Description of Canada
Description of Canada
Presentation of the theme:
Description of Canada
Contents
1.
About
Canada
2.
People
of Canada
3.
Etymology
4.
History
5.
European
colonization
6.
Confederation
and expansion
7.
Early
20th century
8.
Modern
times
9.
Government
and politics
10.
Law
11.
Foreign
relations and military
12.
Provinces
and territories
13.
Geography
and climate
14.
Science
and technology
15.
Economy
16.
Culture
17.
Language
18.
Ottawa
19.
About
Ottawa
20.
Ottawa
as the capital
21.
History
Canada
Flag Arms
Motto: A Mari Usque Ad Mare (Latin)
"From
Sea to Sea"
Anthem: "O Canada"
Royal
anthem: "God
Save the Queen"
CapitalOttawa
45°24′N
75°40′W
Largest
cityToronto
Official
language(s)English and French
DemonymCanadian
GovernmentFederal parliamentary
democracy and constitutional monarchy
MonarchHM
Queen Elizabeth II
Governor
GeneralMichaëlle Jean
Prime
MinisterStephen Harper
LegislatureParliament
Upper
HouseSenate
Lower
HouseHouse of Commons
Establishment
British North
America ActsJuly 1, 1867
Statute of
WestminsterDecember 11, 1931
Canada
ActApril 17, 1982
Area
Total9,984,670
km2 (2nd)
3,854,085 sq
mi
Water (%)8.92
(891,163 km2/344,080 mi2)
Population
2010
estimate34,073,000 [3] (36th)
2006
census31,241,030[4]
Density3.41/km2
(228th)
Drives
on the Right
Canada (pronounced /ˈkænədə/)
is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the
Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into
the Arctic Ocean. It is the world's second largest country by total area.
Canada's common border with the United States to the south and northwest is the
longest in the world.
People
of Canada
Canada is a
good example of the way peoples of different ways of life and different
languages can live side by side under one government. The population of Canada
has risen from 11,5 million in 1941 to 25 million in 1980. Most of the
new-comers are from Europe, Asia and the USA, so that today less than 44% of
Canada’s population is of British origin. Quebec Province is still 90% French.
There are some groups of French Canadians in Ontario and Manitoba, but the numbers
are quite small. There
are many Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese, and also blacks from the USA, among
the immigrants who are pouring into Canada now. Some Canadians are afraid that
before long Canada will have colored citizens that white. Other Canadians are
disturbed by the growing racism in their country. Canada, like so many
countries, has only just begun to treat her own non-white citizens, Eskimos (or
Inuit) and the Indians, as generously as they deserve. The Indian and Eskimo
populations have grown quite a lot in the last few years. The government is at
last realizing that it has a duty towards this people that it has neglected for
so long. All Canadian children have
to learn both French and English at school, but Franco phones and Anglophones do
not enjoy learning each other’s language. Still, most Quebecois middle class
families, living in Montreal are bilingual - they speak English and French
equally well. Until the Second World War, every Canadian province except Quebec
was overwhelmingly British. Some Canadians were more patriotic than the British
them-selves and were really angry if anyone walked out of a cinema while ‘God
Save the King’ was being played. Now Canadians think of themselves as a people
in their own right, not tied to either Britain or the USA. The USA has not been
a threat to Canada for almost two hundred years. In fact, the 6,416 km US-Canadian frontier is the longest continuous frontier in the world, has no wire fence, no
soldiers, no guns on either side. It is called ‘The Border’. The land occupied by Canada was
inhabited for millennia by various groups of Aboriginal people. Beginning in
the late 15th century, British and French expeditions explored, and later
settled, along the 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 from the United Kingdom.
This widening autonomy was highlighted by the Statute of Westminster of 1931
and culminated in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence
on the British parliament. A federation consisting of ten provinces and three territories, Canada is
governed as a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy with Queen
Elizabeth II as its head of state. It is a bilingual nation with both English
and French as official languages at the federal level. One of the world's
highly developed countries, Canada has a diversified economy that 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 G8, G-20, NATO, OECD, WTO, Commonwealth, Franco phone, OAS, APEC,
and UN.
Etymology
The name
Canada comes from a St. Lawrence Iroquoian word, Kanata, meaning
"village" or "settlement". In 1535, indigenous inhabitants
of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer
Jacques Cartier towards the village of Stadacona. 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. From the early 17th century onwards,
that part of New France that lay along the Saint Lawrence River and the
northern shores of the Great Lakes was known as Canada. The area was later
split into two British colonies, Upper Canada and Lower Canada. They were
re-unified as the Province of Canada in 1841. Upon Confederation in 1867, the name
Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country, and Dominion was
conferred as the country's title. Combined, the term Dominion of Canada was in
common usage until the 1950s. 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.
History
Aboriginal
peoples in Canada comprise the First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The
descriptors "Indian" and "Eskimo" are falling into disuse.
Archaeological and Indigenous genetic studies support a human presence in the
northern Yukon from 26,500 years ago, and in southern Ontario from 9,500 years
ago. Old Crow Flats and
Bluefish Caves are the earliest archaeological sites of human (Paleo-Indians)
habitation in Canada. Among the First Nations peoples, there are eight unique
stories of creation and their adaptations. These are the earth diver, world
parent, emergence, conflict, robbery, rebirth of corpse, two creators and their
contests, and the brother myth. The characteristics of Canadian Aboriginal
civilizations included permanent or urban settlements, agriculture, civic and
monumental architecture, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations
had long faded by the time of the first permanent European arrivals (c. late
15th–early 16th centuries), and have been discovered through archaeological
investigations. The aboriginal population is estimated to have been between
200,000 and two million in the late 1400s. Repeated outbreaks of European
infectious diseases such as influenza, measles and smallpox (to which they had
no natural immunity), combined with other effects of European contact, resulted
in an eighty-five to ninety-five percent aboriginal population decrease
post-contact. The Métis culture of mixed blood originated in the
mid-17th century when First Nation and Inuit married European settlers. The
Inuit had more limited interaction with European settlers during the early
periods.]
European
colonization
Europeans
first arrived when the Vikings settled briefly at L'Anse aux Meadows in
Newfoundland around AD 1000; after the failure of that colony, there was no
known further attempt at Canadian exploration until 1497, when Italian seafarer
Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) explored Canada's Atlantic coast for England. In
1534 Jacques Cartier explored Canada for France. 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 French
colonists of New France, Canadians extensively settled the Saint Lawrence River
valley and Acadians settled the present-day Maritimes, while French fur traders
and Catholic missionaries explored the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and the
Mississippi watershed to Louisiana. The French and Iroquois Wars broke out over
control of the fur trade. Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe (1771) dramatizes
Wolfe's death during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec in 1759. The
battle was part of the Seven Years' War. The English established fishing
outposts in Newfoundland around 1610 and established the Thirteen Colonies to
the south. A series of four Inter colonial Wars erupted between 1689 and 1763.
Mainland Nova Scotia came under British rule with the Treaty of Utrecht (1713);
the Treaty of Paris (1763) ceded Canada and most of New France to Britain after
the Seven Years' War. The Royal Proclamation (1763) carved the Province of Quebec out of New
France and annexed Cape Breton Island to Nova Scotia. St. John's Island (now
Prince Edward Island) became a separate colony in 1769. 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 and helped to fuel the American Revolution. The Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized
American independence and ceded territories south of the Great Lakes to the
United States. Around 50,000 United Empire Loyalists fled the United States to
Canada. 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 the province of Quebec) and
English-speaking Upper Canada (later Ontario), granting each its own elected
Legislative Assembly. Canada (Upper and Lower) was the main front in the War of 1812 between
the United States and the British Empire. Following the war, large-scale
immigration to Canada from Britain and Ireland began in 1815. From 1825 to 1846,
626,628 European immigrants landed at Canadian ports. Between one-quarter and
one-third of all Europeans who immigrated to Canada before 1891 died of
infectious diseases. The timber industry surpassed the fur trade in economic
importance in the early nineteenth century. The desire for responsible government
resulted in the aborted Rebellions of 1837. The Durham Report subsequently
recommended responsible government and the assimilation of French Canadians
into British culture. 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. 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). Canada launched a series of exploratory
expeditions to claim Rupert's Land and the Arctic region.
Confederation
and expansion
Robert
Harris's Fathers of Confederation, an amalgamation of the Charlottetown and
Quebec conferences. When
Canada was formed in 1867 its provinces were a relatively narrow strip in the
southeast, with vast territories in the interior. It grew by adding British
Columbia in 1871, P.E.I. in 1873, the British Arctic Islands in 1880, and
Newfoundland in 1949, Its provinces grew both in size and number at the expense
of its territories. Following
several constitutional conferences, the Constitution Act, 1867 brought about
Confederation, creating "one Dominion under the name of Canada" on
July 1, 1867, with four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick. 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. British Columbia and Vancouver Island (which had united in 1866) and
the colony of Prince Edward Island joined the Confederation in 1871 and 1873,
respectively. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald's Conservative government
established a national policy of tariffs to protect nascent Canadian
manufacturing industries.
An animated
map, exhibiting the growth and change of Canada's provinces and territories
since Confederation. To
open the West, the government sponsored construction of three trans-continental
railways (most notably 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. In 1898, after the Klondike
Gold Rush in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian government created the
Yukon territory. Under Liberal Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier, continental
European immigrants settled the prairies, and Alberta and Saskatchewan became
provinces in 1905.
Early
20th century
Canadian
soldiers won the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917. Britain's 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 battles of the war. Out of
approximately 625,000 who served, about 60,000 were killed and another 173,000
were wounded. The Conscription Crisis of 1917 erupted when conservative Prime
Minister Robert Borden brought in compulsory military service over the
objection of French-speaking Quebecers. In 1919, Canada joined the League of
Nations independently of Britain and in 1931, the Statute of Westminster
affirmed Canada's independence. The Great Depression brought economic hardship all over Canada. In
response, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Alberta and
Saskatchewan enacted many measures of a welfare state as pioneered by Tommy Douglas
in the 1940s and 1950s. 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.
Canadian
troops played important roles in the Battle of the Atlantic, the failed 1942
Dieppe Raid in France, the Allied invasion of Italy, the D-Day landings, the
Battle of Normandy, and the Battle of the Scheldt in 1944. Canada provided
asylum and protection for the monarchy of the Netherlands while that country
was occupied, and is credited by the latter country for leadership and major contribution
to its liberation from Nazi Germany. The Canadian economy boomed as industry
manufactured military materiel for Canada, Britain, China, and the Soviet
Union. Despite another Conscription Crisis in Quebec, Canada finished the war
with one of the largest armed forces in the world. In 1945, during the war,
Canada became one of the founding members of the United Nations.
Modern
times
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