Three oceans and 52,455 islands
Canada covers 9,984,670 square kilometres, making it the second-largest country in the world. Statistics Canada measures its coastline on three oceans at 243,042 kilometres, the longest anywhere, and counts 52,455 islands. Baffin Island in Nunavut is the biggest at 507,451 square kilometres. Fresh water covers 891,163 square kilometres, with Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories the largest lake wholly inside the country, and the Mackenzie the longest river at 4,241 kilometres from its furthest source. The highest mountain is Mount Logan, at 5,959 metres in the St Elias Mountains of Yukon.
Much of the interior sits on the Canadian Shield, a mass of ancient rock dated at 2.5 billion years and older. Ice-age glaciers scraped it clean, which explains its thin soil, bare outcrops and tangle of lakes and rivers. The Shield also holds substantial deposits of nickel, gold, silver and copper.
The boundary with the United States stretches for 8,891 kilometres, of which 2,475 kilometres run along Alaska. The International Boundary Commission calls it the world's longest land border between two adjoining countries.
Forts, furs and a country built in stages
The land's first peoples lived by hunting, gathering and raising crops. The earliest known Europeans were Norse, who built an encampment at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland over 1,000 years ago. Samuel de Champlain built a French fortress at what is now Quebec City in 1608, and in 1670 the English crown gave the Hudson's Bay Company exclusive trading rights over the Hudson Bay watershed. Large numbers of Indigenous people died of European diseases against which they had no immunity.
Britain beat France on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and France ceded Canada by treaty on 10 February 1763. The Quebec Act of 1774 restored French civil law and gave Catholics religious freedom. More than 40,000 Loyalists fled north during the American Revolution, and about 3,000 Black Loyalists also came.
The Dominion of Canada was born on 1 July 1867 from Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Expansion was contested. When Canada took over the north-west in 1869 without consulting the Métis of the Red River, Louis Riel led an armed uprising, and Manitoba was created in 1870. A second rebellion ended with his execution for high treason in 1885. That same year the last spike was driven on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which Ottawa had promised British Columbia when it joined in 1871. Alberta and Saskatchewan joined in 1905, and Newfoundland and Labrador in 1949. Major constitutional changes still needed the British Parliament until 1982, when the constitution came home with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms added.
The new country set out to absorb Indigenous peoples. The Indian Act of 1876 had what the Library of Parliament calls an ultimate goal of assimilation, and an amendment banned the potlatch ceremony until 1951. The first church-run residential school opened in 1831. Attendance became compulsory for Treaty-status children aged 7 to 15 in 1920, and more than 150,000 children passed through the system. The last federally run school, at Punnichy in Saskatchewan, closed in 1996. Thousands of children are known to have died in the schools. The prime minister apologised in 2008, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard from 6,500 survivors and witnesses, described the system's intent as cultural genocide.
Two languages, many origins, one huge customer
Statistics Canada's preliminary estimate for 1 July 2026 is 41,798,407 people. Nearly three in four lived in a census metropolitan area in 2021, and Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver alone held over a third of all Canadians. Immigrants made up 23.0 percent of the population that year, the highest share since Confederation and the largest in the G7. India was the leading birthplace of recent arrivals, at 18.6 percent.
In 2021 French was the first official language of 22.0 percent of Canadians, rising to 84.1 percent in Quebec and 30.3 percent in New Brunswick. Quebec has twice voted on sovereignty. On 20 May 1980 the No side took 59.56 percent. On 30 October 1995, with turnout at 93.52 percent, it won by 50.58 percent to 49.42, a margin of 54,288 votes.
The 2021 census counted 1,807,250 Indigenous people, 5.0 percent of the population, growing faster and averaging about eight years younger than everyone else. The largest land claims settlement in Canadian history, signed in 1993, led to Nunavut, a territory of about two million square kilometres created on 1 April 1999. Inuit were 84.4 percent of its people in 2021, and Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun are official languages there alongside English and French.
Trade leans south. The United States took 75.9 percent of Canadian goods exports in 2024, then 71.7 percent in 2025, its lowest share since the early 1980s. Energy was the top export category in 2024 at C$195.3 billion, with 88.0 percent going to the American market, and Alberta's oil sands hold 166.3 billion of the country's 171.0 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. A sweeter speciality is maple syrup: Canada made more than 75 percent of the world's supply in 2025, nine-tenths of it in Quebec.
