Canada

The Country

Canada, the largest country in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest in the world (after Russia), extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to a southern limit near Detroit, Michigan. Because of its northerly location, severe climate, and unfavorable geographic conditions, only one-third of its total area has been developed, and more than two-thirds of its people inhabit a 100-mile-wide strip of territory along the U.S. border. Colonized by both English and French settlers, it retained throughout a long period of British rule a distinctive cultural and linguistic duality. Of the more than 6.7 million Canadians who claim French as their mother tongue, approximately 86 percent are concentrated in the province of Quebec, where demands for political and economic ...