Canada is bigger than the European Union:
It’s bigger than the entire European Union (33 times bigger than Italy and 15 times bigger than France), more than 30 percent larger than Australia, five times as big as Mexico, three times as big as India.
Canada’s lowest recorded temperature is as cold as Mars:
A temperature of -63 C (-81.4 F) was recorded in the small village of Snag on Feb. 3, 1947. That’s roughly the same temperature as the surface of Mars!
There are more lakes here than anywhere else in the world:
The Great White North has 563 lakes larger than 100 square kilometres. The Great Lakes alone contain about 21 percent of the world’s fresh lake water. That’s a lot of water—and a lot of gorgeous scenery.
Canada has the world’s longest coastline:
Canada has the world’s longest coastline, bordered on three sides by three different oceans: the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific. To put that fun fact about Canada into perspective, that accounts for 202,080 of the world’s total 356,000 kilometres of oceanfront property.
Canada has 10 percent of the world’s forests:
An incredible 362-million hectares of forest and other wooded land can be found across the country, and 68 percent of that is coniferous. The best part of all? Most of our forest land is publicly owned.
Canada has the only walled city in North America:
One of the most fascinating facts about Canada is that Quebec City is the only city north of Mexico that still has fortified walls. First the French, and later the English, built up Quebec City’s fortifications between the 17th and the 19th centuries. Quebec’s entire historic district, including the ramparts, has since been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Canada has the world’s third-largest recoverable oil reserve:
It’s thick, it’s sticky and Canada has an estimated 166.3 billion recoverable barrels of it. That’s right, crude bitumen—a semi-solid source of petroleum—is available in abundance in Canada’s oil sands. That puts us just behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia in terms of proven reserves, and accounts for 10.3% of the global total.
Canada’s national parks are bigger than most countries:
Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta and the Northwest Territories is even bigger at 44,807 square kilometres, which makes it bigger than Denmark and Switzerland.
Canada has North America’s strongest current:
The stretch of the Discovery Passage has some of the strongest tidal currents ever measured with flood speeds of 17 km/h and ebb speeds of 18 km/h.
It’s on the other coast, of course, that you’ll find those incredible 15 metre tides at the Bay of Fundy.
Alert, Nunavut, is the world’s northernmost settlement:
At the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, just 817 kilometers from the North Pole, you’ll find the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world: Alert, Nunavut.
