Canada

Canada spans the north of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and up through an Arctic archipelago, giving it the world’s longest coastline. At its core lies the Canadian Shield, ancient rock scoured by glaciers and scattered with lakes and boreal forest around Hudson Bay. West of the Shield the prairies roll out to the Rocky Mountains, and to the south-east the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River form the corridor where the country first grew. Winters are long and hard almost everywhere but the Pacific coast.

First Nations and Inuit lived here for thousands of years before Europeans came for cod and beaver fur, and the Métis nation grew out of the fur trade. New France, centred on the St Lawrence from 1608, passed to Britain in 1763, though French law, language and Catholicism endured in Quebec. Confederation in 1867 joined three colonies into a dominion of four provinces, and Canada took full control of its constitution only in 1982.

French is the everyday language of Quebec, and New Brunswick is bilingual by law. Ice hockey is the shared passion of a country whose rinks freeze naturally for months. The economy draws on what the land holds: oil from the Alberta oil sands, potash, wheat and canola from the prairies, timber, nickel and uranium. Car plants in Ontario, aircraft makers around Montreal and the banks of Toronto add industry and finance, and dams in Quebec and British Columbia supply cheap hydropower.