How well do you know Canada?
No capitals, no maple leaf, no hockey trivia. These six questions explore Canada's inventions, wildlife, tides and even the pull of gravity beneath its northern bays.
Did you know?
- Canada has the world's longest coastline, about 243,000 kilometres when all its islands are included. Someone walking 20 kilometres a day would need more than 33 years to follow it all, and much of the route would cross Arctic islands that are frozen for most of the year.
- Quebec produces around 70 percent of the world's maple syrup. Its producers' federation keeps a strategic reserve of syrup in barrels to smooth out bad harvests. In 2011 and 2012, thieves stole syrup worth about 18 million Canadian dollars from one warehouse, one of the largest thefts in Canadian history.
- A 2016 global survey estimated that Canada holds more than half of the world's lakes larger than ten hectares, far more than any other country. Many are in the rocky Canadian Shield, where retreating glaciers left countless basins that filled with meltwater and rain.
Canada beyond the postcards
Canada is the second-largest country in the world by area, yet most Canadians live in a narrow band within a few hundred kilometres of the United States border. Much of the rest of the country is forest, tundra, lakes and ice. That combination of huge empty spaces and a few crowded corridors has shaped everything from Canadian inventions to the way people in the far north travel, shop and receive their mail, often by small plane or, in winter, over roads built on frozen lakes.
A land shaped by ice
During the last Ice Age, an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick covered almost all of Canada. As it melted, it scraped hollows into the rock that filled with water, which is why the country is scattered with lakes. The weight of the ice also pushed the crust down, and the land is still slowly springing back, especially around Hudson Bay. Some old beaches there now sit far inland and well above the sea, a visible record of ground that is still rising today.
Canadian ideas that went global
Insulin was first isolated at the University of Toronto in 1921 and 1922 by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working with John Macleod and James Collip, turning diabetes from a fatal disease into a manageable one. The IMAX film format was developed by Canadian filmmakers and first shown at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. Joseph-Armand Bombardier of Quebec built early snowmobiles for snowbound rural communities, and Canada designed the Canadarm, the robotic arm first used on the Space Shuttle in 1981.
Life in the far north
Nunavut, created in 1999, is Canada's newest and largest territory, with about 40,000 residents spread across an area nearly four times the size of France. Most Nunavummiut are Inuit, and Inuktitut is one of the territory's official languages. There are no roads connecting Nunavut's communities to each other or to the south, so food and fuel arrive by air or on summer sealift ships. In Churchill, visitors watch polar bears from large, high-wheeled tundra vehicles each autumn as the bears wait for the bay to freeze.