kimberley, British Columbia (lead, zinc, and silver). Petroleum and natural gas are found in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Agriculture employs some 2% of the population and contributes a similar percentage of the GDP. The sources of the greatest farm income are livestock and dairy products. Among the biggest income-earning crops are wheat, barley, rapeseed (canola), tobacco, fruits, and vegetables. Canada is one of the world's leading agricultural exporters, especially of wheat. Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta are the great grain-growing provinces, and, with Ontario, are also the leading sources of beef cattle. The main fruit-growing regions are found in Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. Apples and peaches are the principal fruits grown in Canada. More than half of the total land area is forest, and Canadian timber production ranks among the highest in the world.
Fishing is an important economic activity in Canada. Cod and lobster from the Atlantic and salmon from the Pacific historically have been the principal catches, but the cod industry was halted in the mid-1990s due to overfishing. About 75% of the take is exported. The fur industry, once vitally important but no longer dominant in the nation's economy, is centered in Quebec and Ontario.
A major problem for Canada is that large segments of its economy-notably in manufacturing, petroleum, and mining-are controlled by foreign, especially U.S. interests. This deprives the nation of much of the profits of its industries and makes the economy vulnerable to developments outside Canada. This situation is mitigated somewhat by the fact that Canada itself is a large foreign investor. Since the free trade agreement with the United States (effective 1989), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (effective 1994), trade and economic integration between the two countries has increased dramatically.
The United States is by far Canada's leading trade partner, followed by China and Mexico. Machinery and equipment, chemicals, and consumer goods comprise the bulk of imports; crude petroleum and motor vehicles and parts rank high among both the nation's largest imports and exports. Other important exports are industrial machinery, aircraft, telecommunications equipment, chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, forest products, natural gas, hydroelectric power, and aluminum.
Government
Canada is an independent constitutional monarchy and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. The monarch of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is also the monarch of Canada and is represented in the country by the office of governor-general. The basic constitutional document is the Canada Act of 1982, which replaced the British North America Act of 1867 and gave Canada the right to amend its own constitution. The Canada Act, passed by Great Britain, made possible the Constitution Act, 1982, which was passed in Canada. The document includes a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the rights of women and native peoples and protects other civil liberties.
Power on the federal level is exercised by the Canadian Parliament and the cabinet of ministers, headed by the prime minister. (See the table entitled Canadian Prime Ministers since Confederation for a list of Canada's prime ministers.) The federal government has authority in all matters not specifically reserved to the provincial governments, and may veto any provincial law. The provincial governments have power in the fields of property, civil rights, education, and local government; they may levy only direct taxes. Canada has an independent judiciary; the highest court is the Supreme Court, with nine members.
The Parliament has two houses: the Senate and the House of Commons. There are generally 105 senators, apportioned among the provinces and appointed by the governor-general upon the advice of the prime minister. Senators may serve until age 75; prior to 1965 they served for life. The 308 members of the House of Commons are elected, largely from single-member constituencies. Elections must be held every four years, but the Commons may be dissolved and new elections held earlier if the government loses a confidence vote. There are four main political parties: the Liberal party, the Conservative party (formed in 2003 by the merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative party), the Bloc Québécois (aligned with the Parti Québécois of Quebec), and the New Democratic party.
History
Early History and French-British Rivalry
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in Canada, the area was inhabited by various peoples who came from Asia via the Bering Strait more than 10,000 years ago. The Vikings landed in Canada c.A.D. 1000. Their arrival is described in Icelandic sagas and confirmed by archaeological discoveries in Newfoundland. John Cabot, sailing under English auspices, touched the east coast in 1497. In 1534, the Frenchman Jacques Cartier planted a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula. These and many other voyages to the Canadian coast were in search of a northwest passage to Asia. Subsequently, French-English rivalry dominated Canadian history until 1763.
The first permanent European settlement in Canada was founded in 1605 by the sieur de Monts and Samuel de Champlain at Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, N.S.) in Acadia. A trading post was established in Quebec in 1608. Meanwhile the English, moving to support their claims under Cabot's discoveries, attacked Port Royal (1614) and captured Quebec (1629). However, the French regained Quebec (1632), and through the Company of New France (Company of One Hundred Associates), began to exploit the fur trade and establish new settlements. The French were primarily interested in fur trading. Between 1608 and 1640, fewer than 300 settlers arrived. The sparse French settlements sharply contrasted with the relatively dense English settlements along the Atlantic coast to the south. Under a policy initiated by Champlain, the French supported the Huron in their warfare against the Iroquois; later in the 17th cent., when the Iroquois crushed the Huron, the French colony came near extinction. Exploration, however, continued.
In 1663, the Company of New France was disbanded by the French government, and the colony was placed under the rule of a royal governor, an intendant, and a bishop. The power exercised by these authorities may be seen in the careers of Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac, Jean Talon, and François Xavier de Laval, the first bishop of Quebec. There was, however, conflict between the rulers, especially over the treatment of the indigenous peoples-the bishop regarding them as potential converts, the governor as means of trade. Meanwhile, both missionaries, such as Jacques Marquette, and traders, such as Pierre Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, were extending French knowledge and influence. The greatest of all the empire builders in the west was Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, who descended the Mississippi to its mouth and who envisioned the vast colony in the west that was made a reality by men like Duluth, Bienville, Iberville, and Cadillac.
The French did not go unchallenged. The English had claims on Acadia, and the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670 began to vie for the lucrative fur trade of the West. When the long series of wars between Britain and France broke out in Europe, they were paralleled in North America by the French and Indian Wars. The Peace of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain Acadia, the Hudson Bay area, and Newfoundland. To strengthen their position the French built additional forts in the west (among them Detroit and Niagara). The decisive battle of the entire struggle took place in 1759, when Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, bringing about the fall of Quebec to the British. Montreal fell in 1760. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, France ceded all its North American possessions east of the Mississippi to Britain, while Louisiana went to Spain.
British North America
The French residents of Quebec strongly resented the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which imposed British institutions on them. Many of its provisions, however, were reversed by the Quebec Act (1774), which granted important concessions to the French and extended Quebec's borders westward and southward to include all the inland territory to the Ohio and the Mississippi. This act infuriated the residents of the Thirteen Colonies (the future United States). In 1775 the American Continental Congress had as its first act not a declaration of independence but the invasion of Canada. In the American Revolution the Canadians remained passively loyal to the British crown, and the effort of the Americans to take Canada failed dismally (see Quebec campaign).
Loyalists from the colonies in revolt (see United Empire Loyalists) fled to Canada and settled in large numbers in Nova Scotia and Quebec. In 1784, the province of New Brunswick was carved out of Nova Scotia for the loyalists. The result, in Quebec, was sharp antagonism between the deeply rooted, Catholic French Canadians and the newly arrived, Protestant British. To deal with the problem the British passed the Constitutional Act (1791). It divided Quebec into Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), predominantly British and Protestant, and Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), predominantly French and Catholic. Each new province had its own legislature and institutions.
This period was also one of further exploration. Alexander Mackenzie made voyages in 1789 to the Arctic Ocean and in 1793 to the Pacific, searching for the Northwest Passage. Mariners also reached the Pacific Northwest, and such men as Capt. James Cook, John Meares, and George Vancouver secured for Britain a firm hold on what is now British Columbia. During the War of 1812, Canadian and British soldiers repulsed several American invasions. The New Brunswick boundary (see Aroostook War) and the boundary W of the Great Lakes was disputed with the United States for a time, but since the War of 1812 the long border has generally been peaceful.
Rivalry between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company erupted into bloodshed in the Red River Settlement and was resolved by amalgamation of the companies in 1821. The new Hudson's Bay Company then held undisputed sway over Rupert's Land and the Pacific West until U.S. immigrants challenged British possession of Oregon and obtained the present boundary (1846). After 1815 thousands of immigrants came to Canada from Scotland and Ireland.
Movements for political reform arose. In Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie struggled against the Family Compact. In Lower Canada, Louis J. Papineau led the French Canadian Reform party. There were rebellions in both provinces. The British sent Lord Durham as governor-general to study the situation, and his famous report (1839) recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada under responsible government. The two Canadas were made one province by the Act of Union (1841) and became known as Canada West and Canada East. Responsible government was achieved in 1849 (it had been granted to the Maritime Provinces in 1847), largely as a result of the efforts of Robert Baldwin and Louis H. LaFontaine.
Confederation and Nationhood
The movement for federation of all the Canadian provinces was given impetus in the 1860s by a need for common defense, the desire for some central authority to press railroad construction, and the necessity for a solution to the problem posed by Canada West and Canada East, where the British majority and French minority were in conflict. When the Maritime Provinces, which sought union among themselves, met at the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, delegates from the other provinces of Canada attended. Two more conferences were held-the Quebec Conference later in 1864 and the London Conference in 1866 in England-before the British North America Act in 1867 made federation a fact. (In 1982 this act was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867.)
The four original provinces were Ontario (Canada West), Quebec (Canada East), Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The new federation acquired the vast possessions of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869. The Red River Settlement became the province of Manitoba in 1870, and British Columbia voted to joined in 1871. In 1873, Prince Edward Island joined the federation, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were admitted in 1905. Newfoundland (now Newfoundland and Labrador) joined in 1949.
Canada's first prime minister was John A. Macdonald (served 1867-73 and 1878-91), who sponsored the Canadian Pacific Railway. In the west, religious tension and objections to lack of political representation and unfair land-grant and survey laws produced rebellions of Métis, led by Louis Riel in 1869-70 and 1884-85. The Métis were French-speaking Roman Catholics who had considered themselves a new nation combining the traditions and ancestry of Europeans and native peoples.
Under the long administration (1896-1911) of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, rising wheat prices attracted vast numbers of immigrants to the Prairie Provinces. Between 1891 and 1914, more than three million people came to Canada, largely from continental Europe, following the path of the newly constructed continental railway. In the same period, mining operations were begun in the Klondike and the Canadian Shield. Large-scale development of hydroelectric resources helped foster industrialization and urbanization.
Under the premiership of Conservative Robert L. Borden, Canada followed Britain and entered World War I. The struggle over military conscription, however, deepened the cleavage between French Canadians and their fellow citizens. During the depression that began in 1929, the Prairie Provinces were hard hit by droughts that shriveled the wheat fields. Farmers, who had earlier formed huge cooperatives, sought to press their interests through political movements such as Social Credit and the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (now the New Democratic party).
World War II to the Present
With W. L. Mackenzie King as prime minister, Canada played a vital role on the Allied side in World War II. Despite economic strain Canada emerged from the war with enhanced prestige and took an active role in the United Nations. Canada joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following the war, uranium, iron, and petroleum resources were exploited; uses of atomic energy were developed; and hydroelectric and thermal plants were built to produce electricity for new and expanded industries.
King was succeeded by Louis St. Laurent, the first French-speaking prime minister. John G. Diefenbaker, a Progressive Conservative, came to power in 1957. The St. Lawrence Seaway was opened in 1959. The Liberals returned to office in 1963 under Lester B. Pearson. After much bitter debate, the Canadian Parliament in 1964 approved a new national flag, with a design of a red maple leaf on a white ground, bordered by two vertical red panels. The new flag symbolized a growing Canadian nationalism that de-emphasized Canada's ties with Great Britain. The Pearson government enacted a comprehensive social security program. The Montreal international exposition, Expo '67, opened in 1967 and was applauded for displaying a degree of taste and interest far superior to that of most such exhibitions.
Pearson was succeeded by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, a Liberal, in 1968. The Trudeau government was faced with the increasingly violent separatist movement active in Quebec in the late 1960s and early 70s. In 1968, Trudeau's government introduced the Official Languages Bill, which encouraged bilingualism in the federal civil service. In elections in Oct., 1972, Trudeau's Liberal party failed to win a majority, but he continued as prime minister, dependent on the small New Democratic party for votes to pass legislation; in July, 1974, the Liberals reestablished a majority, and Trudeau remained prime minister. Except for a brief period (June, 1979-Mar., 1980) when Conservative Joe Clark gained office, Trudeau was prime minister until 1984. Increased government spending and slowed industrial growth were Canada's main problems, in addition to the continuing threat of Quebec separatism.
After Quebec voted (1980) not to leave the Canadian federation, Trudeau began a constitutional debate that culminated with the Canada Act of 1982, which made Canada fully independent from Great Britain by giving it the right to amend its own constitution. Quebec's provincial government, however, did not accept the new constitution.
With the country reeling from the effects of a recession, Trudeau resigned (1984) and was succeeded as head of the Liberal party and prime minister by John Turner. In the elections later that year, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to victory in a landslide. Mulroney's first major accomplishment was the Meech Lake Accord, a set of constitutional reforms proposed by Quebec premier Robert Bourassa that would have brought Quebec into the constitution by guaranteeing its status as a "distinct society." However, aggressive measures by the Quebec government to curtail the use of English, such as forbidding the use of any language other than French on public signs, caused a wave of resentment in Canada's English-speaking population. The accord died on June 22, 1990, when Newfoundland and Manitoba failed to ratify it, leaving Canada in a serious constitutional crisis. In Oct., 1992, Canadian voters rejected a complex package of constitutional changes (the Charlottetown Accord) intended to provide alternatives that would discourage the separatist movement in Quebec.
Canada's new constitution also opened the way for native land claims that have changed the political appearance of N Canada and had effects elsewhere as well. In 1992, as part of the largest native-claim settlement in Canadian history, the Inuit-dominated eastern portion of the Northwest Territories was slated to be separated as the territory of Nunavut, which was completed in 1999. The subsequent years saw the signing of a series of similar self-government agreements with various aboriginal groups to settle additional native claims; none of these agreements, however, established separate province-level territories. In 1998 the federal government issued a formal apology to its indigenous people for 150 years of mistreatment and established a fund for reparations.
The most significant accomplishment of Mulroney's first government was a free-trade agreement with the United States, which was ratified by parliament after Mulroney and the Progressive Conservatives returned to power in 1988 reelection; the agreement came into effect in Jan., 1989. In his second term this pact formed the groundwork for the broader North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1992. NAFTA came into effect in Jan., 1994, establishing a free-trade zone that consisted of Mexico, Canada, and the United States.
In 1993, Mulroney resigned and was succeeded by fellow Conservative Kim Campbell, who became (June, 1993) Canada's first woman prime minister.
Widespread anger over recession and high unemployment led to a Progressive Conservative rout in the elections of Oct., 1993, sweeping the Liberals to power and making Jean Chrétien prime minister. The Conservatives were left with only two seats, having lost a total of 151. Two relatively new parties, the Bloc Québécois (a Quebec separatist party) and the Reform party (based in western Canada), won nearly all the remaining parliamentary seats. In Oct., 1995, Quebec voters again rejected independence from Canada in a referendum, but this time the question was only narrowly defeated.
Chrétien's Liberal party held onto 155 seats following the June, 1997, parliamentary elections, and he remained prime minister. The majority of the opposition seats went to the Reform party (60), which in 2000 reconstituted itself as the Canadian Alliance, and the Bloc Québécois (44). In the late 1990s the low Canadian dollar and relatively high unemployment were among the country's chief concerns, but the government made progress in paying down the national debt.
In July, 2000, Chrétien won passage of a bill designed to make it harder for Quebec to secede, by requiring that a clear majority support a clearly worded proposition and that such issues as borders and the seceding province's responsibility for a share of the national debt be resolved by negotiations. In the elections of Nov., 2000, Chrétien led the Liberals to a third consecutive victory at the polls, winning 172 seats in the House of Commons; the Canadian Alliance (66) and Bloc Québécois (38) remained the principal opposition parties. Although the country suffered an economic slowdown in 2001, the government rejected the stimilus of deficit spending, adhering instead to the fiscal discipline established in the late 1990s, and by the end of the year economic conditions had improved. Following the Sept., 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, a contingent of Canadian forces participated in operations against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In 2002, Chrétien's cabinet was hurt by charges of lax ethical standards, resulting in a shakeup; Finance Minister Paul Martin, a likely challenger to Chrétien's leadership, was also forced out. Increasingly active Liberal opposition to Chrétien's continuation as party leader led him to announce announce that he would not seek a fourth term as prime minister. In the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (Mar., 2003) Canada attempted to negotiate a compromise Security Council resolution; the failure of the council to reach agreement led the Canadian government not to participate in the invasion. Beginning in May, 2003, the country's livestock industry was hurt when other nations banned imports of Canadian beef after an occurrence of "mad cow" disease in Alberta. The situation was not ameliorated later in the year when a cow with the disease was found in the United States and was discovered to have been imported from Canada several years before.
Late in 2003 Liberals elected Paul Martin to succeed Chrétien as party leader and prime minister, and Chrétien resigned in December. Meanwhile, conservatives moved to end the divisions on the right by merging the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative party in the Conservative party of Canada. In the ensuing June, 2004, elections, Martin and the Liberals were hurt by scandals, but they retained sufficient parliamentary seats to form a minority government as voters did not rally to the Conservatives' socially conservative positions.
A scandal originating in a federal advertising sponsorship program begun in the mid-1990s and designed to promote national unity in Quebec increasingly undermined Paul Martin's government in 2005, though he appeared not to have been involved personally. Under Chrétien Quebec advertising firms aligned with the Liberal party received millions of dollars but apparently did little or no work, and some money was funneled illegally to Liberal party coffers. It was unclear whether the former prime minister knew of the scandal, but one of his brothers was implicated in testimony in 2005. The scandal was first uncovered in 2002, and hurt the Liberals in the 2004 elections.
New, detailed revelations about the scandal in 2005 threatened to bring down the government, which narrowly survived a confidence vote in May, 2005. Parliament subsequently passed an appropriations bill and a gay-marriage bill by more comfortable majorities. In Nov., 2005, Martin's government finally collapsed after the New Democrats joined the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois in a no-confidence vote; the vote had been preceded by the release of an investigative report into the advertising sponsorship scandal that called it an elaborate kickback scheme designed to funnel money to individuals and the Liberal party.
The Jan., 2006, elections saw the Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, win a plurality of the seats in parliament and 36% of the vote, but the results did not indicate a significant rightward shift in Canadian attitudes, as the majority of the vote (and seats) went to left of center parties (the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, and the New Democrats). Issues concerning the extent of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic and Canadian control over the Northwest Passage became more prominent in 2006 as Harper's government sharply rejected U.S. assertions that Canada was claiming international waters.
Seeking to strengthen his minority government, Harper called a snap election in 2008, and in the October vote won an increased plurality (with 37.6% of the vote) but failed to secure a parliamentary majority. Two weeks into the new parliamentary session, the opposition agreed to bring down the government over what they denounced as an inadequate economic stimulus plan in the face of a worsening economy, and the Liberals and New Democrats were prepared to form a minority government with Bloc support. However, Harper secured the governor-general's suspension of the session until late January in order to avoid the December confidence vote and buy time to mount a publicity campaign against the opposition plans.
Harper subsequently proposed a significant government stimulus package, and the Liberals supported (Feb., 2009) the budget after the Conservatives agreed to an amendment requiring regular reports on government spending and its effects. In June a Conservative-Liberal agreement to study unemployment insurance reform and to permit a no-confidence vote in September preserved the minority government. Harper survived that vote and another in early October, and in December he again secured the suspension of parliament, this time until Mar., 2010. In Mar., 2011, however, the government lost a confidence vote. In the elections in May the Conservatives won a majority of the seats and almost 40% of the vote. The Liberals and Bloc Québécois suffered large losses as the New Democrats emerged as the largest opposition party, with more than a hundred seats.
Bibliography
Classic works on early Canada are those of Francis Parkman. See also G. M. Wrong, The Rise and Fall of New France (2 vol., 1928; repr. 1970); D. G. Creighton, The Story of Canada (rev. ed. 1971); R. C. Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada, 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (1974); Robert Bothwell et al., Canada Since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (1981); L. D. McCann, Heartland and Hinterland (2d ed. 1987); R. T. Naylor, Canada in the European Age, 1453-1919 (1988); George Woodcock, A Social History of Canada (1988); H. Crookell, Canadian-American Trade and Investment Under the Free Trade Agreement (1990); R. C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (1991); R. K. Weaver, The Collapse of Canada? (1992). See also The Canadian Encyclopedia (4 vol., 1988).
Although Ernest Jones chose Toronto as the city from which he would undertake his campaign to institutionalize psychoanalysis in North America, Montreal is the city where it got its start in Canada. In 1957 the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) officially recognized the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (CPS). Although English and French were the society's two official languages, exchanges and teaching activities took place almost exclusively in English until 1969, when the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal (Montreal Psychoanalytic Society) was established. Only after the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society created a French section, along with other English sections, did it institute a training program in French. Mirroring the relationship between Quebec and the remainder of Canada, the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal and the English-language sections were two isolated entities that continued to question the reasons for their cohabitation.
In 1908 Ernest Jones established himself in Canada as a neuropathologist at the Toronto Lunatic Asylum. He remained there until 1913, when he returned to Europe, after having contributed to the foundation of psychoanalysis in the United States. However, no permanent organization was established in Canada as a result of his presence there, and it would take another forty years before psychoanalysis gained a foothold in the country.
After being established in Montreal, a large metropolis of psychoanalysis in Canada is the result of a paradox that is as strange as it is revelatory of the unique character of the country: an anti-Franco Spanish refugee, Miguel Prados, formed an alliance with a French-Canadian priest, the Dominican Noël Mailloux. Beginning in the spring of 1945, four interns from the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, founded by Dr. Ewen Cameron in 1944 and affiliated with the Royal Victoria Hospital, began meeting at the home of Dr. Prados, who had obtained a position at the Neurological Institute in the early 1940s. There they discussed clinical cases and studied what they referred to as "Freudian doctrine."
In early 1946 they decided to form a group known as the Cercle Psychanalytique de Montréal (Montreal Psychoanalytic Circle). At this time Prados had only undertook a self-analysis and was not affiliated with any psychoanalytic association. In 1948 Father Mailloux, who had founded the Institute of Psychology at the University of Montreal at the same time as Cameron was founding the Allan Memorial Institute, joined the group, which grew considerably from this time on. The number of members grew to forty, with as many guests invited to meetings. From New York they invited Sándor Lorand, Edith Jacobson, Bertrand D. Lewin, Phyllis Greenacre, Rudolph Loewenstein, Rene Spitz, George Gero, Charles Fisher, and Kaufman; from Detroit, Leo Bartemeir and Richard and Editha Sterbas; from Boston, Eduard Lindeman and Edward and Grete Bibring.
Although the circle certainly helped to spread psychoanalysis, it did not promote the training of Canadian psychoanalysts. Forced to seek training at institutions in the United States, these candidates had little inclination to return to Canada. In 1948, with the help of the Lady Davis Foundation and Father Mailloux, Professor Théo Chentrier, a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society), became the first psychoanalyst to immigrate to Canada. He was appointed professor at the University of Montreal and joined the Cercle Psychanalytique, of which he later became an enthusiastic and loyal director. Between 1948 and 1950 the circle was very active and held semimonthly meetings, along with weekly seminars on clinical practice and theory.
In 1950 Dr. Eric Wittkower of the British Psychoanalytic Society came to the Allan Memorial Institute. Then in 1951 Georges Zavitzianos, a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, immigrated to Montreal. In the autumn of that same year, Dr. Alastair MacLeod, of the British Psychoanalytic Society, was hired by the psychiatry department of McGill University. Finally, in September 1952 Dr. Bruce Ruddick, who had just completed his training at the New York Institute, returned to Montreal.
With the arrival of these four psychoanalysts, all members of organizations recognized by the IPA, members of the circle felt that it was time to seek official status. Since recognition could only be granted to members who belonged to an affiliate group, Théo Chentrier, Alastair MacLeod, Miguel Prados, Bruce Ruddick, Eric Wittkower, and Georges Zavitzianos formed a study group and applied to the IPA, hoping to be recognized at the 1951 congress. As the bylaws required a recommendation from an affiliate group, they turned to the Detroit Psychoanalytic Society, which was familiar with the circle, to obtain recognition as an independent organization and affiliate of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA). Since the APA had recently discredited the Detroit training program, it was suggested to the study group that they contact the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, which they never did. At the end of September 1951, the group learned that during the congress in Amsterdam, its request had been referred to the office of professional standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Although the professional-standards committee may have supported the request, the APA's official response was that the time was not right: a member of the group was an analyst but not a physician, and the Canadians were planning to admit lay analysts.
Faced with this situation, the study group withdrew its request to the American association and turned to the British Psychoanalytic Society, which granted them membership after no more than a few weeks of deliberation. As a result, in March 1952 the Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts became an affiliate of the British Psychoanalytic Society. Chentrier was the president, and MacLeod the secretary. The response from the APA was immediate. They let it be known that the Marienbad Agreement of the 1936 IPA congress gave them exclusive control over all of North America. The British Psychoanalytic Society replied that since Canada was part of the British empire, it was only fair that it serve as sponsor in this case. The Americans rejected out of hand a compromise that would have involved joint sponsorship from both associations. In July 1952, after lengthy negotiations, the British Psychoanalytic Society indicated that it would not oppose an agreement with the APA if this solution would help to establish in Canada a psychoanalytic society recognized by the IPA. To facilitate negotiations with the Americans, Chentrier, who was not a physician, decided in August 1952 to give up the presidency of the Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts. MacLeod became president, and Ruddick secretary. After being dissolved on October 17, 1953, the society was replaced by the Canadian Society for Psychoanalysis. But more important, in October 1952 Prados proposed dissolving the Montreal Psychoanalytic Circle because he was convinced that the Americans confused it with the Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts, which consisted exclusively of member analysts. These concessions turned out to be pointless because the Americans never granted affiliate status to the Canadian group.
On October 17, 1953, the group was officially formed as the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. In December 1953 the group withdrew its request for membership in the APA and reaffirmed its membership in the British Psychoanalytic Society, which had never been abandoned. Because Canada is bicultural, with equal weight given to French and English, it was decided that the society would officially be bilingual. During the summer of 1953, Dr. Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, his wife Françoise, and Dr. J. P. Labrecque, all of whom were trained by the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, became members of the study group. The following year, Dr. W. Clifford M. Scott, a Canadian psychoanalyst who had become president of the British Psychoanalytic Society; Drs. Hans and Friedl Aufreiter of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; and André Lussier, who was completing his training at the London Institute, joined the new organization. Initially incorporated in Quebec by the lieutenant-governor of the province in 1955, it became incorporated under Canadian federal law on April 3, 1967. And with the sponsorship of the British Psychoanalytic Society, it became officially recognized as a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association on July 31, 1957, during the twentieth IPA congress.
The British Psychoanalytic Society also sponsored the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. This professional organization made its initial foray into the professional sphere in 1954 in a university setting, at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University (directed by Dr. Ewen Cameron). With the help of Doctor Clifford Scott, agreements were concluded in mid-1954 to initiate a training program identical to that of the British Institute, with three training analysts. After thriving in Britain for a quarter century, Scott, at Cameron's request, returned to Montreal to run the program. The way was now open for training future analysts.
The first students had already begun their training in Montreal, London, Paris, or the United States. Scott helped them complete their training. The other analysts supported this decision, with the exception of Cameron, who had integrated psychoanalysis in his program at the university so it would be under his direct control. When Cameron refused to hire another training analyst, Scott and the other colleagues realized they could avoid his controlling efforts only by forming their own autonomous institute. The training committee of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society developed and introduced a teaching program in 1958. The first seminar was held on April 4, 1959. On October 1, 1960, members of the society ratified a proposal recommending the creation and incorporation of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, which was done on March 17, 1961, in Quebec. Jean-Baptiste Boulanger was the first director. The first training program, in 1959, had twelve teachers for thirteen students. Of the thirty-seven candidates trained from 1959 to 1967, eleven were French speakers.
Around 1968 and 1969, for cultural as well as geographic reasons, a federal model was used to create different sections within the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. A French-speaking section was created in Montreal, the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal, and an English-speaking section in Quebec, the CPS Quebec English Branch. In Ontario the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society was formed. Currently, at the start of the twenty-first century, the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society has approximately four hundred members, seven sections, and three institutes. In addition to those already mentioned, which have had an associated institute since their formation, three sections—the South Western Ontario Psychoanalytic Society (located in London), the Société Psychanalytique de Québec, and the CPS Western Canadian Branch—do not yet have an institute, while the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society is still in the process of formation, since it does not have the requisite number of training analysts (five). Service agreements have been concluded with the CPS Quebec English Branch so that candidates of the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society can continue to be trained locally. For the CPS Western Canadian Branch, the national executive committee recently authorized two training analysts from the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society in the United States to work with the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute to train candidates in Western Canada locally. Candidates of the Société de Québec must complete their training in Montreal, since the Quebec group has only a single training analyst. Candidates of the Western Canadian Branch in Ontario undergo training at the Toronto Institute.
The CPS Quebec English Branch consists of analysts from Montreal from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds who concentrated on English language and culture when sections were created in 1969. As of 2002, it consisted of a hundred members. The training program of its institute was, until the first few years of the twenty-first century, much more academic than that of the Société de Psychanalyse de Montréal (SPM). Since 2000, the CPS Quebec English Branch has added European authors such as Piera Aulagnier, Wilfred Bion, and Jacques Lacan to the fourth-year program.
Psychoanalysis has also made progress in Toronto. In September 1954, Alan Parkin, who had just completed his training in London, England, arrived in the city. In 1956 he created the Toronto Psychoanalytic Study Circle with a core of eleven psychiatrists with an interest in psychoanalysis. He attempted to establish a psychoanalysis training program at the department of psychiatry of the University of Toronto and obtain recognition for his study group from the Ontario Psychiatric Institute. After two years of activity the circle decided to transform itself into the psychotherapy section of the Ontario Psychiatric Society by opening its doors to all members of that association. The request was ratified on January 23, 1959, and two years later, on January 20, 1961, the psychotherapy section held its first scientific congress. In his History of Psychoanalysis in Canada, Parkin comments on the prodigious growth of this section, which in January 1970 had no fewer than ninety-three members. The establishment of psychoanalysis within the context of psychiatry helped determine the medical orientation psychoanalysis assumed in Ontario. This growth continued until psychoanalytic psychologists of the Ontario Psychological Association, with the support of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, decided, at the end of the 1980s, to found their own organization, the Toronto Contemporary Society, and their own institute, the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Initially, candidates training at the new institute were not physicians; then psychiatrists began to apply to the organization, although it was not a part of the IPA. They were attracted by the diversity of approaches used in its training program and wanted to escape the incessant conflicts between Freudian and Kohutian factions that divided the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society. The Toronto Psychoanalytic Society would likely have split if there had not emerged a third group, the post-Kleinians, whose members were partisans of object-relations theory and followers of Margaret Mahler and Otto Kernberg. Their emergence prevented the complete polarization of the society. Today the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society has approximately 130 members.
After the formation of the first three sections of the society and the institute, other sections were created when at least five analysts or training analysts belonging to the same geographic or cultural community submitted a request. In 1972 the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society was formed, followed by the Ottawa Institute in 1978. Then, also in 1978, the CPS Western Canadian Branch was founded, consisting of members scattered throughout the four western provinces. Donald Watterson, in Vancouver, was the first psychoanalyst to settle in British Colombia, yet there was little growth in psychoanalysis in the province until the end of the twentieth century. Julius Guild settled in Edmonton, Alberta, followed by Perry Segal in 1971 and Hassan Azim in 1973, but as of 1998 there was only one analyst in Calgary and two in Edmonton. Similar numbers were found in Winnipeg and Manitoba. Even though it covers an area that is roughly a third of Canada, the CPS Western Canadian Branch currently has only ten members: six in British Colombia, three in Alberta, and one in Manitoba.
The Southwestern Ontario Psychoanalytic Society is the sixth section of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. It was founded on June 5, 1982, and currently has fourteen members. Formed in 1988, the Société Psychanalytique de Québec (Quebec Psychoanalytic Society), with ten members, is the most recent of the seven sections of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. The senior member is Henri Richard, who began practicing after psychoanalytic training in Paris from 1952 to 1959. A few years later he was joined by Noël Montgrain, who had also studied at the Institut de Psychanalyse de Paris (Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis). There is currently no organization in the maritime provinces of eastern Canada. Aside from the cultural and economic centers of Montreal and Toronto, psychoanalysis throughout Canada has grown very slowly.
For years oral communication was the primary mode of transmission within the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. The first generations of analysts were more absorbed with fundamental issues and transmission than in the preparation of written texts. Although a number of practitioners—such as W. Clifford M. Scott, Georges Zavitzianos, Jean-Baptiste Boulanger, Jean-Louis Langlois, Paul Lefebvre, André Lussier, Jean Bossé, Pierre Doucet, Guy Da Silva, and Roger Dufresne—wrote important articles, they spent the majority of their time training future generations of analysts.
The ephemeral character of psychoanalytic reviews bears witness to the phenomenon. The first issue of the Revue canadienne de psychanalyse, published in 1954 and sponsored by the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, was the final one until the reappearance, nearly forty years later in the spring of 1993, of the semiannual bilingual Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue canadienne de psychanalyse, edited by Eva Lester. Similarly, the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal has, since 1988, published an internal periodical three times a year, the Bulletin de la Société Psychanalytique de Montréal. Julien Bigras, however, was the first to promote written communication within the psychoanalytic community with the review Inter-prétation, of which he was the founder and editor-in-chief from 1967 to 1971. Josette Garon, Jacques Mauger, Lise Monette, and François Peraldi continued his efforts with the publication of Frayages. In the autumn of 1992, Dominique Scarfone published the first issue of Trans, a semiannual, semithematic, interdisciplinary journal. The journal played a key role in encouraging the exchange of psychoanalytic ideas and also played an important role in the Montreal psychoanalytic community by organizing annual colloquia open to the public. Despite this success, the editorial committee decided to discontinue publication in the spring of 1999 with the publication of issue ten of the journal. The year 1992 also saw the introduction of the semiannual Filigrane, financed by the publication of Santé mentale au Québec and directed at psychotherapists and professional psychoanalysts whose clinical methods were compatible with psychoanalysis.
Patrick J. Mahoney, Jean Imbeault, and Dominique Scarfone are among the first analysts to make significant contributions on an international level to a critical analysis of the psychoanalytic corpus.
In Canada, as elsewhere, the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and its various sections are not the only entities involved in psychoanalysis. Alongside them have always existed unaffiliated psychoanalysts working alone or in small groups. Among the first to practice psychoanalysis outside an institutional context was Michel Dansereau, a doctor who had trained with René Laforgue in Casablanca, Morocco, and was active during the 1950s. Much later were François Peraldi, who arrived in Montreal in 1974, and Mireille Lafortune, who was active during the late 1960s.
There also exist many organizations devoted to psychoanalysis. In 1986 François Peraldi established the Réseau des Cartels (Network of Cartels), composed of analysts interested in the work of Jacques Lacan. This network did not survive the loss of its founder, and in 2004 only a single cartel is still active. The Association des Psychanalystes du Québec (Quebec Association of Psychoanalysts), founded in 1967 and having only ten members in 2004, is Lacanian in focus. The Association des Psychothérapeutes Psychanalytique du Québec (Quebec Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists), founded in 1985 and consisting of some 150 members in different regions of Quebec, includes clinicians who make use of psychoanalytic methods. The association organizes colloquia and conferences, to which members of the Société Psychanalytique de Montréal are invited. The Groupe d'Études Psychanalytiques Interdisciplinaires (Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Study Group) consists of some fifteen professors from the Université de Québec at Montreal who teach psychoanalysis while practicing. The Institut Québécois de Psychothérapie (Quebec Psychotherapy Institute), which has existed since 1992, provides a two-year training program in analytic and systemic psychotherapy. Father Henri Samson, who trained in France and was a contemporary of Father Mailloux, founded the Institut de Psychothérapie de Québec in the 1960s for those who wanted training in analytic psychotherapy. The Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles (Interdisciplinary Group for Freudian Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions), founded by Willy Apollon and cooperating with psychiatrists from the Robert-Giffard Center, has gained a considerable reputation in analytic psychotherapy based on Lacanian principles, especially in its work with psychotic patients. The Cercle Jung de Québec (Quebec Jung Circle), founded in the 1970s by Marcel Gaumont, a Jungian analyst trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, promotes Jungian psychoanalysis in Canada through public conferences and discussions. André Renaud, a psychoanalyst with the Société Psychanalytique de Québec, established in 1984, and ran until 1996, Étayage (Support), a training program for doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who wanted to study analytic psychotherapy. Finally, a group of analytic psychotherapists has also been at work in British Columbia in Western Canada.
Bibliography
Cloutier, Yvan. (1988). La naissance de la psychanalyse à Montréal. Philosophiques, 15(1), 221-225. (Reprinted from Frayages, 3 (1987).)
Paradis, André. (1988). La naissance de la psychanalyseà Montréal. Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, 41(3), 443-446. (Reprinted from Frayages, numéro spécial (1987).)
Parkin, Allan. (1987). History of psychoanalysis in Canada. Toronto: Toronto Psychoanalytical Society.
Prados, Miguel. (1954). La psychanalyse au Canada. Revue canadienne de psychanalyse, 1, 1-33.
Sourkes, Theodore L., and Pinard, Gilbert (Eds.). (1995). Building on a proud past: 50 years of psychiatry at McGill. Montreal: McGill University.
Vigneault, Jacques. (1993). Transferts et déplacements: fondements de la psychanalyse en Amérique du Nord. Trans, 3, 223-237.
—JACQUES VIGNEAULT
As in all immigrant societies, the spread of formal education in Canada followed a predictable pattern as religious orders and missions attempted to "civilize" both the aboriginal and the settler communities. All levels of formal education from the seventeenth century onward had their roots in Catholicism, Anglicanism, and after 1763, when the British assumed control, a whole range of protestant denominations. Dramatic change occurred in 1867 with the enactment of the Constitution Act (formerly the British North American Act) when the principle of secular and separate systems of education funded by the state was accepted throughout Canada with a few significant exceptions. Section 98 of the act allocated exclusive jurisdiction for education to the provinces. This division of constitutional powers has remained in place and has been the basis for a degree of tension between the federal government and the ten provincial governments. The federal government is responsible for education in the three northern territories. With regard to public education, Canadians subscribe to three common social and educational values: equality of access, equality of opportunity, and cultural pluralism.
Influences on the Educational Systems
According to Rodney Clifton, Canada is the "only country without a national office of education: all other nations, including all other federated nations, have national offices of education that coordinate and/or administer various aspects of their educational system" (p. 7). While there are many similarities among Canada's systems of education, they have each developed in unique ways. These systems are profoundly influenced by the distribution of the population of 31 million across the vast country, which covers four and one-half time zones. More than 80 percent of Canadians live in urban centers within 100 miles of the border with the United States.
Canadian society has developed as a mosaic of peoples, beginning with aboriginal populations and then followed by French, British, and other European settlement. Canada has two official languages: English is the mother tongue of 61 percent of the population, and French is the mother tongue of 26 percent. Most French speakers live in Quebec, where they make up 82 percent of the population, but there are also many French speakers in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Manitoba. Education is available in both official languages, but to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the region. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, immigrants from all parts of the world were attracted to Canada, with the largest proportion coming from Asia.
The patterns of immigration have had an enormous impact on the structure and organization of educational systems. Although the systems of the western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia followed the patterns laid down in Ontario, more emphasis was placed on meeting the needs of all people, not just Anglicans and Catholics. While "separate" (Catholic) publicly funded schools were resisted in Manitoba, by World War II only British Columbia, out of the ten provinces, maintained a secular system of education. This stance was modified in 1977, when the province began providing subsidy to private and independent schools. In 1998 Newfoundland abandoned denominational education and became the only province with a secular system.
The French tradition and language have dominated educational systems in Quebec and parts of New Brunswick and Manitoba. Since the "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec in the 1960s and the adoption of a bilingual and multicultural policy at the federal level in the 1970s, French culture has become part of all Canadian educational systems. The challenge has been to privilege the "founding" cultures while at the same time recognizing aboriginal peoples and the vast range of other cultures that form Canadian society. The complexities that come with geography, immigration, and settlement gave rise to socialization processes that placed great emphasis on the role of education in molding Canadian citizens.
Twentieth-Century Developments
The "Great Transformation" in Canadian society, as it was dubbed by Karl Polanyi in 1944, is very much a twentieth-century phenomena. Mass public education that was free and compulsory through high school had become the norm by the 1950s. Public education is provided free to all Canadian citizens and permanent residents until the end of secondary school, normally at eighteen. The ages for compulsory schooling vary from one jurisdiction to another, but generally it is required from age six or seven to age sixteen. As the federal government assumed more responsibility for funding university education from the mid-1950s and recognized the importance of human capital, so the systems of higher education expanded. Expansion of the university system and the development of parallel college systems changed the nature of higher education in Canada. By 1976 every province was operating a binary system of universities and colleges, and furthermore the number of universities offering graduate programs had risen to forty-seven from the 1960 level of twenty-eight.
As in other countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the baby boom generation flooded into the higher education system in the 1960s and the early 1970s. Enrollment continued to expand into the 1990s, but over the next decade it reached a plateau and then began to decline. Between 1991 - 1992 and 1999 - 2000, university full-time enrollment decreased from approximately 580,000 to 540,000, while part-time enrollment fell from 280,000 to 240,000. Between 1992 - 1993 and 1999 - 2000, full-time community college enrollment increased from approximately 360,000 to 400,000. Part-time community college enrollment declined from approximately 180,000 to 90,000. Furthermore, the gender balance has been reversed so that women are in the majority at the undergraduate level in both community colleges and universities and at parity with men at the graduate level.
The federal government had, through the incremental development of a science and technology policy, created an elaborate structure for funding and supporting research. In addition to the three national funding councils, which were established in the late 1970s and cover all the disciplines and fields represented in the academy, the government created other programs, such as the Networks of Centres of Excellence, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Canada Research Chairs.
Education in Canada has traditionally been a public enterprise. Private or independent schools educate approximately 5 percent of the school-age population. Although these schools do generally follow the curriculum and diploma requirements of their jurisdiction, they function independently of the public system and charge fees. Five provinces - Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec, and Saskatchewan - provide some form of financial assistance to these schools. Prior to the 1990s, higher education was almost totally a public enterprise. During that decade the number of private institutions offering vocational and degree programs increased dramatically. Four provinces - Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and New Brunswick - have passed legislation to allow for the establishment of private universities.
The Place of Education in the Society
As an institutional form, education occupies a unique place in Canadian society. By the late 1960s, education had become a central legitimating institution in the modern Canadian state. Between 1960 and 1995 - 1996, the cost of public education increased from $1.7 billion to almost $60 billion. One in fourteen employed Canadians work in education, and 25 percent of the total population is involved with education. Public education is a major industry involving approximately 16,000 elementary and secondary schools, 200 postsecondary colleges, 75 universities and university colleges, 300,000 teachers, and 60,000 instructors and professors.
Relative to other developed countries, Canada invests a substantial amount on education. At all levels of education, Canadian expenditure per student is second highest (after the United States) among the G-7 countries (the other G-7 members being France, Italy, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom) and is substantially above the OECD average. Canada's educational expenditure of 7 percent of gross domestic product is the highest level among the G-7 countries and is one of the highest in the OECD. Eighty percent of Canada's adult population has completed upper-secondary (referred to as high school in North America) or postsecondary education. This is much higher than the OECD average of 64 percent. Fifty-two percent of the adult population has completed postsecondary education. This rate is the highest in the OECD and double the OECD average. Yet it should be noted that this ranking is due to the very high proportion of the population that is enrolled in nonuniversity postsecondary education.
By the mid-1990s, Canadian governments had created a mass postsecondary system. With a participation rate of more than 40 percent for eighteen-to twenty-one-year-olds, Canada ranked first among OECD nations. The system can be characterized as soft federalism. While the federal government has since the 1950s shouldered a significant portion of the bill for universities, constitutionally the responsibility has remained with the provinces. The level of institutional autonomy enjoyed by universities is probably more pronounced in Canada than in any other OECD country. The public monopoly over the binary structure (colleges and universities) accounts for the limited competition and the perceived equivalence among credentials across the country. This state public system is relatively homogeneous and, as a vestige of its roots in the United Kingdom and France, is still committed to the ethos of liberal education rather than vocationalism.
Issues and Problems
The key issues and problems facing the Canadian education systems are as follows: deprofessionalization; the dominance of a political-economic imperative in the formulation of state educational policy (accountability, privatization, market, choice, and decentralization); multiculturalism and diversity; restructuring and retrenchment; and the demographic changes facing all industrialized nations.
As governments have limited the size of the "public space" in Canadian society, so necessarily the ideals of professionalism have come under attack. On the one hand, the creation of professional "colleges of teachers" in British Columbia (in 1986) and in Ontario (in 1996), as well as the current attempts for such undertakings in Quebec, are indicators of the professionalizing trend. Other such initiatives, also present in other provinces (namely, Alberta, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia), aim at raising the standards in teacher training and at better controlling its quality through the definition of standards for training and practice. Yet the discourse of professionalism has in some respects been co-opted by the state and transformed into government by norms. The substitution of credentials for professional practice, while intended to support professionalization, serves instead to undermine it. Credentialism becomes the overriding trend and the substitute for the promotion of professionalism.
In the 1990s, accountability replaced autonomy in discussions of roles within the state. Accountability has also come to mean recognition of the dominance of market ideology. Governments press educational institutions and systems to be more responsive to the economy and to create alliances with the private sector. The accountability models are embedded within the broader, ideological mechanisms - variously characterized as public-sector reform, new public management, and the "evaluative state" - that have accompanied the political-economic transition from welfare state to the global economy.
The severe limitations on public expenditures are linked to the general suspicion of public institutions and a belief in the greater efficiency of free-market forces. The key policy terms that are the symbols of both market and accountability are "choice" and "privatization." The battle against federal and provincial deficits and the adoption of neoliberal assumptions concerning the role of the state has led governments to inflict considerable budget cuts on educational systems while looking to maximize their services. Yet while the position of the provinces got worse, by 2000 the federal government had moved into surplus. Efforts to decentralize responsibility and increase the autonomy of school boards and school staffs has translated into a more significant role for parents, the development of an "in-service training" culture, and the elaboration of school programs that promote the acquisition of competencies required in the new knowledge society. A parent council structure was created in British Columbia in 2002 and was already in place in six other provinces, including Ontario and Quebec.
For a majority of teachers in urban settings, the combination of immigration policy, the longstanding commitment to diversity and multiculturalism and the new emphasis on "inclusion" has created schools very different from the ones that existed in the 1980s. Schools can contain students who speak as many as eighty different languages, a high proportion of ESL (English as a second language) students, and many students with special needs. The increasing cultural and linguistic diversity has become most evident in the three major urban centers, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. On the other hand, diversity and equality have been safeguarded and extended through the teaching of heritage languages, curriculum design, and the development of programs to combat racism. The development of French-language school boards across the country is a good indicator of this trend.
A major retrenchment and restructuring has occurred throughout Canada as provincial ministries have drastically reduced the number of school boards through amalgamation. These changes have been accompanied by a tightening of control over expenditures at the local level.
Skills and knowledge have become central elements in economic policy as human resource policy has become the modern equivalent of human capital theory in the 1960s. In postsecondary education there has been a growing emphasis on technical and professional programs. Universities are developing closer links with business and industry. Since the late 1980s, the shift has been toward more private and less public expenditure on postsecondary education. Part of this shift is related to the increase in tuition fees, which have more than doubled, but this trend also includes the rise in nongovernmental sources of funding for research.
The most pressing need in Canadian education systems and the society at large is the expected shortfall in the supply of professional personnel. By 2010, Canada will need to replace 50 percent of its teachers, instructors, and professors.
Bibliography
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Fisher, Donald, and Edwards, Gail. 1999. "The Legitimation of Education in Canadian Universities: A Social History of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education/Société Canadienne pour l'étude de l'éducation." In A Challenge Met: The Definition and Recognition of the Field of Education, ed. Michel Allard, James Covert, Collette Dufresne-Tassé, Angela Hildyard, and Michael Jackson. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Society for the Study of Education and University of Toronto Press.
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Internet Resource
Centre of Education Research Information System. 2001. "Theme: Parents." www.schoolnet.ca/ceris/e/Parents1.html
— DONALD FISHER
Canada is a vast country touched by three oceans, and it holds within its boundaries prairies, hills, mountains, semidesert and desert country, rocky thin-soiled lands, a multitude of lakes, enormous forests, and Arctic tundra. While the terrain varies greatly, there is a commonality across Canada, and that is the severity of winter. Few European immigrants in Canada's early history were prepared for the cold, and from the beginning, Canadians struggled with the elements for their survival. This was a defining factor in the development of Canadian cuisine. But it is the people of Canada who, more than the land and weather, created Canada's cookery. From the First Nations people to the waves of immigrants from every country in the world, Canada's cuisine became distinctly regional.
Diversity has been a characteristic of Canadian cuisine from the beginning of settlement. In the seventeenth century, the first Europeans in Canada encountered a highly varied population of Native Peoples, for example, hunters and gatherers including the Inuit in the Arctic; agricultural people in parts of southern Quebec and Ontario; buffalo hunters on the plains; and fishermen on the West Coast among the nearly sedentary Pacific North Coastal people.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the dominant groups in Canada were British (particularly English and Scots), French, and American Loyalists. The cuisine that developed during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century reflected these influences. There were strong overtones of French cookery in Quebec, British influences in English-speaking Canada, and a strong import of culinary culture from the United States. While there were many ethnic groups in Canada by the end of World War II, British-American cookery dominated Canadian cookery. A partial exception to this generalization was the Chinese influence. Peasants from southern China immigrated to "Golden Mountain" (Canada or, more specifically, British Columbia) beginning in the 1850s. Many were employed in construction and the building of the railroad. As with other cultural groups, they were discriminated against, but they introduced Canadians to Chinese cuisine by opening Chinese restaurants in nearly every village and city across Canada.
In spite of the cultural dominance of English-speaking Canadians, other ethnic immigrant groups often settled in regional pockets where they maintained their language and their culinary traditions. Coming from different regions in their home countries, they melded traditions together. For example, in the Ukraine, women made pysanky (eggs decorated with ritualistic symbols) according to their local traditions, but in Canada, they drew designs from many regions of Ukraine. Northern and Southern Italian foods such as pasta and polenta, likewise, were simply "Italian" in Canada.
Until after World War II, ethnic foods were rarely written about in Canadian food magazines or cookbooks, and ethnic recipes were highly modified. In a 1920s community cookbook, for example, a chop suey recipe was a mixture of fried hamburger, rice, tomatoes, and onions, baked for an hour; and spaghetti was cooked meat, spaghetti, onion, butter, green pepper, and canned tomato soup, baked with buttered bread crumbs; both were seasoned only with salt and pepper. In the 1970s the milieu changed when, under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau, Canada adopted a policy of multiculturalism. It then became the fashion to share ethnicity, and the easiest way was through cookery. The foods that ethnic groups had eaten in the privacy of their homes became de rigueur.
After World War II, fast-food eateries and chain restaurants serving inexpensive, mass-produced foods swept across North America. Franchises on the U.S. model were adopted and Canadians quickly developed their own fast food restaurants for hamburgers, fried chicken, and pizza. A favorite fast-food chain is Tim Horton Donuts, a coffee and donut shop. Popular Canadian restaurant chains that developed were "road houses" serving grilled foods and pasta. The Americanization of Canadian foods and foodways was influenced also by food articles in American magazines and by television food shows.
Canadian cuisine is strongly regional in character with American influences. The eating pattern of three meals a day, the popularity of many foods, the importation of fresh produce and manufactured foods, and the eating of particular foods at the feasts of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are common denominators of the cuisine of both the United States and Canada. The real difference is the highly visible regional cuisines of Canada, based on the available ingredients and the ethnic groups who settled in these regions. Canadian cuisine cannot be understood without examining these regional traditions.
Newfoundland: a Survival Cuisine
From the early sixteenth century, the huge and lucrative cod fisheries on the coasts surrounding this island province and the Grand Banks offshore attracted fishing vessels manned by Basque, Portuguese, French, and British sailors. Before settlement, these groups salted cod in summer fish-drying camps, and then dried it on "flakes." A product that could keep indefinitely, salt cod was eaten in Europe for centuries. Eventually the English settled in the north and west, followed by the Irish, in St. John's and the east coast, and French along the south shore. Newfoundland's environment is harsh and demanding with deceivingly warm but short summers. The cuisine that developed was simple and entrenched.
Only a few ingredients are needed to make ribsticking, hearty, and soul-satisfying meals. Fish (cod) and root vegetables form the basis of the Newfoundlanders' diet. There is little agriculture on the island, but root vegetables can be grown there, and tiny vegetable garden plots are often found along the roadside on the western coast. Potatoes, carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, and cabbage are mainstays.
In 1992 the cod stocks crashed on the Grand Banks, and a moratorium was placed on commercial fishing in Canadian waters on the Banks. Although a way of life for Newfoundlanders seemed to have been lost, cod remains their favorite food. While the major cod fisheries are still closed, some fish is available on the southern coast, and local inhabitants are allowed to "jig" for cod two weekends a year. When a Newfoundlander says the word "fish," he or she means "cod," which, over the centuries, has been the preferred dish. A fresh cod dinner is Newfoundland comfort food. A thick piece of cod, usually grilled or poached, is served with mashed potatoes, mixed peas and carrots, coleslaw and fluffy white rolls. Delicacies are cod tongues and cheeks, either sautéed or deep-fried. Salt cod is prepared most commonly as fish 'n' brewis (also called "fisherman's brewis"). The salted fish is soaked, shredded, and cooked with dried bread chunks (hardtack) until thick, and schruncheons (fried diced salt pork) with its fat is poured over the mixture.
Pea soup (a thick potage of yellow split peas with diced turnips, carrots, and potatoes) can be traced back to the daily fare of sixteenth-century fishermen—with salt beef added on Sundays. Split peas are also used to make pease pudding by dropping a pudding bag of peas into Jigg's dinner, a boiled dinner of salt beef, onions, potatoes, carrots, and turnips.
To supplement and vary the fish and salt-beef diet, many men hunt partridge, ptarmigan, rabbits, turr (a seabird), moose, caribou, and deer. Moose is preferred only because it will fill the hunter's freezer—and his neighbors'—and last through the winter. A traditional wild-game dish is flipper pie made from seal flippers, carefully prepared and cooked in a pastry. The wilds also provide berries in abundance, eaten fresh and preserved for the long winter, either frozen for pies and other desserts or made into jams. Favorites are blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, partridgeberries (lignonberries), and yellow baking apples (cloud berries).
More than anything else, Newfoundlanders are known for fun: parties, Newfoundland fiddling, and rum. Screech, a dark rum, was named because American servicemen during World War II found it made them "screech." Those "from away" may undergo a Newfoundland initiation by tossing back Screech and reciting an intonation, always with good humor, and sometimes accompanied by kissing a cod.
The Maritime Provinces: an Entrenched Cuisine
The cuisine of the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.) is a bittersweet one—bitter because so many people were dislocated, either within the Maritimes or because they had to leave their homelands, sweet because the Maritime cuisine was a result. Early migration into the Atlantic provinces generally took place of necessity. Power struggles between France and England led to the forced displacement of the French Acadians in 1755, and American planters took over their rich farmlands. Scattered to many countries, some Acadians returned after 1763, not to their rich farmlands but to less desirable land, or they turned to fishing. Settling in parts of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Quebec, they developed a distinct cuisine in each area: buckwheat pancakes, poutine râpée (dumpling stuffed with salt pork), râpure (grated potato and chicken or seafood pie), fricots (stews), rabbit pies, and many other traditional dishes.
Later in the century, in 1783, United Empire Loyalists, scorned in the United States, made their way into the Maritimes. These American Loyalists brought New England food traditions, popularizing corn in many forms (corn-on-the-cob, johnnycakes, corn puddings, and Anadama or Yankee bread), and the Saturday night custom of baked beans and brown bread. Freed African loyalists and others of African descent also came north. Blacks settling in the Shelburne area brought Southern American cooking: deep-fat frying, barbecued meat, the use of corn meal and hominy, pork, rice, and fish. Germans left for Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, in 1753 and contributed Solomon Gundy (pickled herring), soused eels, and sauerkraut. Scots in Cape Breton brought oat cakes and porridge bread. These early settlers created distinct regional cuisines. But the one traditional meal common to the Maritimes is Dutch mess, also called hugger-in-buff, fish and schrunchions, or house bankin, depending upon where one lives. Salt cod is soaked, then cooked; potatoes are boiled in the fish broth; salt pork and onions are fried, vinegar and cream added and poured over the cod and potatoes. The next day, leftovers are mashed and made into fish cakes.
The abundant fish and shellfish were the key ingredients defining early Maritime cuisine, and they continue to do so today. These seafoods, along with root vegetables, dried peas, cabbage, and trade goods from Britain formed the basic components used in early eastern Canadian cookery. Early English colonists were dependent upon Great Britain for food, and these supplies grew into a thriving trade of tea, sugar, spices (ginger was a favorite), and dried fruits. The triangular trade between England, New England, and the Caribbean brought molasses, rum, and ginger from the Caribbean. Halifax, the early center of British social life, retains a distinct English character. Gaily signed pubs serve meat pies and fish and chips. British dishes linger—roast beef with York-shire pudding, trifle, and gingerbread.
Each Maritime province has vast coastal areas, and cod is common to all. Products of the sea vary somewhat in each province. Prince Edward Island is associated with lobster fisheries, aqua-cultured blue mussels, Malpeque oysters, and Irish moss. Nova Scotia is known for Digby scallops and dulse (a reddish seaweed). New Brunswick fishes for Fundy salmon, smelt, trout, and shad. Samphire greens (eaten locally) are harvested from the shores of each of these provinces. In countryside Nova Scotia, roadside "canteens," one-room buildings, sell some of the region's best seafood: lobster or clam rolls, fried scallops, or fried fish—all seafoods cooked fresh from the sea.
The harvest from the land is also regional. Nova Scotia is known for its Annapolis Valley apple orchards, New Brunswick for its maple syrup and wild chanterelles, and P.E.I. for its potatoes. New Brunswick fiddleheads from the Ostrich fern are a gourmet delicacy picked in early spring before the fronds open, and are cooked as a vegetable.
By the early 1800s, established food traditions had become associated with a way of life, and to a great extent, have remained impervious to change. Even the large migrations of ethnic groups after World War II were insufficient to displace these three-hundred-year-old culinary traditions.
Quebec: a Distinct Cuisine
Quebecois consider themselves a distinct society, and this is reflected in their cuisine. Restaurant menus are written in French, and the cuisine is distinctly French, but with a difference: most of all, the love of—even obsession with—good food and its celebration, the use of flavorful sauces, the elaboration of courses, the use of fresh ingredients, and the respect for their chefs. The first European settlers in Canada in the early seventeenth century were French. They maintained close ties with their mother country until after the English conquest in the mid-eighteenth century. At that time, communication with France was cut off.
Thus, many traditional Quebec dishes resemble those prepared in medieval and early Renaissance France. Well-known favorites across Quebec are cretons (a rich pork pâté), tourtière (meat pie), ragoût de pattes et de boulettes (pigs' feet and meatball stew), les cipaille or cipâte (baked casserole made by layering pastry with meat, poultry, and/or seafood), and galettes de sarrasin (buckwheat pancakes). A hearty fare, originally cooked for fishermen, farmers, and loggers, they are today reserved for family gatherings and holidays.
The abundance of wild game and the land available to provide forage for it probably influenced Quebec's cuisine more than any other factor. This provided ordinary settlers with meat and gave them an equality with royalty unknown to the seventeenth-century French peasant. Indeed, in France at that time, food was frequently scarce. It is not surprising that the Quebecois' diet was rich in meat, poultry, and fish and that regional dishes were made with these ingredients.
Although maintaining their French heritage, the Quebecois incorporated ingredients and dishes from other cultures. From the beginning, the French had close ties with aboriginal peoples whose culture dictated that they share game and fish with their friends. The Native Peoples showed them the edible wild flora and fauna, and the French were quick to incorporate wild game, berries, and maple sugar into their diet. It should be noted that corn, beans, and squash had already been introduced into France before Quebec was colonized, and potatoes are thought to have been introduced by the British. American Loyalists and British immigrants after 1755 also influenced Quebec cookery; the French especially liked sweet British desserts, many of them made with molasses. Cultural influences continue today as with the Middle Eastern innovation mechoui, a popular party at which a whole animal is barbecued, usually wild game like buffalo or wild boar. Quebec cities, like other Canadian centers, have a multicultural character. This is especially true of Montreal, where there are more French-speaking immigrants than in other major Canadian cities: Haitians, Lebanese, and Vietnamese have all influenced Quebec's cookery, particularly in their family-owned restaurants and their ingredients in small grocery stores. Moreover, Montreal's population contains a mix of people speaking a multitude of languages who have contributed their foodways to the cultural mix of this city.
Quebec's cuisine is a highly regional one. The Institut de Tourisme et d'Hôtellerie du Québec has identified at least seventeen gastronomical regions within the province and has searched out more than 30,000 regional recipes. In the Gaspé, for instance, salt is used liberally and salmon layered with pastry is their version of cipâte. People from the Lac Saint-Jean area are called "les Bluets" (blueberries), and these berries are made into grandpères (dumplings cooked in blueberry sauce) or a blueberry cipaille. Gourgane beans brought from Europe are unique to this area and are often made into soupe aux gourganes, a filling bean, barley, and vegetable potage.
Today, young Quebec-trained chefs search out local ingredients, experiment with them, and to some extent are turning to France for inspiration. Artisanal breads, soft cheeses, goat cheeses, Normandy-style apple cider, local wines, organically grown vegetables, white asparagus, fresh herbs (especially summer savory), wild mushrooms, rabbits, caribou, and wild game birds are some of the ingredients finding their way onto the Quebec table. The Quebec diet is changing but the accent remains distinctly French Quebec.
Ontario: a Dynamic Cuisine
The French and then the British and, shortly thereafter, American Loyalist immigrants had close contact with members of the Iroquoian tribes. From these original farming inhabitants, the immigrants learned how to plant corn, beans, squash, Jerusalem artichokes, and sunflowers, and to tap the maple trees for their sweet sugar. In the early days of settlement, wild game and fresh fish from the streams and the many lakes in Ontario were plentiful. The French left little impact upon Ontario's cuisine, but the English foodways became dominant: their style of eating and especially their love of sweets, roasted beef and pork, cooked root vegetables, white bread, and tea. One of the first tasks the settlers had was to build grist mills to grind wheat for their cakes and breads. They found the farmland in southern Ontario to be fertile, and most of the crops from their homelands flourished. Dairy herds were established, which led in the nineteenth century to a significant trade in cheddar cheese with England and the popularity of this cheese in Ontario.
There were two influential groups who came north with the Loyalists at the end of the eighteenth century. The Iroquois under the leadership of Joseph Brant settled near Brandford to form the Six Nations. An agricultural people, they grew the "Three Sisters"—corn, beans, and squash—and reinforced the growth and use of these crops in Ontario. The other group was the Pennsylvania German Mennonites who took up farming in the Waterloo area. When the Ontario Mennonites chose their food preparations from the Pennsylvania German recipe repertoire, a difference appeared. While the recipes they loved best were still distinctly Mennonite, the choices of foods changed. In Ontario, they are known for summer sausages, Nusschinken (cool-smoked ham), smoked pork chops, Koch Käse (a runny cooked whey cheese flavored with caraway seed, smeared on bread with apple butter), shoofly pie made with maple syrup, Dutch apple pie, doughnuts, and mint tea.
In the nineteenth century, southern Ontario was the terminus of the "underground railroad," offering shelter to American blacks escaping slavery. They brought Southern American cookery to Ontario. Irish, Scots, English, and other groups streamed into Ontario during this century, reinforcing British cuisine. Rutabagas (called turnips) were standard winter fare. Steamed carrot pudding became a Christmas tradition. China tea cups were given to brides, and the prescribed wedding cake was a dark fruit cake.
Some ethnic groups entering Ontario in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed communities around Ontario: the Poles in Wilno, the Portuguese in Strathroy, the Italians in Guelph, the Scots in the Renfrew valley near Ottawa, the Finns in Thunder Bay, and Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans in Hamilton. This is not to say that myriad cultural groups are not found in these areas; the point is that in these areas, the home cuisine and the language of these settlers was maintained.
Coming primarily from politically troubled parts of the world, approximately 175,000 immigrants annually enter Canada. Of these, about half locate in Ontario, the majority moving into the Toronto area. Immediately after World War II came Italians, Eastern Europeans, British war brides, and many others. In the 1970s, after Canada's newly entrenched multicultural policy, immigrants streamed in from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Somalia, Ethiopia, Croatia, Serbia, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and other countries. Ontario had long served up a meat, potato, and root vegetable table, but the influx of new people and their culinary traditions meant a developing and rapidly changing gastronomy in Ontario, led by Toronto.
Toronto, the most culturally diverse city in Canada, is a reflection of Canadian multiculturalism in the makeup of its population and in its cuisine. There are five Chinatowns in the Toronto area, most recently settled by affluent Chinese from Hong Kong, and Chinese restaurants represent every region in China. Upscale restaurants serve Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Indian, Lebanese, Caribbean, and American cuisine, but the neighborhood dining spots are the best places to find the comfort food of nearly every nation in the world and at a reasonable price.
As a result of this diversity, Ontario is somewhat fragmented in its cuisine, but people in Ontario pride themselves on a receptivity to the flavors of the world. Hoisin sauce, garam masala, baba ghanoush, phyllo pastry, flat breads, tzatziki, pierogies, rice and beans, Jamaican meat patties, and espresso are, if not daily fare, part of Ontario's food repertoire.
The Prairies: Bread and Beef
Traveling west through the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, seemingly endless fields of wheat dominate the landscape. The wheat belt runs through all three prairie provinces, and wheat is an important economic export. Canadian cuisine has been affected by this bountiful crop since it was first planted on the Prairies in the last half of the nineteenth century. Canadians have a history of baking. In 1913 Five Roses Flour Company published a cookbook of recipes collected from women across Canada. By 1915 this book was found in 950,000 or nearly half of the homes in Canada. In addition to bread and pastry flours, durum wheat that is made into semolina flour for making pastas is grown here.
Prairie history, however, was not one of farming. Native Americans who dominated the plains lived primarily on buffalo, which they preserved by drying and mixing it with buffalo fat and berries, usually Saskatoon berries, and storing the mixture, known as pemmican, in containers made of buffalo skin. French and Scottish voyagers of the fur trade were provisioned with pemmican by Native People, and early settlers relied upon it. When overhunting led to the demise of the huge buffalo herds, beef took its place. A favored method of beef cookery is grilling, and some cook it outdoors year round. For community barbecues, a hole is dug with a backhoe large enough for several cords of wood and an entire beef animal. After twelve hours of underground cooking, the beef is sliced and served with baked beans, fresh breads, salads, pickles and relishes, pies and cakes. Calgary, the home of the Canadian cowboy, glorifies the chuck wagon at "stampede," the annual rodeo. Chuck wagon races are an awaited event; the wagons dash pell-mell around a circle and at the finish line the cowboy "cook" must be the first to light the campfire. Chuck wagon expressions humorously included "baked wind pills" (baked beans), "CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad) strawberries" (prunes), "dough-gods" (dumplings), "paperweights" (hot biscuits), and "yesterday, today and forever" (hash).
Until the 1950s, British settlers strongly influenced prairie cuisine. Stews, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and cakes named after British royalty (Prince of Wales, Prince Albert, King George and King Edward cakes) were popular. Today, Alberta is dotted with English tea houses, in as unlikely locations as a grain elevator.
While British cookery dominated the great wave of immigration (over a million) in the early part of the twentieth century, immigrant groups did not sacrifice their culinary traditions. Russian Mennonites settling in Manitoba, Icelandic immigrants in Grimli, Manitoba, Hutterites in Alberta, and the French who came early in settlement, particularly in Winnipeg, continued to cook their favorite recipes, as had their families before them.
Ukrainians, however, influenced prairie cookery. From the time they arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, they brought with them a tradition of wheat farming and cuisine. Mothers taught daughters the ancient art of making traditional breads and pysanky. They introduced varenyky or pierogies (flour-based rounds of dough stuffed with a unique Canadian potato and cheddar cheese mixture), stuffed cabbage rolls, psyrizhky (baked stuffed buns), and paska (Easter bread).
Newer immigration waves have made their mark on Prairie cuisine, particularly in the cities. In Winnipeg there is the largest Philippine population outside of that country. West Indian roti shops, Middle Eastern foods, and other ethnic foods add to the culinary flavors of Winnipeg, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Calgary.
British Columbia: Aboriginal, English, Chinese, and California Fusion
Because of settlement patterns in British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, its cuisine is different from the rest of Canada. The aboriginal people included many bands of North Coastal and Interior Coastal Peoples living in small villages along the Pacific Ocean and in the interior mountainous areas. By the 1860s there was a genteel English colony on Vancouver Island enjoying garden parties and afternoon tea. Chinese laborers arrived in the last half of the nineteenth century, and in addition to opening restaurants, frequently became cooks in English homes. In the twentieth century, the Californian free-spirited cookery spread up the coast, espousing the use of fresh local ingredients and healthy cooking, including vegetarianism. Many other cultural groups added to this mix but the dominant cuisine is Aboriginal, English, Chinese, and Californian.
As the cuisine in British Columbia developed, locally grown or harvested ingredients from land and sea respectively were adopted by all groups and each modified them according to their backgrounds. The Pacific harvest focuses on salmon: coho, chinook, pink, chum, and red sockeye salmon. Halibut, black cod, lingcod, tuna, rockfish, and eulachon are also favored fish. Shellfish include crabs (especially Dungeness) oysters, scallops, shrimp, prawns, abalone, and many varieties of clams. Agricultural areas in the beginning were developed in the Fraser River delta, supplying produce for Victoria and Chinese vegetables for early Chinese immigrants. Further inland, microclimates characterize the agricultural areas of the Okanagan and Similkimen Valleys, the fruit-growing regions of British Columbia. This climate is ideal for viticulture, and some grapes left on the vine until January are made into Eiswein. Soapberries, thimble-berries, salmonberries, huckleberries, and many other berries are harvested from the wild, as are pine mushrooms growing in evergreen forests.
The first inhabitants who influenced British Columbian cookery were the North Coast Native Peoples. Salmon was and continues to be their primary foodstuff: it is baked, poached, barbecued, and smoked. Family smokehouses are common in the coastal villages. Women also preserve salmon by canning for times when it is not in season. Eulachon oil and herring eggs are prized foods. Eulachon, a small oily fish (also called "candle fish" because when dried it can be lighted), can be eaten fried or baked, but is prized more for its oil, used as a dip for foods and as a seasoning. Spruce boughs are placed in the ocean water and become a spawning site for herring. The branches are harvested with the eggs still clinging to them and are then dried. It is not uncommon to see these boughs drying on the sides of houses. Roots were gathered in the past but are not as commonly used today with the exception of roasted camas bulbs. Indian ice cream is made by whipping the indigenous soapberries into a froth. These local ingredients still dominate aboriginal cooking, particularly since food must be brought to many native villages by ferry. However, the overall cuisine of the Native Peoples has been affected by Canadian culinary culture and their daily menus are as likely to include pizza, burgers, donuts and coffee, stews, pies and cakes as that of any other Canadian. But they value their distinct culinary traditions.
Victoria on Vancouver Island, more than any other Canadian city, has a decidedly English character. Afternoon tea is still a tradition, and locally brewed ales can be found at English-style pubs. In the warm climate (by Canadian standards), growers around Victoria are able to successfully harvest such fruits as kiwi and figs. Their small farms are often organic, and herbs are grown year-round.
Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, although multicultural, has a character all its own. Here there are English, Chinese, Pacific Coast Native, Italian, and Japanese, as well as Californian influences. The Chinese influence is strongest in Vancouver. The Chinese community demands fresh produce and fish—evident in Vancouver food stores. Chinese vegetables such as gai lohn have long been grown in the Fraser River delta. Live fish and shellfish from the Pacific are kept in tanks (goe-duck clams, Dungeness crabs, and rockfish). Recent wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong created a demand for imported Chinese foods and medicines such as ginseng (grown commercially in British Columbia and Ontario), dried abalone, shark's fin, and bird's nest.
Young, well-trained chefs are combining this cooking in various adaptations, creating a fusion cuisine. These young people revere local ingredients, ethnic ideas and styles, organically grown foods, herbs, edible flowers, whole grains, and enjoy the good life.
The North: Finding Food for Survival
Canada's agricultural belt as well as its population is concentrated in approximately the lower one-third of its land mass. The "North" includes the territories of the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and the newest territory, Nunavut. For purposes of describing the regional cuisines of Canada, the forest land south of the tundra and north of the agricultural belt are also included, as are parts of the Prairie provinces, Ontario, Quebec and Labrador.
Indigenous ingredients distinguish the cuisine of northern Canada from other regions. Because food supplies are difficult to transport, there is more of an emphasis upon local foods than in southern Canada. Caribou, muskoxen, moose, deer, ptarmigan, and arctic char are hunted or fished. Today aboriginal people supply wild game to restaurants and the luxury market, particularly caribou, muskoxen, and arctic char. Migratory ducks and geese provide variety to the larder in the fall. Berries grow profusely—blueberries, partridge berries, cranberries, and black currants are made into pies, preserves, jellies, and sauces. These foods all have local habitats—not all are found in every part of Canada's north.
The aboriginal population comprises about twothirds of the northern population. Before European settlement, the Inuit occupied the Arctic, that is, the tundra beyond the tree line that encompasses the northern third of Canada's land mass. The aboriginal tribes of the Mackenzie and Yukon River basins and the Northern Cree occupy the northern wooded areas. Before contact with Europeans, these Peoples of the First Nations were self-sufficient and lived seasonally, either following herds of caribou or moving from place to place where food could be found. Their diet was rich in protein, with plant materials making up an estimated five percent of their food. This diet was healthy and supplied all their nutritional needs. In the twentieth century, attempts to assimilate Native Peoples into white society changed the native culture dramatically. Many were moved to permanent settlements (especially the Inuit) and were no longer able to resume their migratory food patterns. They began to live on foods that could be transported into their villages, usually by plane. These foods were much different from their traditional diet. Carbohydrates were introduced, particularly white flour and refined sugar. Manufactured foods like potato chips and soft drinks became popular, especially because the traditional pattern was to eat when hungry rather than at set mealtimes. Rich in fat and starch, these new foods were detrimental to the health of Native Peoples, leading to diabetes and other dietary diseases. While there is a trend among Native Peoples to return to their traditional diet, permanent settlements make this difficult.
The largest white settlements in the north are in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Dawson and Whitehorse were settled during the gold rush, and Yellowknife was established as the capital of the Northwest Territories. The Yukon today has predominately British roots. The center of the gold rush beginning in 1897, Dawson drew miners, honky-tonk girls, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). To prevent starvation, miners were required to pack in a year's supply of food before they were allowed into the territory. Provisions were basic and affected the cuisine of the territory: beans, flour, dried fruit, sugar, bacon, and tea were common items. Wild game supplemented their plain diets, but if they struck it rich they could buy luxury foods such as chocolate, champagne, and fresh eggs. Prospectors became known as "sour-doughs" because they craved white bread so much they baked it in their camps. Legend has it that they kept the yeast starter alive by carrying it in their armpits when traveling in the bitter cold.
Today procurement of food for the north still requires a great deal of planning. Winter is unpredictable, and even where there are logging trails or water access to northern communities, food supplies are sometimes delayed. Nearly any food can be shipped in by air, but that option is expensive. With modern communications with the rest of the world, there is demand for many more food products, especially in increasingly popular luxury fly-in hunting and fishing lodges. Overall, diets in the North are simpler than elsewhere, but definitely Canadian in style.
From coast to coast, diverse regional cuisines dominate Canadian cooking. Canadians today value their ethnic origins highly and take pride in preserving their culture, particularly their cuisine. Overlying these regional cuisines is a dominant North American influence, which is not surprising since there was American immigration into Canada early in its history, the language is understood by most Canadians, and the cultural influence of the media has brought trends and new foods to Canada. Canadians also take advantage of fruits and vegetables grown south of the border that lend variety to winter meals. One cannot say that there is a national cuisine, as there is in Mexico, but one must experience and enjoy the diverse regional cuisines of Canada, which together create a diversity of foodways that reflect Canadian society.
The Order of Good Cheer
The small band of French explorers at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, anticipated the winter of 1606 with dread. The previous winter many of their men had died from a mysterious "land-sickness." The illness was thought to be caused by ill-temper, idleness, and discontent. Samuel de Champlain, a member of the band, founded L'ordre de bon temps (the Order of Good Cheer) to prevent the illness. The object of the society was to go hunting and fishing for wild game and seafood that could be served up in a series of feasts held throughout the winter.
The feasting was met with great enthusiasm by Chief Henri Membertou and his Mi'kmaq followers, who joined the hunting forays and were invited to the grand dinners. It was the custom of the Mi'kmaq to share their food with whoever was in the vicinity, and the French reciprocated this generosity. The variety of raw ingredients for their meals was extensive—venison, moose, beaver, ducks and geese, salmon and trout caught through the ice, scallops, cockles, sea urchin, crabs, and lobster. In addition to these foods, there was plenty of wine and provisions from France.
Although we do not know the dishes prepared for the feasts, the gentlemen in the group were accustomed to sophisticated food. Champlain had been a visitor to the court of Henry IV; one of the men wrote in his diary that their food was as good as roastmeats from the cook shops of Paris. As well, Champlain kept stocked fish ponds near the Habitation.
The Order did help to fend off the illness (scurvy) during the winter. More than anything else, however, the lasting benefit of the dinners was an enduring friendship between the Mi'kmaq and the French. As others have found, the dining table is much better than a negotiating table for mediating conflicts between cultures. The spirit of the Order of Good Cheer is a culinary legacy to Canadians.
Poor Man's Fare
Pâté à la râpure (or rappie pie, the English name) is a traditional Acadian dish with its roots in the frugality of French women. After the British victory in Nova Scotia in the late eighteenth century, some families who had been expelled from the fertile Annapolis Valley returned, but to fishing or to farming marginal land. Times were extremely hard, but they were able to cultivate potatoes—and the men liked their white shirts starched. The women made starch by grating potatoes, squeezing out the starch, and boiling the white shirts in the extract. Since they couldn't waste the potato gratings, they put them into a pan with lobster or fish and baked this mixture. The result, distinctly different from sliced and baked potatoes, was a gelatinous, translucent mixture flavored with seafood, called râpure. Today the tradition continues and, although they still squeeze out the starch to give râpure its distinct character, the starch is seldom used for stiffening white shirts.
Cabin Au Sucre
Where the sugar maples grow in Quebec, there will be "sugar shacks." From the beginning of settlement, colonists tapped the clear maple sap to produce sugar for the year's use as a sweetener. "Spiles," originally wooden tubes with sharpened ends and now metal tubes with hooks for buckets or tubing, were placed in holes drilled into the sugar maple trees. When the nights were cold and days warm, the sap flowed. In the old days, horses hauled tubs of the clear liquid to a covered shed where the sap was boiled down day and night. It took thirty to forty buckets of sap to produce one bucket of golden maple syrup. Men and boys stayed for weeks in the bush tending the fires and watching the syrup so that it would not burn. Today, when one drives through Quebec in the early spring before the snow melts, buckets adorning maple trees and smoke billowing from the bush are a common sight. From this, today's cabin au sucre, or sugar shack, has become a Quebec feature that anyone can enjoy. City folk today flock to the cabins au sucre to feast on maple-drenched dishes, to dance, and to drink. Outdoors, children are treated to la tire, syrup boiled down to a taffy and hardened on snow, and horses draw wagons of fun-seekers into the bush to view the miles of plastic tubing collecting the clear sap—Quebec "gold."
Bibliography
Aitken, Julia, and Anita Stewart. The Ontario Harvest Cookbook: An Exploration of Feasts and Flavours. Toronto: Macmillan, 1996.
Armstrong, Julian. A Taste of Quebec. Toronto: Macmillan, 1990.
Barer-Stein, Thelma. You Eat What You Are: People, Culture and Food Traditions. 2nd ed. Toronto: Firefly Books, 1999.
Canadian Historical Association. Canada's Ethnic Groups, series of booklets. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1982–1991.
Driver, Elizabeth. A Bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks (1825–1949). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.
Ferguson, Carol, and Margaret Fraser. A Century of Canadian Home Cooking: 1900 through the '90s. Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall, 1992.
Five Roses Cook Book. Montreal: Lake of the Woods Milling Co., 1913.
Institut de Tourisme et d'Hôtellerie du Québec. Cuisine du Québec. Montreal: Les Éditions TransMo, 1985.
Lafrance, Marc, and Yvon Desloges. A Taste of History: The Origins of Québec's Gastronomy. Montreal: Les Éditions de la Chenelière, 1989.
Nightingale, Marie. Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens. New York: Scribners, 1971.
Ontario Historical Society. Consuming Passions: Eating and Drinking Traditions in Ontario. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1990.
Powers, Jo Marie, ed. Buon appetito! Italian Foodways in Ontario. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 2000.
Powers, Jo Marie, ed. From Cathay to Canada: Chinese Cuisine in Transition. Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1998.
Powers, Jo Marie, and Anita Stewart, eds. Northern Bounty: A Celebration of Canadian Cuisine. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1995.
Stechishin, Savella. Traditional Ukrainian Cookery. Winnipeg: Trident Press, 1957.
Stewart, Anita. The Flavours of Canada: A Celebration of the Finest Regional Foods. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2000.
Turner, Nancy J. Food Plants of Interior First Peoples. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997.
—Jo Marie Powers
Nation in northern North America, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Pacific Ocean and Alaska to the west, and the United States to the south. Its capital is Ottawa, and its largest city is Toronto. In area, Canada is the second largest nation in the world, behind Russia.
| It is 10:14 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: Labrador (exception), Newfoundland. | ![]() |
| It is 9:44 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: New Brunswick, Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island. | ![]() |
| It is 8:44 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: Nunavut (Eastern), Quebec, Quebec (far east), Ontario. | ![]() |
| It is 7:44 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: Ontario (western), Saskatchewan (exceptions - east), Nunavut - Southampton Island, Nunavut (Central), Manitoba. | ![]() |
| It is 6:44 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: Saskatchewan (exceptions - west), British Columbia (exception 2), Nunavut (Mountain), Saskatchewan, Alberta, Northwest Territories. | ![]() |
| It is 5:44 PM, May 31, in the following region(s) of Canada: Yukon, British Columbia (exception 1), British Columbia. | ![]() |
| Background: | A land of vast distances and rich natural resources, Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867 while retaining ties to the British crown. Economically and technologically the nation has developed in parallel with the US, its neighbor to the south across an unfortified border. Canada faces the political challenges of meeting public demands for quality improvements in health care and education services, as well as responding to separatist concerns in predominantly francophone Quebec. Canada also aims to develop its diverse energy resources while maintaining its commitment to the environment. |

| Location: | Northern North America, bordering the North Atlantic Ocean on the east, North Pacific Ocean on the west, and the Arctic Ocean on the north, north of the conterminous US |
| Geographic coordinates: | 60 00 N, 95 00 W |
| Map references: | North America |
| Area: | total: 9,984,670 sq km land: 9,093,507 sq km water: 891,163 sq km |
| Area - comparative: | somewhat larger than the US |
| Land boundaries: | total: 8,893 km border countries: US 8,893 km (includes 2,477 km with Alaska) |
| Coastline: | 202,080 km |
| Maritime claims: | territorial sea: 12 nm contiguous zone: 24 nm exclusive economic zone: 200 nm continental shelf: 200 nm or to the edge of the continental margin |
| Climate: | varies from temperate in south to subarctic and arctic in north |
| Terrain: | mostly plains with mountains in west and lowlands in southeast |
| Elevation extremes: | lowest point: Atlantic Ocean 0 m highest point: Mount Logan 5,959 m |
| Natural resources: | iron ore, nickel, zinc, copper, gold, lead, molybdenum, potash, diamonds, silver, fish, timber, wildlife, coal, petroleum, natural gas, hydropower |
| Land use: | arable land: 4.57% permanent crops: 0.65% other: 94.78% (2005) |
| Irrigated land: | 7,850 sq km (2003) |
| Total renewable water resources: | 3,300 cu km (1985) |
| Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): | total: 44.72 cu km/yr (20%/69%/12%) per capita: 1,386 cu m/yr (1996) |
| Natural hazards: | continuous permafrost in north is a serious obstacle to development; cyclonic storms form east of the Rocky Mountains, a result of the mixing of air masses from the Arctic, Pacific, and North American interior, and produce most of the country's rain and snow east of the mountains |
| Environment - current issues: | air pollution and resulting acid rain severely affecting lakes and damaging forests; metal smelting, coal-burning utilities, and vehicle emissions impacting on agricultural and forest productivity; ocean waters becoming contaminated due to agricultural, industrial, mining, and forestry activities |
| Environment - international agreements: | party to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Sulfur 85, Air Pollution-Sulfur 94, Antarctic-Environmental Protocol, Antarctic-Marine Living Resources, Antarctic Seals, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands signed, but not ratified: Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Marine Life Conservation |
| Geography - note: | second-largest country in world (after Russia); strategic location between Russia and US via north polar route; approximately 90% of the population is concentrated within 160 km of the US border |
| Population: | 33,487,208 (July 2009 est.) |
| Age structure: | 0-14 years: 16.1% (male 2,761,711/female 2,626,836) 15-64 years: 68.7% (male 11,633,950/female 11,381,735) 65 years and over: 15.2% (male 2,220,189/female 2,862,787) (2009 est.) |
| Median age: | total: 40.4 years male: 39.3 years female: 41.5 years (2009 est.) |
| Population growth rate: | 0.817% (2009 est.) |
| Birth rate: | 10.28 births/1,000 population (2009 est.) |
| Death rate: | 7.61 deaths/1,000 population (2008 est.) |
| Net migration rate: | 5.63 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2009 est.) |
| Urbanization: | urban population: 80% of total population (2008) rate of urbanization: 1% annual rate of change (2005-10 est.) |
| Sex ratio: | at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.02 male(s)/female 65 years and over: 0.78 male(s)/female total population: 0.98 male(s)/female (2009 est.) |
| Infant mortality rate: | total: 5.04 deaths/1,000 live births male: 5.37 deaths/1,000 live births female: 4.69 deaths/1,000 live births (2009 est.) |
| Life expectancy at birth: | total population: 81.23 years male: 78.69 years female: 83.91 years (2009 est.) |
| Total fertility rate: | 1.58 children born/woman (2009 est.) |
| HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate: | 0.4% (2007 est.) |
| HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS: | 73,000 (2007 est.) |
| HIV/AIDS - deaths: | fewer than 500 (2007 est.) |
| Nationality: | noun: Canadian(s) adjective: Canadian |
| Ethnic groups: | British Isles origin 28%, French origin 23%, other European 15%, Amerindian 2%, other, mostly Asian, African, Arab 6%, mixed background 26% |
| Religions: | Roman Catholic 42.6%, Protestant 23.3% (including United Church 9.5%, Anglican 6.8%, Baptist 2.4%, Lutheran 2%), other Christian 4.4%, Muslim 1.9%, other and unspecified 11.8%, none 16% (2001 census) |
| Languages: | English (official) 59.3%, French (official) 23.2%, other 17.5% |
| Literacy: | definition: age 15 and over can read and write total population: 99% male: 99% female: 99% (2003 est.) |
| School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education): | total: 17 years male: 17 years female: 17 years (2004) |
| Education expenditures: | 5.2% of GDP (2002) |
| Country name: | conventional long form: none conventional short form: Canada |
| Government type: | a parliamentary democracy, a federation, and a Commonwealth realm |
| Capital: | name: Ottawa geographic coordinates: 45 25 N, 75 42 W time difference: UTC-5 (same time as Washington, DC during Standard Time) daylight saving time: +1hr, begins second Sunday in March; ends first Sunday in November note: Canada is divided into six time zones |
| Administrative divisions: | 10 provinces and 3 territories*; Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Northwest Territories*, Nova Scotia, Nunavut*, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Yukon Territory* |
| Independence: | 1 July 1867 (union of British North American colonies); 11 December 1931 (recognized by UK) |
| National holiday: | Canada Day, 1 July (1867) |
| Constitution: | made up of unwritten and written acts, customs, judicial decisions, and traditions; the written part of the constitution consists of the Constitution Act of 29 March 1867, which created a federation of four provinces, and the Constitution Act of 17 April 1982, which transferred formal control over the constitution from Britain to Canada, and added a Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as procedures for constitutional amendments |
| Legal system: | based on English common law, except in Quebec, where civil law system based on French law prevails; accepts compulsory ICJ jurisdiction with reservations |
| Suffrage: | 18 years of age; universal |
| Executive branch: | head of state: Queen ELIZABETH II (since 6 February 1952); represented by Governor General Michaelle JEAN (since 27 September 2005) head of government: Prime Minister Stephen HARPER (since 6 February 2006) cabinet: Federal Ministry chosen by the prime minister usually from among the members of his own party sitting in Parliament elections: the monarchy is hereditary; governor general appointed by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister for a five-year term; following legislative elections, the leader of the majority party or the leader of the majority coalition in the House of Commons is automatically designated prime minister by the governor general |
| Legislative branch: | bicameral Parliament or Parlement consists of the Senate or Senat (105 seats; members appointed by the governor general with the advice of the prime minister and serve until reaching 75 years of age) and the House of Commons or Chambre des Communes (308 seats; members elected by direct, popular vote to serve a maximum of five-year terms starting in 2009 elections) elections: House of Commons - last held 14 October 2008 (next to be held no later than 19 October 2012) election results: House of Commons - percent of vote by party - Conservative Party 37.6%, Liberal Party 26.2%, New Democratic Party 18.2%, Bloc Quebecois 10%, Greens 6.8%, other 1%; seats by party - Conservative Party 143, Liberal Party 77, New Democratic Party 37, Bloc Quebecois 49, other 2 |
| Judicial branch: | Supreme Court of Canada (judges are appointed by the prime minister through the governor general); Federal Court of Canada; Federal Court of Appeal; Provincial Courts (these are named variously Court of Appeal, Court of Queens Bench, Superior Court, Supreme Court, and Court of Justice) |
| Political parties and leaders: | Bloc Quebecois [Gilles DUCEPPE]; Conservative Party of Canada [Stephen HARPER] (a merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party); Green Party [Elizabeth MAY]; Liberal Party [Michael IGNATIEFF]; New Democratic Party [Jack LAYTON] |
| Political pressure groups and leaders: | other: agricultural sector; automobile industry; business groups; chemical industry; commercial banks; communications sector; energy industry; environmentalists; public administration groups; steel industry; trade unions |
| International organization participation: | ACCT, ADB (nonregional member), AfDB (nonregional member), APEC, Arctic Council, ARF, ASEAN (dialogue partner), Australia Group, BIS, C, CDB, CE (observer), EAPC, EBRD, ESA (cooperating state), FAO, G-20, G-7, G-8, G-10, IADB, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC, ICCt, ICRM, IDA, IEA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO, ILO, IMF, IMO, IMSO, Interpol, IOC, IOM, IPU, ISO, ITSO, ITU, ITUC, MIGA, MINUSTAH, MONUC, NAFTA, NAM (guest), NATO, NEA, NSG, OAS, OECD, OIF, OPCW, OSCE, Paris Club, PCA, PIF (partner), SECI (observer), UN, UNAMID, UNCTAD, UNDOF, UNESCO, UNFICYP, UNHCR, UNMIS, UNRWA, UNTSO, UNWTO, UPU, WCL, WCO, WFTU, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO, ZC |
| Diplomatic representation in the US: | chief of mission: Ambassador Michael WILSON chancery: 501 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001 telephone: [1] (202) 682-1740 FAX: [1] (202) 682-7701 consulate(s) general: Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tucson consulate(s): Anchorage, Houston, Philadelphia, Princeton (New Jersey), Raleigh, San Jose (California) |
| Diplomatic representation from the US: | chief of mission: Ambassador David H. WILKINS embassy: 490 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 1G8 mailing address: P. O. Box 5000, Ogdensburg, NY 13669-0430; P.O. Box 866, Station B, Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5T1 telephone: [1] (613) 688-5335 FAX: [1] (613) 688-3082 consulate(s) general: Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg |
| Flag description: | two vertical bands of red (hoist and fly side, half width) with white square between them; an 11-pointed red maple leaf is centered in the white square; the official colors of Canada are red and white |
| Economy - overview: | As an affluent, high-tech industrial society in the trillion-dollar class, Canada resembles the US in its market-oriented economic system, pattern of production, and affluent living standards. Since World War II, the impressive growth of the manufacturing, mining, and service sectors has transformed the nation from a largely rural economy into one primarily industrial and urban. The 1989 US-Canada Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (which includes Mexico) touched off a dramatic increase in trade and economic integration with the US, its principle trading partner. Canada enjoys a substantial trade surplus with the US, which absorbs nearly 80% of Canadian exports each year. Canada is the US's largest foreign supplier of energy, including oil, gas, uranium, and electric power. Given its great natural resources, skilled labor force, and modern capital plant, Canada has enjoyed solid economic growth, and prudent fiscal management has produced consecutive balanced budgets from 1997 to 2007. In 2008, growth slowed sharply as a result of the global economic downturn, US housing slump, plunging auto sector demand, and a drop in world commodity prices. Public finances, too, are set to deteriorate for the first time in a decade. Tight global credit conditions have further restrained business and housing investment, despite the conservative lending practices and strong capitalization that made Canada's major banks among the most stable in the world. |
| GDP (purchasing power parity): | $1.307 trillion (2008 est.) $1.299 trillion (2007) $1.265 trillion (2006) note: data are in 2008 US dollars |
| GDP (official exchange rate): | $1.564 trillion (2008 est.) |
| GDP - real growth rate: | 0.6% (2008 est.) 2.7% (2007 est.) 3.1% (2006 est.) |
| GDP - per capita (PPP): | $39,300 (2008 est.) $39,400 (2007 est.) $38,700 (2006 est.) note: data are in 2008 US dollars |
| GDP - composition by sector: | agriculture: 2% industry: 28.4% services: 69.6% (2008 est.) |
| Labor force: | 18.18 million (2008 est.) |
| Labor force - by occupation: | agriculture 2%, manufacturing 13%, construction 6%, services 76%, other 3% (2006) |
| Unemployment rate: | 6.1% (2008 est.) |
| Population below poverty line: | 10.8%; note - this figure is the Low Income Cut-Off (LICO), a calculation that results in higher figures than found in many comparable economies; Canada does not have an official poverty line (2005) |
| Household income or consumption by percentage share: | lowest 10%: 2.6% highest 10%: 24.8% (2000) |
| Distribution of family income - Gini index: | 32.1 (2005) |
| Investment (gross fixed): | 22.6% of GDP (2008 est.) |
| Budget: | revenues: $608.3 billion expenditures: $606 billion (2008 est.) |
| Fiscal year: | 1 April - 31 March |
| Public debt: | 62.3% of GDP (2008 est.) |
| Inflation rate (consumer prices): | 1% (January 2009 est.) |
| Central bank discount rate: | 3.5% (January 2009) |
| Commercial bank prime lending rate: | 6.1% (31 December 2007) |
| Stock of money: | $391.6 billion (31 December 2007) |
| Stock of quasi money: | $1.381 trillion (31 December 2007) |
| Stock of domestic credit: | $2.382 trillion (31 December 2007) |
| Market value of publicly traded shares: | $2.187 trillion (31 December 2007) |
| Agriculture - products: | wheat, barley, oilseed, tobacco, fruits, vegetables; dairy products; forest products; fish |
| Industries: | transportation equipment, chemicals, processed and unprocessed minerals, food products, wood and paper products, fish products, petroleum and natural gas |
| Industrial production growth rate: | -1% (2008 est.) |
| Electricity - production: | 612.6 billion kWh (2007 est.) |
| Electricity - consumption: | 530 billion kWh (2006 est.) |
| Electricity - exports: | 50.12 billion kWh (2007 est.) |
| Electricity - imports: | 19.66 billion kWh (2007 est.) |
| Electricity - production by source: | fossil fuel: 28% hydro: 57.9% nuclear: 12.9% other: 1.3% (2001) |
| Oil - production: | 3.425 million bbl/day (2007 est.) |
| Oil - consumption: | 2.371 million bbl/day (2007 est.) |
| Oil - exports: | 2.225 million bbl/day (2005) |
| Oil - imports: | 1.229 million bbl/day (2005) |
| Oil - proved reserves: | 178.6 billion bbl note: includes oil sands (1 January 2008 est.) |
| Natural gas - production: | 187 billion cu m (2007 est.) |
| Natural gas - consumption: | 92.9 billion cu m (2007 est.) |
| Natural gas - exports: | 107.3 billion cu m (2007 est.) |
| Natural gas - imports: | 13.2 billion cu m (2007 est.) |
| Natural gas - proved reserves: | 1.648 trillion cu m (1 January 2008 est.) |
| Current account balance: | $12.82 billion (2008 est.) |
| Exports: | $461.8 billion f.o.b. (2008 est.) |
| Exports - commodities: | motor vehicles and parts, industrial machinery, aircraft, telecommunications equipment; chemicals, plastics, fertilizers; wood pulp, timber, crude petroleum, natural gas, electricity, aluminum |
| Exports - partners: | US 78.9%, UK 2.8%, China 2.1% (2007) |
| Imports: | $436.7 billion f.o.b. (2008 est.) |
| Imports - commodities: | machinery and equipment, motor vehicles and parts, crude oil, chemicals, electricity, durable consumer goods |
| Imports - partners: | US 54.1%, China 9.4%, Mexico 4.2% (2007) |
| Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: | $41.08 billion (2007 est.) |
| Debt - external: | $758.6 billion (30 June 2007) |
| Stock of direct foreign investment - at home: | $586.6 billion (2008 est.) |
| Stock of direct foreign investment - abroad: | $547.2 billion (2008 est.) |
| Currency (code): | Canadian dollar (CAD) |
| Currency code: | CAD |
| Exchange rates: | Canadian dollars (CAD) per US dollar - 1.0364 (2008 est.), 1.0724 (2007), 1.1334 (2006), 1.2118 (2005), 1.301 (2004) |
| Telephones - main lines in use: | 21 million (2006) |
| Telephones - mobile cellular: | 18.749 million (2006) |
| Telephone system: | general assessment: excellent service provided by modern technology domestic: domestic satellite system with about 300 earth stations international: country code - 1; submarine cables provide links to the US and Europe; satellite earth stations - 7 (5 Intelsat - 4 Atlantic Ocean and 1 Pacific Ocean, and 2 Intersputnik - Atlantic Ocean region) (2007) |
| Radio broadcast stations: | AM 245, FM 582, shortwave 6 (2004) |
| Radios: | 32.3 million (1997) |
| Television broadcast stations: | 148 (2007) |
| Televisions: | 21.5 million (1997) |
| Internet country code: | .ca |
| Internet hosts: | 5.119 million (2008) |
| Internet Service Providers (ISPs): | 760 (2000 est.) |
| Internet users: | 28 million (2007) |
| Airports: | 1,369 (2008) |
| Airports - with paved runways: | total: 514 over 3,047 m: 18 2,438 to 3,047 m: 16 1,524 to 2,437 m: 152 914 to 1,523 m: 251 under 914 m: 77 (2008) |
| Airports - with unpaved runways: | total: 855 1,524 to 2,437 m: 70 914 to 1,523 m: 367 under 914 m: 418 (2008) |
| Heliports: | 11 (2007) |
| Pipelines: | crude and refined oil 23,564 km; liquid petroleum gas 74,980 km (2006) |
| Railways: | total: 48,068 km standard gauge: 48,068 km 1.435-m gauge (2006) |
| Roadways: | total: 1,042,300 km paved: 415,600 km (includes 17,000 km of expressways) unpaved: 626,700 km (2006) |
| Waterways: | 636 km note: Saint Lawrence Seaway of 3,769 km, including the Saint Lawrence River of 3,058 km, shared with United States (2008) |
| Merchant marine: | total: 175 by type: bulk carrier 60, cargo 13, carrier 1, chemical tanker 10, combination ore/oil 1, container 2, passenger 6, passenger/cargo 64, petroleum tanker 12, roll on/roll off 6 foreign-owned: 17 (Germany 3, Netherlands 1, Norway 3, US 10) registered in other countries: 206 (Australia 9, Bahamas 84, Barbados 9, Cambodia 2, Cyprus 2, Denmark 1, Honduras 1, Hong Kong 44, Liberia 7, Malta 1, Marshall Islands 6, Norway 10, Panama 18, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 1, Spain 4, Taiwan 2, Vanuatu 5) (2008) |
| Ports and terminals: | Fraser River Port, Halifax, Hamilton, Montreal, Port-Cartier, Quebec City, Saint John (New Brunswick), Sept-Isles, Vancouver |
| Military branches: | Canadian Forces: Land Forces Command (LFC), Maritime Command (MARCOM), Air Command (AIRCOM), Canada Command (homeland security) (2009) |
| Military service age and obligation: | 17 years of age for male and female voluntary military service (with parental consent); 16 years of age for reserve and military college applicants; Canadian citizenship or permanent residence status required; maximum 34 years of age; service obligation 3-9 years (2008) |
| Manpower available for military service: | males age 16-49: 8,072,010 females age 16-49: 7,813,462 (2008 est.) |
| Manpower fit for military service: | males age 16-49: 6,647,513 females age 16-49: 6,413,748 (2009 est.) |
| Manpower reaching militarily significant age annually: | male: 223,238 female: 210,797 (2009 est.) |
| Military expenditures: | 1.1% of GDP (2005 est.) |
| Disputes - international: | managed maritime boundary disputes with the US at Dixon Entrance, Beaufort Sea, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Gulf of Maine including the disputed Machias Seal Island and North Rock; Canada, the US, and other countries dispute the status of the Northwest Passage; US works closely with Canada to intensify security measures for monitoring and controlling legal and illegal movement of people, transport, and commodities across the international border; sovereignty dispute with Denmark over Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel between Ellesmere Island and Greenland; commencing the collection of technical evidence for submission to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in support of claims for continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its declared baselines in the Arctic, as stipulated in Article 76, paragraph 8, of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea |
| Illicit drugs: | illicit producer of cannabis for the domestic drug market and export to US; use of hydroponics technology permits growers to plant large quantities of high-quality marijuana indoors; increasing ecstasy production, some of which is destined for the US; vulnerable to narcotics money laundering because of its mature financial services sector |
Thanksgiving |
Recipes
Sauteed FiddleheadsGeographic Setting and Environment
Canada is the world's second-largest country (after Russia), and is the largest country in North America. The eastern provinces, known as the Maritimes, are separated from the rest of the country by low mountain ranges. Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island are island provinces in the Atlantic Ocean.
Along the border with the United States in the center of Canada is a fertile plain bounded by the Saint Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, and the Hudson Bay. Also along the U.S. border further to the west are farms and ranches. Extending through western Alberta to the Pacific Ocean is the northern portion of the Rocky Mountain range. Mount Logan, at 19,524 feet (5,915 meters) the highest peak in Canada, is near the Alaska border. The climate varies across the vast Canadian territory. The west coast gets about 60–120 inches (150–300 centimeters) of rain each year; the center part of the country gets less that 20 inches (50 centimeters), and the Maritime provinces 45–60 inches (115–150 centimeters). In British Columbia, there are 252 rainy days each year, but in the center of the country, there are just 100.
History and Food
France and England battled over who would colonize the territory of Canada in the late 1400s. The English explorer John Cabot arrived in Newfoundland in 1497. About 40 years later in 1534, Jacques Cartier began his exploration of Canada on behalf of France. By the early 1600s, there were permanent French colonies, and in 1663, New France was established as a territory of France. French fur traders competed with the traders of the Hudson's Bay Company, run by British merchants. Wars in North America, known as the French and Indian wars, were waged in the 1700s. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the armed fighting and established British rule over all of the territory formerly called New France.
In 1846 conflict over the western portion of the United States–Canada border was resolved, and the border was set at 49°north latitude. This border has been undisputed every since.
Food and other customs in Canada still carry hints of the colonial influences of England and France. Canadians speak English except in Quebec, where the language is French, reflecting the influence of French settlers. But there are other regional differences in food and customs, too.
Food in the provinces of Eastern Canada shows signs of English heritage, except in Quebec where the influence is French. In the provinces of Western Canada, the cuisine reflects the explorers and settlers, who, like their southern neighbors in the United States, made simple, hearty meals from available ingredients. In northern Canada—Northwest, Yukon, and Nunavut territories—the diet is limited by the short growing season, dominated by preserved food ingredients, and influenced by the native Inuit diet. And along the west coast in British Columbia, immigrants from Asian nations influence food and cultural practices. In Vancouver in the west and Toronto in the east (and in many places elsewhere in Canada), Lunar New Year celebrations were inspired by the citizens of Asian heritage living there, but are enjoyed by many other Canadians as well.
Foods of the Canadians
The favorite foods of Canadians vary slightly from region to region, and are strongly influenced by their family heritage, especially in relation to holiday celebrations. Along the Atlantic coast, seafood and dishes derived from English traditions (except in Quebec) are common. In Quebec, favorite foods come from the area's French heritage. Throughout Canada, maple syrup and maple products are popular, reflecting the significance of the maple tree, whose leaf adorns the flag of Canada. Many families enjoy a visit in early spring to a maple sugar "shack," the special rustic building where sap from maple trees is boiled in a large open pan to make maple syrup.
Later in the spring, many people in Eastern Canada visit a wooded area to harvest fiddleheads. Fiddleheads, named because they look like the coiled end of a violin ("fiddle"), are the tasty new sprouts of woodland ferns, picked before they develop into large lacy fronds. They are a fragile spring specialty, usually available for just a few weeks in the spring. Grocery stores in Canada may stock frozen fiddleheads alongside other frozen vegetables.
See Sauteed Fiddleheads recipe.
See Canadian Bacon with Maple Glaze recipe.
See Sweet Corn Pancakes recipe.
Food for Religious and Holiday Celebrations
Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October. A typical menu for Thanksgiving is similar to that served in the country's neighbor to the south, the United States.
Burns Day is celebrated January 25 to commemorate the birthday of poet Robert Burns (1759–96). It is especially significant for people of Scottish descent worldwide, and Scots Canadians are no exception. On Burns Day, the menu includes such Scottish favorites as haggis, cockaleekie soup (chicken-based leek soup), and Dundee cake (a rich fruitcake).
See Canada Day Cake recipe.
See Nanaimo Bars recipe.
Mealtime Customs
Most Canadians eat three meals each day, with breakfast featuring cold cereal, pastries, fruit juices, and hot beverages such as coffee, tea, or hot chocolate. At around noon, Canadians may enjoy a sandwich or soup; students may carry a ham and cheese sandwich, chips or pretzels, and fruit to eat a noon during the school lunch break.
For dinner, depending on where they live, Canadians may have seafood (west coast or Maritime east coast provinces), beef (western Canada, especially Alberta), or chicken or pork. Many Canadians enjoy gravy, serving it frequently with potatoes prepared in many different ways. A traditional Newfoundland dish, Fish and Brewis, features ingredients that may be stored through the long winter months. Desserts featuring maple syrup, such as Maple Syrup Upside-Down Cake or a simple Maple Sundae, are popular treats.
See Maple Sundae recipe.
See Fish and Brewis recipe.
See Maple Syrup Upside-Down Cake recipe.
Politics, Economics, and Nutrition
Only about 5 percent of Canada's land is considered arable (able to grow crops), and agriculture contributes about 2 percent to the country's gross domestic product. The trend is toward larger farms. Canadian farms produce grains such as wheat, barley, corn, and oats. Canada ranks third in the world in grain exports. Canadian farmers and ranchers also raise livestock for export, especially in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
Further Study
Books
Barbolet, Herb. Farm Folk, City Folk: Stories, Tips, and Recipes Celebrating Local Food for Food Lovers of All Stripes. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998.
Barer-Stein, Thelma. You Eat What You Are: People, Culture, and Food Traditions. 2nd ed. Toronto, Ont.: Firefly Books, 1999.
Chavich, Cinda. The Wild West Cookbook. Don Mills, Ont.: R. Rose, 1998.
Claman, Marcy. Rise & Dine Canada: Savory Secrets from Canada's Bed & Breakfast Inns. 2nd ed. Montreal, Quebec: Callawind Publications, 1999.
London, Jonathan. The Sugaring-Off Party. New York: Dutton, 1994. [Picture-book account of maple sugaring in Canada.]
Stewart, Anita. Great Canadian Cuisine: The Contemporary Flavours of Canadian Pacific Hotels. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999.
Web Sites
Canada Day Cake Recipe. [Online] Available http://www.mochasofa.com/apps/recipes/RecipeDetail.asp?RecipeId=975 (accessed June 1, 2001).
Liboiron, Henri and Bob St-Cyr. "Making Pemmican." [Online] Available http://collections.ic.gc.ca/notukeu/pemmican_e.htm (accessed April 17, 2001).
Root, Lorna. "Food and More: Canadian Cuisine." [Online] Available http://www.geocities.com/lorna_lynne/recipes/recipe1.html (accessed April 17, 2001).
Source for Special Ingredients
Always Canadian. [Online] Available http://www.alwayscanadian.com (accessed August 17, 2001).
Canada is not a large wine producer and, in fact, consumes almost seven times what it produces. The cold climate severely limits the areas in which grapes can be grown successfully. However, Canada is making a serious effort to produce excellent wines. The province of ontario is the leader in this effort, followed by british columbia and, to a much smaller degree, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Bodies of water play a critical role in successful Canadian wine production, especially in the emerging quality-wine areas of southern Ontario and the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. The climate of both areas is tempered by the surrounding lakes (see lake effect). Southern Ontario produces about 80 percent of Canada's wines and has three quality growing areas-Pelee Island, Lake Erie North Shore, and the Niagara Peninsula (see ontario, for more detail). Quebec, with over thirty wineries, produces hardy hybrids that can withstand the cold weather and the short growing season. Nova Scotia also has a small evolving wine industry. Ontario was the first to implement the vintners quality alliance (vqa), an appellation-regulating system. British Columbia has since adopted the VQA, Quebec and Nova Scotia are about to accept it, and there is a move to implement it on a national scale. VQA is important because it distinguishes quality wines made with Canadian grapes from wines labeled simply "Product of Canada," which can comprise up to 75 percent imported grapes or wine. For many decades grapes grown in Canada were mainly hybrids (like baco noir, de chaunac, maréchal foch, seyval blanc and vidal blanc) or North American varieties (like catawba, concord, Elvira, and niagara). Until the late 1980s, Canada grew limited amounts of vitis vinifera grapes-since then, increased plantings have produced a significant amount of these varieties. The quality growing areas now cultivate increasing amounts of cabernet franc, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, gamay noir, gewürztraminer, merlot, pinot gris, pinot noir, riesling, and sauvignon blanc. Needless to say, cool weather varieties do best in Canada's climate. One advantage that Canada's cold weather provides is the ability to produce consistently superior icewine (see eiswein).
O Canada!
Our home and
native land!
True patriot
love in all thy
sons command.
With glowing
hearts we see
thee rise,
The True
North strong
and free!
From far and
wide,
O Canada,we
stand on guard
for thee.
God keep our
land glorious
and free!
O Canada, we
stand on guard
for thee.
O Canada, we
stand on guard
for thee.
French Version
O Canada!
O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.
Canada closed its doors to Jews long before the Nazis rose to power. During the early 1920s the farmlands of western Canada attracted many Europeans, including Jews. This provoked many Canadians to oppose an open immigration policy, and in 1923 the Canadian government restricted its immigration quotas for all Eastern Europeans. Particularly strict rules limited the immigration of Jews to Canada, except those from Great Britain or the United States. After 1923, only Jews who had very close relatives in Canada or could convince the authorities to give them an entry permit---which almost never happened---were admitted into the country.
The Great Depression of the 1930s made matters even worse. Despite the rise of Antisemitism in Europe, especially in Germany, Canada's conditions for immigration were further restricted. Canada's small Jewish community---which made up less than 1.5 percent of the country's entire population---responded to the immigration restrictions by lobbying the government for change. Their national Jewish organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress, also responded to the Nazi threat by arranging a national boycott of goods manufactured in Germany (see also Boycotts, Anti-Nazi). The boycott may have been somewhat successful, but the lobbying accomplished nothing. Canadian delegates attended the international Evian Conference on Refugees in July 1938, but not to offer their country's support in helping the Jews desperately seeking a safe haven from the Nazis. Rather, totally unaffected by the Jews' plight and the lobbying efforts of Canada's own Jews, the delegates were present at the conference in order to ensure that other delegates did not suggest Canada as a possibility for some Jewish refugee resettlement plan.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, Canada's Jewish community both completely supported the war effort, and continued trying to convince the Canadian government to allow in European Jews who could still be saved. On a very few occasions, the Canadian Jewish Congress did manage to persuade the authorities to admit into Canada small groups of Jews. In late 1941 the government agreed to accept 1,000 Jewish children from Vichy France whose parents had already been deported to Extermination Camps in Poland. However, their hard-won efforts came too late to actually save those children: before the children could leave for Canada, the Nazis took control of Vichy France, and the orphans were deported to their deaths. Later on in the war, the Canadian authorities allowed into Canada several hundred Jewish refugees who had made their way to Spain and Switzerland.
A third group of Jewish refugees arrived in Canada during the war, but not due to the efforts of the Jewish community or by the good graces of the Canadian government. These refugees came from England, where they had already found a safe haven from the Nazis. After France was vanquished by the Germans in mid-1940, the British started to fear an invasion of their island. They began to believe that German and Austrian refugees in Britain---including Jews who were simply trying to escape with their lives---were a danger, and might aid the enemy from within. Thus, the British began deporting such refugees to Australia and Canada. Only after two years of pressure from the Canadian Jewish community were the Jewish refugees among the group finally released.
After the war, Canada still refused to change its immigration regulations, even with its recognition of the atrocities that had occurred in Europe. Only during the late 1940s did the Canadian government open its doors wide to Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust.

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Canada
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| Motto: A Mari Usque Ad Mare (Latin) "From Sea to Sea" |
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| Anthem: "O Canada" Royal anthem: "God Save the Queen"[1][2] |
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| Capital | Ottawa 45°24′N 75°40′W / 45.4°N 75.667°W |
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| Largest city | Toronto | |||||
| Official language(s) | English and French | |||||
| Recognised regional languages | Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, Slavey (North and South) and Tłįchǫ[3] | |||||
| Demonym | Canadian | |||||
| Government | Federal parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy[4] | |||||
| - | Monarch | Elizabeth II | ||||
| - | Governor General | David Johnston | ||||
| - | Prime Minister | Stephen Harper | ||||
| - | Chief Justice | Beverley McLachlin | ||||
| Legislature | Parliament | |||||
| - | Upper house | Senate | ||||
| - | Lower house | House of Commons | ||||
| Establishment | from the United Kingdom | |||||
| - | Constitution Act, 1867 | July 1, 1867 | ||||
| - | Statute of Westminster | December 11, 1931 | ||||
| - | Canada Act | April 17, 1982 | ||||
| Area | ||||||
| - | Total | 9,984,670 km2 (2nd) 3,854,085 sq mi |
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| - | Water (%) | 8.92 (891,163 km2/344,080 mi2) | ||||
| Population | ||||||
| - | 2012 estimate | 34,810,000[5] (35th) | ||||
| - | 2011 census | 33,476,688[6] | ||||
| - | Density | 3.41/km2 (228th) 8.3/sq mi |
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| GDP (PPP) | 2011 estimate | |||||
| - | Total | $1.396 trillion[7] (14th) | ||||
| - | Per capita | $40,541[7] (12th) | ||||
| GDP (nominal) | 2011 estimate | |||||
| - | Total | $1.736 trillion (10th) | ||||
| - | Per capita | $50,436[7] (9th) | ||||
| Gini (2005) | 32.1[8] (medium) | |||||
| HDI (2011) | ||||||
| Currency | Canadian dollar ($) (CAD) |
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| Time zone | (UTC−3.5 to −8) | |||||
| - | Summer (DST) | (UTC−2.5 to −7) | ||||
| Date formats | dd-mm-yyyy, mm-dd-yyyy, and yyyy-mm-dd (CE) | |||||
| Drives on the | Right | |||||
| ISO 3166 code | CA | |||||
| Internet TLD | .ca | |||||
| Calling code | +1 | |||||
Canada (
/ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km2 (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
Canada is a federal state that is governed as a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. The country is officially bilingual at the federal level. Canada's diversified economy is one of the world's largest, and is reliant upon its abundant natural resources and upon trade – particularly with the United States, with which Canada has had a long and complex relationship. It is a member of the G7, G8, G20, NATO, OECD, WTO, Commonwealth of Nations, Francophonie, OAS, APEC, and United Nations.
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Contents
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The name Canada comes from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement".[10] In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona.[11] Cartier later used the word Canada to refer not only to that particular village, but also the entire area subject to Donnacona (the chief at Stadacona); by 1545, European books and maps had begun referring to this region as Canada.[11]
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, "Canada" referred to the part of New France that lay along the St. Lawrence River and the northern shores of the Great Lakes. The area was later split into two British colonies, Upper Canada and Lower Canada. They were reunified as the Province of Canada in 1841.[12]
Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country, and the word Dominion was conferred as the country's title.[13] However, as Canada asserted its political autonomy from the United Kingdom, the federal government increasingly used simply Canada on state documents and treaties, a change that was reflected in the renaming of the national holiday from Dominion Day to Canada Day in 1982.[14]
Archaeological studies and analyses of DNA haplogroups have indicated a human presence in the northern Yukon region from 24,500 BC, and in southern Ontario from 7500 BC.[15][16][17] The Paleo-Indian archaeological sites at Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are two of the oldest sites of human habitation in Canada.[18][19][20] The characteristics of Canadian Aboriginal societies included permanent settlements, agriculture, complex societal hierarchies, and trading networks.[21][22] Some of these cultures had collapsed by the time European explorers arrived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and have only been discovered through archaeological investigations.[23]
The aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 200,000[24] and two million in the late 15th century,[25] with a figure of 500,000 accepted by Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Health.[26] As a consequence of the European colonization, Canada's aboriginal peoples suffered from repeated outbreaks of newly introduced infectious diseases such as influenza, measles, and smallpox (to which they had no natural immunity), resulting in a forty- to eighty-percent population decrease in the centuries after the European arrival.[24] Aboriginal peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations,[27] Inuit,[28] and Métis.[29] The Métis are a mixed-blood people who originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit people married European settlers.[30] In general, the Inuit had more limited interaction with European settlers during the colonization period.[31]
The first known attempt at European colonization began when Norsemen settled briefly at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around 1000 AD.[32] No further European exploration occurred until 1497, when Italian seafarer John Cabot explored Canada's Atlantic coast for England.[33] Basque and Portuguese mariners established seasonal whaling and fishing outposts along the Atlantic coast in the early 16th century.[34] In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence River, where on July 24 he planted a 10-metre (33 ft) cross bearing the words "Long Live the King of France", and took possession of the territory in the name of King Francis I of France.[35]
In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed St. John's, Newfoundland, as the first North American English colony by the royal prerogative of Queen Elizabeth I.[36] French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrived in 1603, and established the first permanent European settlements at Port Royal in 1605 and Quebec City in 1608. Among the French colonists of New France, Canadiens extensively settled the St. Lawrence River valley and Acadians settled the present-day Maritimes, while fur traders and Catholic missionaries explored the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and the Mississippi watershed to Louisiana. The Beaver Wars broke out in the mid-17th century over control of the North American fur trade.[37]
The English established additional colonies in Cupids and Ferryland, Newfoundland, beginning in 1610. The Thirteen Colonies were founded to the south soon after.[34] A series of four French and Indian Wars erupted between 1689 and 1763.[38] Mainland Nova Scotia came under British rule with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht; the Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded Canada and most of New France to Britain after the Seven Years' War.[39]
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 created the Province of Quebec out of New France, and annexed Cape Breton Island to Nova Scotia.[14] St. John's Island (now Prince Edward Island) became a separate colony in 1769.[40] To avert conflict in Quebec, the British passed the Quebec Act of 1774, expanding Quebec's territory to the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley. It re-established the French language, Catholic faith, and French civil law there. This angered many residents of the Thirteen Colonies, fuelling anti-British sentiment in the years prior to the 1775 outbreak of the American Revolution.[14]
The 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized American independence and ceded territories south of the Great Lakes to the United States. New Brunswick was split from Nova Scotia as part of a reorganization of Loyalist settlements in the Maritimes. To accommodate English-speaking Loyalists in Quebec, the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the province into French-speaking Lower Canada (later Quebec) and English-speaking Upper Canada (later Ontario), granting each its own elected legislative assembly.[41]
The Canadas were the main front in the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. Following the war, large-scale immigration to Canada from Britain and Ireland began in 1815.[25] Between 1825 and 1846, 626,628 European immigrants reportedly landed at Canadian ports.[43] Between one-quarter and one-third of all Europeans who immigrated to Canada before 1891 died of infectious diseases.[24]
The desire for responsible government resulted in the abortive Rebellions of 1837. The Durham Report subsequently recommended responsible government and the assimilation of French Canadians into English culture.[14] The Act of Union 1840 merged The Canadas into a united Province of Canada. Responsible government was established for all British North American provinces by 1849.[44] The signing of the Oregon Treaty by Britain and the United States in 1846 ended the Oregon boundary dispute, extending the border westward along the 49th parallel. This paved the way for British colonies on Vancouver Island (1849) and in British Columbia (1858).[45]
Following several constitutional conferences, the 1867 Constitution Act officially proclaimed Canadian Confederation on July 1, 1867, initially with four provinces – Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.[46][47][48] Canada assumed control of Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory to form the Northwest Territories, where the Métis' grievances ignited the Red River Rebellion and the creation of the province of Manitoba in July 1870.[49] British Columbia and Vancouver Island (which had been united in 1866) joined the Confederation in 1871, while Prince Edward Island joined in 1873.[50] Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and his Conservative government established a National Policy of tariffs to protect the nascent Canadian manufacturing industries.[48]
To open the West, the government sponsored the construction of three transcontinental railways (including the Canadian Pacific Railway), opened the prairies to settlement with the Dominion Lands Act, and established the North-West Mounted Police to assert its authority over this territory.[51][52] In 1898, during the Klondike Gold Rush in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian government created the Yukon Territory. Under the Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, continental European immigrants settled the prairies, and Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905.[50]
Because Britain still maintained control of Canada's foreign affairs under the Confederation Act, its declaration of war in 1914 automatically brought Canada into World War I. Volunteers sent to the Western Front later became part of the Canadian Corps. The Corps played a substantial role in the Battle of Vimy Ridge and other major engagements of the war.[53] Out of approximately 625,000 Canadians who served in World War I, around 60,000 were killed and another 173,000 were wounded.[54] The Conscription Crisis of 1917 erupted when conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden brought in compulsory military service over the objections of French-speaking Quebecers. In 1919, Canada joined the League of Nations independently of Britain,[53] and the 1931 Statute of Westminster affirmed Canada's independence.[4]
The Great Depression of the early 1930s brought great economic hardship to Canada. In response to the downturn, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Saskatchewan introduced many elements of a welfare state (as pioneered by Tommy Douglas) in the 1940s and 1950s.[55] Canada declared war on Germany independently during World War II under Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, three days after Britain. The first Canadian Army units arrived in Britain in December 1939.[53]
Canadian troops played important roles in many key battles of the war, including the failed 1942 Dieppe Raid, the Allied invasion of Italy, the Normandy landings, the Battle of Normandy, and the Battle of the Scheldt in 1944.[53] Canada provided asylum for the monarchy of the Netherlands while that country was occupied, and is credited by the Netherlands for major contributions to its liberation from Nazi Germany.[56] The Canadian economy boomed during the war as its industries manufactured military materiel for Canada, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union.[53] Despite another Conscription Crisis in Quebec, Canada finished the war with a large army and strong economy.[57]
The Dominion of Newfoundland (now Newfoundland and Labrador) was unified with Canada in 1949.[58] Canada's post-war economic growth, combined with the policies of successive Liberal governments, led to the emergence of a new Canadian identity, marked by the adoption of the current Maple Leaf Flag in 1965,[59] the implementation of official bilingualism (English and French) in 1969,[60] and the institution of official multiculturalism in 1971.[61] Socially democratic programs were also instituted, such as Medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, and Canada Student Loans, though provincial governments, particularly Quebec and Alberta, opposed many of these as incursions into their jurisdictions.[62] Finally, another series of constitutional conferences resulted in the 1982 patriation of Canada's constitution from the United Kingdom, concurrent with the creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[63] In 1999, Nunavut became Canada's third territory after a series of negotiations with the federal government.[64]
At the same time, Quebec underwent profound social and economic changes through the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, giving birth to a modern nationalist movement. The radical Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) ignited the October Crisis in 1970,[65] and the sovereignist Parti Québécois was elected in 1976, organizing an unsuccessful referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980. Attempts to accommodate Quebec nationalism constitutionally through the Meech Lake Accord failed in 1990.[66] This led to the formation of the Bloc Québécois in Quebec and the invigoration of the Reform Party of Canada in the West.[67][68] A second referendum followed in 1995, in which sovereignty was rejected by a slimmer margin of just 50.6 to 49.4 percent. In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that unilateral secession by a province would be unconstitutional, and the Clarity Act was passed by parliament, outlining the terms of a negotiated departure from Confederation.[66]
In addition to the issues of Quebec sovereignty, a number of crises shook Canadian society in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These included the explosion of Air India Flight 182 in 1985, the largest mass murder in Canadian history;[69] the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, a university shooting targeting female students;[70] and the Oka Crisis of 1990,[71] the first of a number of violent confrontations between the government and Aboriginal groups.[72] Canada also joined the Gulf War in 1990 as part of a US-led coalition force, and was active in several peacekeeping missions in the late 1990s.[73] Canada sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, but declined to send forces to Iraq when the US invaded in 2003.[74] In 2011, Canadian forces participated in the NATO-led intervention into the Libyan civil war.[75]
Canada occupies a major northern portion of North America, sharing land borders with the contiguous United States to the south and the US state of Alaska to the northwest. Canada stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west; to the north lies the Arctic Ocean.[76][77] Greenland is to the northeast, while Saint Pierre and Miquelon is south of Newfoundland.
By total area (including its waters), Canada is the second-largest country in the world, after Russia. By land area alone, Canada ranks fourth.[77] The country lies between latitudes 41° and 84°N, and longitudes 52° and 141°W.
Since 1925, Canada has claimed the portion of the Arctic between 60° and 141°W longitude,[78] but this claim is not universally recognized. Canada is home to the world's northernmost settlement, Canadian Forces Station Alert, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island – latitude 82.5°N – which lies 817 kilometres (508 mi) from the North Pole.[79] Much of the Canadian Arctic is covered by ice and permafrost. Canada has the longest coastline in the world, with a total length of 202,080 kilometres (125,570 mi);[77] additionally, its border with the United States is the world's longest land border, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi).[80]
Since the end of the last glacial period, Canada has consisted of eight distinct forest regions, including extensive boreal forest on the Canadian Shield.[82] Canada has around 31,700 large lakes,[83] more than any other country, containing much of the world's fresh water.[84] There are also fresh-water glaciers in the Canadian Rockies and the Coast Mountains. Canada is geologically active, having many earthquakes and potentially active volcanoes, notably Mount Meager, Mount Garibaldi, Mount Cayley, and the Mount Edziza volcanic complex.[85] The volcanic eruption of the Tseax Cone in 1775 was among Canada's worst natural disasters, killing 2,000 Nisga'a people and destroying their village in the Nass River valley of northern British Columbia. The eruption produced a 22.5-kilometre (14.0 mi) lava flow, and, according to Nisga'a legend, blocked the flow of the Nass River.[86]
Canada's population density, at 3.3 inhabitants per square kilometre (8.5 /sq mi), is among the lowest in the world. The most densely populated part of the country is the Quebec City – Windsor Corridor, situated in Southern Quebec and Southern Ontario along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.[87]
Average winter and summer high temperatures across Canada vary from region to region. Winters can be harsh in many parts of the country, particularly in the interior and Prairie provinces, which experience a continental climate, where daily average temperatures are near −15 °C (5 °F), but can drop below −40 °C (−40 °F) with severe wind chills.[88] In noncoastal regions, snow can cover the ground for almost six months of the year, while in parts of the north snow can persist year-round. Coastal British Columbia has a temperate climate, with a mild and rainy winter. On the east and west coasts, average high temperatures are generally in the low 20s °C (70s °F), while between the coasts, the average summer high temperature ranges from 25 to 30 °C (77 to 86 °F), with temperatures in some interior locations occasionally exceeding 40 °C (104 °F).[89]
Canada has a parliamentary system within the context of a constitutional monarchy, the monarchy of Canada being the foundation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.[90][91][92][93] The sovereign is Queen Elizabeth II, who also serves as head of state of 15 other Commonwealth countries and each of Canada's ten provinces and resides predominantly in the United Kingdom. As such, the Queen's representative, the Governor General of Canada (presently David Lloyd Johnston), carries out most of the federal royal duties in Canada.[94][95]
The direct participation of the royal and viceroyal figures in areas of governance is limited;[92][96][97] in practice, their use of the executive powers is directed by the Cabinet, a committee of ministers of the Crown responsible to the elected House of Commons and chosen and headed by the Prime Minister of Canada (presently Stephen Harper),[98] the head of government, though the governor general or monarch may in certain crisis situations exercise their power without ministerial advice.[96] To ensure the stability of government, the governor general will usually appoint as prime minister the person who is the current leader of the political party that can obtain the confidence of a plurality in the House of Commons.[99] The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) is thus one of the most powerful institutions in government, initiating most legislation for parliamentary approval and selecting for appointment by the Crown, besides the aforementioned, the governor general, lieutenant governors, senators, federal court judges, and heads of Crown corporations and government agencies.[96] The leader of the party with the second-most seats usually becomes the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition (presently Thomas Mulcair) and is part of an adversarial parliamentary system intended to keep the government in check.[100]
Each of the 308 Members of Parliament in the House of Commons is elected by simple plurality in an electoral district or riding. General elections must be called by the governor general, on the advice of the prime minister, within four years of the previous election, or may be triggered by the government losing a confidence vote in the House.[101] The 105 members of the Senate, whose seats are apportioned on a regional basis, serve until age 75.[102] Five parties had representatives elected to the federal parliament in the 2011 elections: the Conservative Party of Canada (governing party), the New Democratic Party (the Official Opposition), the Liberal Party of Canada, the Bloc Québécois, and the Green Party of Canada. The list of historical parties with elected representation is substantial.
Canada's federal structure divides government responsibilities between the federal government and the ten provinces. Provincial legislatures are unicameral and operate in parliamentary fashion similar to the House of Commons.[97] Canada's three territories also have legislatures, but these are not sovereign and have fewer constitutional responsibilities than the provinces.[103] The territorial legislatures also differ structurally from their provincial counterparts.[104]
The Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of the country, and consists of written text and unwritten conventions. The Constitution Act, 1867 (known as the British North America Act prior to 1982) affirmed governance based on parliamentary precedent and divided powers between the federal and provincial governments; the Statute of Westminster 1931 granted full autonomy; and the Constitution Act, 1982, ended all legislative ties to the UK, added a constitutional amending formula, and added the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees basic rights and freedoms that usually cannot be overridden by any government – though a notwithstanding clause allows the federal parliament and provincial legislatures to override certain sections of the Charter for a period of five years.[105]
Although not without conflict, European Canadians' early interactions with First Nations and Inuit populations were relatively peaceful. The Crown and Aboriginal peoples began interactions during the European colonialization period. Numbered Treaties, the Indian Act, the Constitution Act of 1982, and case laws were established.[106] A series of eleven treaties were signed between Aboriginals in Canada and the reigning Monarch of Canada from 1871 to 1921.[107] These treaties are agreements with the Government of Canada administered by Canadian Aboriginal law and overseen by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The role of the treaties was reaffirmed by Section Thirty-five of the Constitution Act, 1982, which "recognizes and affirms existing Aboriginal and treaty rights".[106] These rights may include provision of services such as health care, and exemption from taxation.[108] The legal and policy framework within which Canada and First Nations operate was further formalized in 2005, through the First Nations–Federal Crown Political Accord.[106]
Canada's judiciary plays an important role in interpreting laws and has the power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution. The Supreme Court of Canada is the highest court and final arbiter and has been led by the Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, P.C. (the first female Chief Justice) since 2000.[109] Its nine members are appointed by the governor general on the advice of the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice. All judges at the superior and appellate levels are appointed after consultation with nongovernmental legal bodies. The federal cabinet also appoints justices to superior courts at the provincial and territorial levels.[110]
Common law prevails everywhere except in Quebec, where civil law predominates. Criminal law is solely a federal responsibility and is uniform throughout Canada.[111] Law enforcement, including criminal courts, is officially a provincial responsibility, conducted by provincial police forces.[112] However, in most rural areas and some urban areas, policing responsibilities are contracted to the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police.[113]
Canada currently employs a professional, volunteer military force of over 67,000 regular personnel and approximately 43,000 reserve personnel, including supplementary reserves.[114] The unified Canadian Forces (CF) comprise the Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy, and Royal Canadian Air Force. In 2011, Canada's military expenditure totalled approximately C$24.5 billion.[115]
Canada and the United States share the world's longest undefended border, co-operate on military campaigns and exercises, and are each other's largest trading partner.[116] Canada nevertheless has an independent foreign policy, most notably maintaining full relations with Cuba and declining to officially participate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Canada also maintains historic ties to the United Kingdom and France and to other former British and French colonies through Canada's membership in the Commonwealth of Nations and the Francophonie.[117] Canada is noted for having a positive relationship with the Netherlands, owing, in part, to its contribution to the Dutch liberation during World War II.[56]
Canada's strong attachment to the British Empire and Commonwealth led to major participation in British military efforts in the Second Boer War, World War I and World War II. Since then, Canada has been an advocate for multilateralism, making efforts to resolve global issues in collaboration with other nations.[118][119] Canada was a founding member of the United Nations in 1945 and of NATO in 1949. During the Cold War, Canada was a major contributor to UN forces in the Korean War and founded the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in cooperation with the United States to defend against potential aerial attacks from the Soviet Union.[120]
During the Suez Crisis of 1956, future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson eased tensions by proposing the inception of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, for which he was awarded the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize.[121] As this was the first UN peacekeeping mission, Pearson is often credited as the inventor of the concept. Canada has since served in 50 peacekeeping missions, including every UN peacekeeping effort until 1989,[53] and has since maintained forces in international missions in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere; Canada has sometimes faced controversy over its involvement in foreign countries, notably in the 1993 Somalia Affair.[122]
Canada joined the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1990 and hosted the OAS General Assembly in Windsor, Ontario, in June 2000 and the third Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001.[123] Canada seeks to expand its ties to Pacific Rim economies through membership in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC).[124]
In 2001, Canada deployed troops to Afghanistan as part of the US stabilization force and the UN-authorized, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Starting in July 2011, Canada began withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan. In all, Canada lost 158 soldiers, one diplomat, two aid workers, and one journalist during the mission,[125] which cost approximately C$11.3 billion.[126]
In February 2007, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Russia announced their joint commitment to a $1.5-billion project to help develop vaccines for developing nations, and called on other countries to join them.[127] In August 2007, Canada's territorial claims in the Arctic were challenged after a Russian underwater expedition to the North Pole; Canada has considered that area to be sovereign territory since 1925.[128] In July 2010, the federal government announced the largest purchase in Canadian military history – the acquisition of 65 F-35 Lightning II jet fighters, totalling C$9 billion.[129] Between March and October 2011, Canadian forces participated in a UN-mandated NATO intervention into the 2011 Libyan civil war.[130]
Canada is a federation composed of ten provinces and three territories. In turn, these may be grouped into four main regions: Western Canada, Central Canada, Atlantic Canada, and Northern Canada ("Eastern Canada" refers to Central Canada and Atlantic Canada together). Provinces have more autonomy than territories, having responsibility for social programs such as health care, education, and welfare. Together, the provinces collect more revenue than the federal government, an almost unique structure among federations in the world. Using its spending powers, the federal government can initiate national policies in provincial areas, such as the Canada Health Act; the provinces can opt out of these, but rarely do so in practice. Equalization payments are made by the federal government to ensure that reasonably uniform standards of services and taxation are kept between the richer and poorer provinces.[131]
Canada is the world's eleventh-largest economy, with a 2011 nominal GDP of approximately US$1.74 trillion.[7] It is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the G8, and is one of the world's top ten trading nations, with a highly globalized economy.[132][133] Canada is a mixed economy, ranking above the US and most western European nations on the Heritage Foundation's index of economic freedom.[134] The largest foreign importers of Canadian goods are the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.[135]
In the past century, the growth of Canada's manufacturing, mining, and service sectors has transformed the nation from a largely rural economy to an advanced, urbanized, industrial one. Like many other First World nations, the Canadian economy is dominated by the service industry, which employs about three-quarters of the country's workforce.[136] However, Canada is unusual among developed countries in the importance of its primary sector, in which the logging and petroleum industries are two of the most prominent elements.[137]
Canada is one of the few developed nations that are net exporters of energy.[138] Atlantic Canada possesses vast offshore deposits of natural gas, and Alberta also hosts large oil and gas resources. The immense Athabasca oil sands give Canada the world's second-largest proven oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia.[139] Canada is additionally one of the world's largest suppliers of agricultural products; the Canadian Prairies are one of the most important global producers of wheat, canola, and other grains.[140] Canada is a major producer of zinc and uranium, and is a leading exporter of many other minerals, such as gold, nickel, aluminum, and lead.[141][138] Many towns in northern Canada, where agriculture is difficult, are sustainable because of nearby mines or sources of timber. Canada also has a sizable manufacturing sector centred in southern Ontario and Quebec, with automobiles and aeronautics representing particularly important industries.[142]
Canada's economic integration with the United States has increased significantly since World War II. The Automotive Products Trade Agreement of 1965 opened Canada's borders to trade in the automobile manufacturing industry. In the 1970s, concerns over energy self-sufficiency and foreign ownership in the manufacturing sectors prompted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government to enact the National Energy Program (NEP) and the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA).[143] In the 1980s, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives abolished the NEP and changed the name of FIRA to "Investment Canada", in order to encourage foreign investment.[144] The Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) of 1988 eliminated tariffs between the two countries, while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) expanded the free-trade zone to include Mexico in 1994.[140] In the mid-1990s, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government began to post annual budgetary surpluses, and steadily paid down the national debt.[145]
In 2008, Canada's imported goods were worth over $442.9 billion, of which $280.8 billion originated from the United States, $11.7 billion from Japan, and $11.3 billion from the United Kingdom.[135] The country’s 2009 trade deficit totaled C$4.8 billion, compared with a C$46.9 billion surplus in 2008.[146]
The global financial crisis of 2008 caused a major recession, which led to a significant rise in unemployment in Canada.[147] By October 2009, Canada's national unemployment rate reached 8.6 percent, with provincial unemployment rates varying from a low of 5.8 percent in Manitoba to a high of 17 percent in Newfoundland and Labrador.[148] Between October 2008 and October 2010, the Canadian labour market lost 162,000 full-time jobs and a total of 224,000 permanent jobs.[149] Canada's federal debt was estimated to total $566.7 billion for the fiscal year 2010–11, up from $463.7 billion in 2008–09.[150] Canada’s net foreign debt rose by $41 billion to $194 billion in the first quarter of 2010.[151]
In 2011, Canada spent approximately C$29.9 billion on domestic research and development.[152] The country has produced ten Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and medicine,[153] and is home to a number of global technology firms, such as smartphone maker Research In Motion and video games developer BioWare.[154] Canada ranks twelfth in the world for Internet users as a proportion of the population, with over 28 million users – equivalent to around 84 percent of its total 2011 population.[155]
The Canadian Space Agency operates a highly active space program, conducting space, planetary, and aviation research, and developing rockets and satellites. In 1984, Marc Garneau became Canada's first astronaut, serving as payload specialist on NASA's STS-41-G Space Shuttle mission. As of 2012, nine Canadians have flown into space, over the course of fifteen manned missions.[156]
Canada is a participant in the International Space Station (ISS), and is a pioneer in space robotics, having constructed the Canadarm, Canadarm2 and Dextre robotic manipulators for the ISS and NASA. Since the 1960s, Canada's aerospace industry has designed and built numerous marques of satellite, including Radarsat-1 and 2, ISIS and MOST.[157] Canada has also produced a successful and widely used sounding rocket, the Black Brant; over 1,000 Black Brants have been launched since the rocket's introduction in 1961.[158]
| Historical populations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Pop. | ±% |
| 1851 | 2,415,000 | — |
| 1861 | 3,174,000 | +31.4% |
| 1871 | 3,689,000 | +16.2% |
| 1881 | 4,325,000 | +17.2% |
| 1891 | 4,833,000 | +11.7% |
| 1901 | 5,371,000 | +11.1% |
| 1911 | 7,207,000 | +34.2% |
| 1921 | 8,788,000 | +21.9% |
| 1931 | 10,377,000 | +18.1% |
| 1941 | 11,507,000 | +10.9% |
| 1951 | 14,009,000 | +21.7% |
| 1961 | 18,238,000 | +30.2% |
| 1971 | 21,962,000 | +20.4% |
| 1981 | 24,820,000 | +13.0% |
| 1991 | 28,031,000 | +12.9% |
| 2001 | 31,021,000 | +10.7% |
| 2011 | 33,476,000 | +7.9% |
| Source: Statistics Canada[6][159] | ||
The 2011 Canadian census counted a total population of 33,476,688, an increase of around 5.9 percent over the 2006 figure.[6][160] Between 1990 and 2008, the population increased by 5.6 million, equivalent to 20.4 percent overall growth. The main drivers of population growth are immigration and, to a lesser extent, natural growth. About four-fifths of the population lives within 150 kilometres (93 mi) of the United States border.[161] Approximately 80 percent of Canadians live in urban areas concentrated in the Quebec City – Windsor Corridor, the BC Lower Mainland, and the Calgary–Edmonton Corridor in Alberta.[162] In common with many other developed countries, Canada is experiencing a demographic shift towards an older population, with more retirees and fewer people of working age. In 2006, the average age was 39.5 years;[163] by 2011, it had risen to approximately 39.9 years.[164]
According to the 2006 census, the country's largest self-reported ethnic origin is Canadian (accounting for 32% of the population), followed by English (21%), French (15.8%), Scottish (15.1%), Irish (13.9%), German (10.2%), Italian (4.6%), Chinese (4.3%), First Nations (4.0%), Ukrainian (3.9%), and Dutch (3.3%).[165] There are 600 recognized First Nations governments or bands, encompassing a total of 1,172,790 people.[166]
Canada's aboriginal population is growing at almost twice the national rate, and four percent of Canada's population claimed aboriginal identity in 2006. Another 16.2 percent of the population belonged to a non-aboriginal visible minority.[167] The largest visible minority groups are South Asian (4.0%), Chinese (3.9%) and Black (2.5%). Between 2001 and 2006, the visible minority population rose by 27.2 percent.[168] In 1961, less than two percent of Canada's population (about 300,000 people) could be classified as belonging to a visible minority group, and less than one percent as aboriginal.[169] By 2007, almost one in five (19.8%) were foreign-born, with nearly 60 percent of new immigrants coming from Asia (including the Middle East).[170] The leading sources of immigrants to Canada were China, the Philippines and India.[171] According to Statistics Canada, visible minority groups could account for a third of the Canadian population by 2031.[172]
Canada has one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the world,[173] driven by economic policy and family reunification, and is aiming for between 240,000 and 265,000 new permanent residents in 2012,[174] a similar number of immigrants as in recent years.[175] In 2010, a record 280,636 people immigrated to Canada.[176] New immigrants settle mostly in major urban areas like Toronto and Vancouver.[177] Canada also accepts large numbers of refugees.[178] The country resettles over one in 10 of the world’s refugees.[179]
According to the 2001 census, 77.1 percent of Canadians identify as Christian; of this, Catholics make up the largest group, accounting for 43.6 percent of the population. The largest Protestant denomination is the United Church of Canada (accounting for 9.5% of Canadians), followed by Anglicans (6.8%), Baptists (2.4%), Lutherans (2%), and other Christian denominations (4.4%). About 16.5 percent declare no religious affiliation, and the remaining 6.3 percent are affiliated with non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (2.0%) and Judaism (1.1%).[180]
Canadian provinces and territories are responsible for education. The mandatory school age ranges between 5–7 to 16–18 years,[181] contributing to an adult literacy rate of 99 percent.[77] In 2002, 43 percent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 possessed a post-secondary education; for those aged 25 to 34, the rate of post-secondary education reached 51 percent.[182] The Programme for International Student Assessment indicates that Canadian students rank well above the OECD average, particularly in mathematics, sciences, and reading.[183]
| Largest metropolitan areas in Canada by population (2011 Census) | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Province | Population | Name | Province | Population | |||
| Toronto | Ontario | 5,583,064 | London | Ontario | 474,786 | |||
| Montreal | Quebec | 3,824,221 | St. Catharines–Niagara | Ontario | 392,184 | |||
| Vancouver | British Columbia | 2,313,328 | Halifax | Nova Scotia | 390,328 | |||
| Ottawa–Gatineau | Ontario–Quebec | 1,236,324 | Oshawa | Ontario | 356,177 | |||
| Calgary | Alberta | 1,214,839 | Victoria | British Columbia | 344,615 | |||
| Edmonton | Alberta | 1,159,869 | Windsor | Ontario | 319,246 | |||
| Quebec | Quebec | 765,706 | Saskatoon | Saskatchewan | 260,600 | |||
| Winnipeg | Manitoba | 730,018 | Regina | Saskatchewan | 210,556 | |||
| Hamilton | Ontario | 721,053 | Sherbrooke | Quebec | 201,890 | |||
| Kitchener–Cambridge-Waterloo | Ontario | 477,160 | St. John's | Newfoundland and Labrador | 196,966 | |||
Canada's two official languages are Canadian English and Canadian French. Official bilingualism is defined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Official Languages Act, and Official Language Regulations; it is applied by the Commissioner of Official Languages. English and French have equal status in federal courts, Parliament, and in all federal institutions. Citizens have the right, where there is sufficient demand, to receive federal government services in either English or French, and official-language minorities are guaranteed their own schools in all provinces and territories.[184]
English and French are the first languages of 59.7 and 23.2 percent of the population respectively. Approximately 98 percent of Canadians speak English or French: 57.8 percent speak English only, 22.1 percent speak French only, and 17.4 percent speak both.[185] The English and French official-language communities, defined by the first official language spoken, constitute 73.0 and 23.6 percent of the population respectively.[186]
The 1977 Charter of the French Language established French as the official language of Quebec.[187] Although more than 85 percent of French-speaking Canadians live in Quebec, there are substantial Francophone populations in Ontario, Alberta, and southern Manitoba; Ontario has the largest French-speaking population outside Quebec.[188] New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province, has a French-speaking Acadian minority constituting 33 percent of the population. There are also clusters of Acadians in southwestern Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island, and through central and western Prince Edward Island.[189]
Other provinces have no official languages as such, but French is used as a language of instruction, in courts, and for other government services, in addition to English. Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec allow for both English and French to be spoken in the provincial legislatures, and laws are enacted in both languages. In Ontario, French has some legal status, but is not fully co-official.[190] There are 11 Aboriginal language groups, composed of more than 65 distinct dialects.[191] Of these, only the Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibway languages have a large enough population of fluent speakers to be considered viable to survive in the long term.[192] Several aboriginal languages have official status in the Northwest Territories.[193] Inuktitut is the majority language in Nunavut, and is one of three official languages in the territory.[194]
In 2005, over six million people in Canada listed a non-official language as their mother tongue. Some of the most common non-official first languages include Chinese (mainly Cantonese; 1,012,065 first-language speakers), Italian (455,040), German (450,570), Punjabi (367,505) and Spanish (345,345).[195] English and French are the most-spoken home languages, being spoken at home by 68.3 and 22.3 percent of the population respectively.[196]
Canadian society is often depicted as being "diverse and multicultural".[197][198] Canada's culture draws influences from its broad range of constituent nationalities, and policies that promote multiculturalism are constitutionally protected.[199] In Quebec, cultural identity is strong, and many French-speaking commentators speak of a culture of Quebec that is distinct from English Canadian culture.[200] However, as a whole, Canada is in theory a cultural mosaic – a collection of several regional, aboriginal, and ethnic subcultures.[201] Government policies such as publicly funded health care, higher taxation to redistribute wealth, the outlawing of capital punishment, strong efforts to eliminate poverty, an emphasis on multiculturalism, strict gun control, and the legalization of same-sex marriage are further social indicators of Canada's political and cultural values.[202]
Historically, Canada has been influenced by British, French, and aboriginal cultures and traditions. Through their language, art and music, aboriginal peoples continue to influence the Canadian identity.[203] Many Canadians value multiculturalism and see Canada as being inherently multicultural.[63] American media and entertainment are popular, if not dominant, in English Canada; conversely, many Canadian cultural products and entertainers are successful in the United States and worldwide.[204] The preservation of a distinctly Canadian culture is supported by federal government programs, laws, and institutions such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the National Film Board of Canada, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.[205]
Canadian visual art has been dominated by figures such as Tom Thomson – the country's most famous painter – and by the Group of Seven. Thomson's career painting Canadian landscapes spanned a decade up to his death in 1917 at age 39.[206] The Group were painters with a nationalistic and idealistic focus, who first exhibited their distinctive works in May 1920. Though referred to as having seven members, five artists – Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley – were responsible for articulating the Group's ideas. They were joined briefly by Frank Johnston, and by commercial artist Franklin Carmichael. A. J. Casson became part of the Group in 1926.[207] Associated with the Group was another prominent Canadian artist, Emily Carr, known for her landscapes and portrayals of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.[208]
The Canadian music industry has produced internationally renowned composers, musicians and ensembles.[209] Music broadcasting in the country is regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presents Canada's music industry awards, the Juno Awards, which were first awarded in 1970.[210] The national anthem of Canada O Canada adopted in 1980, was originally commissioned by the Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, the Honourable Théodore Robitaille, for the 1880 St. Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony.[211] Calixa Lavallée wrote the music, which was a setting of a patriotic poem composed by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The text was originally only in French, before it was translated to English in 1906.[212]
Canada's official national sports are ice hockey and lacrosse.[213] Hockey is a national pastime and the most popular spectator sport in the country. It is also the sport most played by Canadians, with 1.65 million participants reported in 2004. Seven of Canada's eight largest metropolitan areas – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg – have franchises in the National Hockey League (NHL), and there are more Canadian players in the NHL than from all other countries combined. Other popular spectator sports include curling and football; the latter is played professionally in the Canadian Football League (CFL). Golf, baseball, skiing, soccer, cricket, volleyball, rugby league and basketball are widely played at youth and amateur levels, but professional leagues and franchises are not widespread.[214]
Canada has hosted several high-profile international sporting events, including the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, the 1994 Basketball World Championship and the 2007 FIFA U-20 World Cup. Canada was the host nation for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia.[215]
Canada's national symbols are influenced by natural, historical, and Aboriginal sources. The use of the maple leaf as a Canadian symbol dates to the early 18th century. The maple leaf is depicted on Canada's current and previous flags, on the penny, and on the Arms of Canada.[216] Other prominent symbols include the beaver, Canada Goose, Common Loon, the Crown, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,[216] and more recently, the totem pole and Inuksuk.[217]
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