The Case for Canada

Here is a claim we are prepared to defend: Canada is one of the most successful attempts anyone has made at building a decent society on a hard continent. It took the second largest landmass on Earth, most of it frozen for half the year, and a population drawn from more than 450 origins, and it produced cities people move across the world to live in, a coastline nobody else can match, and a public culture whose defining instinct is to help. We don’t think that’s sentimental. We think it’s just true, and we’ve brought the pictures to prove it.

So here’s our case for Canada, made the way we make every case on this site, with things you can look at. It runs to more than two dozen exhibits, a few of which involve snack foods. Settle in.

First, the Scale of the Thing

It’s hard to hold Canada in your head. The numbers read like typos. Nearly ten million square kilometres, the second largest country on Earth, with a coastline of 243,042 kilometres that touches the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic. That is the longest coastline in the world by a margin so wide that no one else is close. Lay it out straight and it would wrap the planet six times.

Then there is the water. Canada has more lake area than any other country, nearly 900,000 lakes bigger than ten hectares, and holds roughly a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water. The Great Lakes it shares with the United States hold nearly a fifth of the planet’s fresh lake water on their own. Great Slave Lake, up in the Northwest Territories, drops 614 metres, the deepest lake in North America. Wood Buffalo National Park, on the Alberta and NWT border, is bigger than Switzerland and is the largest dark sky preserve on the planet.

Canada also holds about 28 percent of the world’s boreal forest, a green belt that runs unbroken from the Yukon to Labrador and does more to regulate the northern hemisphere’s climate than most of us will ever appreciate. So when we say the country is vast, we don’t mean it in the brochure sense. We mean the land itself is one of the planet’s load-bearing walls, and Canada got handed the job of looking after it. On that job alone, it’s done better than most. It also, for what it’s worth, chose a rodent as its national animal, and put it on the nickel, and has never once seemed embarrassed about this.

The Pacific Edge

Start on the west coast, where the country meets the ocean with rainforest instead of beach towns. Vancouver Island’s outer shore is one of the great wild coastlines in the world, a place where the trees come right down to the surf and the storms are the reason people book the trip.

Tofino and the Pacific Rim

Tofino sits at the end of the road on Vancouver Island’s west coast, and it feels like it. Pacific Rim National Park Reserve runs south from here: sixteen kilometres of Long Beach, old growth cedar and hemlock behind it, grey whales offshore in spring.

In winter the Pacific arrives in swells several metres high and the town’s lodges sell storm watching as a product, which tells you something about a place that decided to love its weather instead of apologizing for it. The surf is cold and consistent, and the people in the water are wearing five millimetres of neoprene and grinning anyway.

Cathedral Grove

On the highway across the island to Tofino there is a stand of Douglas firs that has been growing since around the time of the Magna Carta. Some of the trees in Cathedral Grove are 800 years old and 75 metres tall, and the light comes down through them in shafts, which is why the name stuck. Canada protects this sort of thing almost casually. There’s a parking lot, a boardwalk and a sign, and then there’s a forest that was already old when Europeans first saw the Pacific.

Vancouver

Then there is the city that anchors all of it. Vancouver is what happens when you put a dense, glassy, very modern downtown on a peninsula and surround it with ocean on three sides and mountains on the fourth. Stanley Park, 400 hectares of temperate rainforest and seawall, is larger than Central Park and sits at the end of the downtown grid.

You can ski in the morning and be in a dim sum hall in Richmond by early afternoon, and a lot of people do. More than 40 percent of Vancouver’s residents were born outside Canada. It’s also, we should note, the city where Bing Crosby was refused entry to a hotel in 1951 for wearing denim, which is how the world got the phrase Canadian tuxedo. The city is one of the clearest arguments anywhere that density and nature aren’t opposites.

The Rockies, Which Are Not a Postcard

The Canadian Rockies are the most photographed thing in the country and they still manage to be underrated. The problem with the postcard is that it flattens the scale. Banff and Jasper together cover more than 17,000 square kilometres of the range, and the road between them is one of the finest drives on the continent.

The Icefields Parkway

Two hundred and thirty two kilometres from Lake Louise to Jasper, past the Columbia Icefield, a sheet of ice that feeds rivers flowing to three different oceans. There are more than a hundred glaciers visible from the road. There’s no cell service for most of it and no towns, and nobody seems to mind. We wrote about the strange, milky turquoise of Peyto Lake a while back, and the honest answer to how it gets that colour is rock flour, glacial silt so fine it hangs in the water and scatters blue light. Every lake along this road has its own version of that colour and none of them look the same.

Moraine Lake, at the top of this article, spent a decade on the back of the twenty dollar bill and now lives in every calendar, and it has earned both. The Valley of the Ten Peaks stands behind it like a wall, and in the early morning the water is so still that the mountains appear twice.

Kluane and the Yukon

Further north, the Yukon holds mountains that make the Rockies look domestic. Kluane National Park contains Mount Logan, at 5,959 metres the highest peak in Canada and the second highest in North America, along with the largest non-polar icefields in the world. Almost nobody sees Logan up close, which is part of what makes the Yukon the Yukon. The territory is bigger than California and has a population of about 45,000 people, most of them in Whitehorse, and it has the good sense to leave the rest alone.

The Atlantic, Where the Country Began

If the Pacific coast is about scale, the Atlantic coast is about character. The four Atlantic provinces are older, smaller, saltier, and they have a sense of humour about it. This is where the fog we named this site after actually lives, and where, if you visit Newfoundland, you may be asked to kiss a cod and drink a shot of rum to become an honorary Newfoundlander. This is a real ceremony. It’s called a screech-in. People fly in for it. The Grand Banks of Newfoundland are the foggiest place on Earth, more than 200 days of it a year, and we consider that a point in their favour.

The Bay of Fundy

Twice a day, 160 billion tonnes of seawater move in and out of the Bay of Fundy between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. That is more water than the combined flow of every river on Earth. The tidal range reaches 16 metres, the height of a five storey building, the highest on the planet. At the Hopewell Rocks you walk on the sea floor among sandstone towers in the morning and kayak around their tops in the afternoon. The cliffs at Joggins, farther down the bay, hold a 300 million year old fossil forest and are a UNESCO site. It’s an easy place to feel small in, and an easy place to like.

The Cabot Trail

Cape Breton Island was settled by Scottish Highlanders cleared off their land two centuries ago, and it kept the Gaelic and the fiddles long after Scotland itself let them go.

The Cabot Trail loops 298 kilometres around its northern highlands, most spectacularly along the west side, where the road climbs French Mountain and the highlands drop straight into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In October the hardwoods on the interior slopes go the colour of a struck match. The trail is one of those drives that people fly across the country to make, and having made it, we understand.

Peggy’s Cove

Everyone has seen the lighthouse. Fewer people know that the granite it stands on was scraped bare by the last ice sheet and that the boulders scattered across it, called erratics, were dropped by the ice as it left. The village behind the lighthouse still has a working harbour and about thirty year round residents. It’s the most visited place in Nova Scotia and it has somehow kept its dignity, which very few famous places manage.

Prince Edward Island

The smallest province is a long crescent of red soil, potato fields and dune-backed beaches in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The red comes from iron oxide in the sandstone, and it makes everything on the island look as though it was colour graded by someone with excellent taste: rust cliffs, green fields, teal water. Charlottetown is where the country was negotiated into existence in 1864, in a building you can still walk into. The island has a way of making you slow down whether you planned to or not.

Halifax

Halifax has one of the largest natural harbours in the world and a population that has been welcoming ships into it for 275 years. Pier 21, on the waterfront, is where roughly a million immigrants first stepped onto Canadian ground between 1928 and 1971, and it is now the national immigration museum. The city is university-heavy, pub-heavy, and generous. Every December it sends a Christmas tree to Boston, a thank you for the help Boston sent after the harbour explosion of 1917, and it has done so for more than fifty years. Canadians remember who showed up for them. Worth keeping in mind.

Newfoundland, Which Is Its Own Thing

Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, reluctantly, by a vote of 52 percent, and it has never entirely stopped being a separate country in spirit. It has its own dictionary, its own time zone (half an hour off everyone else, on purpose), place names like Dildo, Come By Chance and Heart’s Content, and a coastline that looks like Norway and Ireland had a child and left it in the North Atlantic.

Gros Morne

Gros Morne is where geologists go on pilgrimage. The Tablelands, a bare orange plateau in the middle of the park, are a slab of the Earth’s mantle that was shoved up onto the surface when two continents collided 500 million years ago. Almost nothing grows on it because the rock is toxic to most plants. A few kilometres away, Western Brook Pond is a freshwater fjord walled by 600 metre cliffs, cut off from the sea when the land rebounded after the ice left. The park is a UNESCO site because it is one of the best places on the planet to see plate tectonics with your own eyes, and it is also, incidentally, ravishing.

Iceberg Alley

Each spring, icebergs that calved off Greenland’s glaciers drift down the Labrador Current and pass the Newfoundland coast, some of them the size of office buildings and ten thousand years old. From Twillingate and St. Anthony you can watch them from the shore. Local breweries fish smaller pieces out of the water and make beer from meltwater that fell as snow before agriculture existed. That’s a very Newfoundland thing to do with an iceberg.

We wrote earlier this summer about Fogo Island Inn, the extraordinary hotel on stilts that Todd Saunders designed for the far northeast corner of this coast, and about the community that built it to keep the island alive. If you want one place that explains Newfoundland, it’s that one.

The North, Where Most of the Country Actually Is

Roughly 40 percent of Canada’s landmass is in its three northern territories, and fewer than 130,000 people live there. This is the part of the country that even most Canadians have never seen, and it contains some of the most staggering landscapes on the planet.

Baffin Island

The fifth largest island in the world, larger than Spain, home to about 13,000 people, almost all of them Inuit. Auyuittuq National Park, on its eastern side, holds Mount Thor, whose west face is the greatest sheer vertical drop on Earth: 1,250 metres of granite at an average angle of 105 degrees, which means it overhangs. The fjords along the coast are the ones photographers cross oceans for. We featured Florian Ledoux’s aerial work from this part of the world earlier this year, and it remains some of the most beautiful photography we have ever published.

The Aurora

Yellowknife, on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, sits directly under the auroral oval, and on clear nights between late August and April the lights appear more often than not. That’s not luck. The city is flat, dry, far from the coast, and dark, and the aurora forecast is a normal part of the evening news. Whitehorse and Churchill have their own versions. It’s one of the few natural spectacles that gets more common the farther you are from anything else, and Canada has a great deal of far.

Churchill

A town of 900 people on the Hudson Bay coast that shares its streets, every autumn, with several hundred polar bears waiting for the sea ice to form. Churchill has a polar bear jail, a polar bear alert line, and a general policy of leaving car doors unlocked so that anyone caught outside has somewhere to go. In summer, thousands of beluga whales come into the Churchill River estuary and will swim up to a kayak out of curiosity. There’s nowhere else like it.

The Middle, Which Nobody Flies Over Twice

The Prairies

Saskatchewan’s licence plates say Land of Living Skies and it isn’t marketing. The province is so flat and so open that weather arrives as theatre: thunderheads you can watch build for an hour, sunsets that take up the whole horizon, northern lights in the winter. The Prairies are where the country’s grain comes from and where a great many of its immigrants were settled a century ago, Ukrainians and Mennonites and Icelanders, whose churches and onion domes still stand in towns of two hundred people. The light here is the best in the country. Photographers already know this. Everyone else is still catching up, and Saskatchewan, being Saskatchewan, is too polite to point it out.

The Badlands

Two hours east of Calgary the prairie drops away into a maze of striped hoodoos and coulees along the Red Deer River, and the rock is so full of fossils that you can find them lying on the ground. Dinosaur Provincial Park has produced more than 50 dinosaur species and is one of the richest fossil beds on Earth. The Royal Tyrrell Museum in nearby Drumheller is one of the great natural history museums in the world and hardly anyone outside the province knows it. Most people have no idea this landscape is in Canada at all. It looks like Utah. It’s Alberta.

Algonquin

The Canadian Shield, the ancient granite heart of the continent, runs across most of Ontario and Quebec, and its signature landscape is a lake with a pine leaning over it. Algonquin Park is the archetype: 7,600 square kilometres, 2,400 lakes, and a canoe route network that people spend their lives exploring. This is the landscape the Group of Seven painted into the national identity a century ago, and in October, when the maples go, you understand why they never wanted to paint anything else.

Niagara

Yes, it’s shared. But the Horseshoe Falls, which carry about 90 percent of the river’s flow and are the ones in every photograph, are on the Canadian side, and so is the view. Roughly 2,800 cubic metres of water go over the crest every second. The falls have retreated eleven kilometres upstream since the last ice age and are still moving. Niagara is the rare famous natural wonder that is more impressive in person than in the pictures, because the pictures can’t do the sound.

The Cities

Canada’s cities are the part of the case that surprises people. They’re dense, safe, walkable and remarkably diverse, and three of them turn up near the top of every livability index anyone bothers to publish. They also sell milk in bags, in Ontario and Quebec at least, and we’ve never had that explained to our satisfaction.

Toronto

The fourth largest city in North America and, by most measures, the most multicultural on Earth. Nearly half of Toronto’s residents were born outside Canada, more than 200 languages are spoken in the city, and its neighbourhoods reflect it: Little Portugal, Koreatown, Little Italy, Greektown, Chinatown, Little Jamaica, a Somali district in Etobicoke, a Tamil corridor in Scarborough. Kensington Market, west of downtown, is a few square blocks where all of it collides. Toronto is also where insulin was discovered, in 1921, in a university lab, and sold to the university for one dollar so that nobody could profit from it.

It’s the home of Drake, of the Raptors, and of a man named Sam Panopoulos who, in 1962, in nearby Chatham, put pineapple on a pizza for the first time and called it Hawaiian. The country has been quietly apologizing for that one ever since.

Montreal

One of the largest French-speaking cities in the world, and the one with the best bagels. Montreal has a music scene that produced Arcade Fire and Leonard Cohen, a design culture that produced Habitat 67 (Moshe Safdie was 28 when he built it for Expo 67), and a winter it decided to enjoy rather than endure.

There’s an underground city of 32 kilometres of tunnels, there are outdoor rinks on every second block, and there is poutine, which the province of Quebec invented in the 1950s and which the rest of the world has spent seventy years trying to improve without success. The city is bilingual in the actual, working sense: you’ll hear a conversation switch languages mid-sentence and nobody will notice.

Quebec City

Founded in 1608 and the only walled city north of Mexico, Quebec City is what people imagine when they imagine old Europe, except that it is on a cliff above the St. Lawrence and it gets three metres of snow a year. The Château Frontenac on top of the cliff is said to be the most photographed hotel in the world, and we have no reason to doubt it.

Every February the city throws a winter carnival with an ice palace, canoe races across a half frozen river, and a seven foot snowman mascot named Bonhomme who wears a red sash and is treated, sincerely, as a dignitary. It’s an extremely Quebec way of dealing with February and we wouldn’t change a thing.

Ottawa

The capital gets teased for being sleepy, and it’s a little sleepy, and that’s fine. It has the finest Gothic Revival government buildings on the continent, a canal that becomes the world’s largest skating rink every winter, and the national galleries and museums, including the National Gallery and Douglas Cardinal’s extraordinary curving Museum of History across the river. Ottawa is what a capital looks like when it isn’t trying to intimidate anyone. People skate to work on the canal with their briefcases. That’s not a metaphor.

The People, Which Is the Real Case

You can make an argument for Canada from the landscape alone. We just did. But landscape is luck. What a country does with its luck is the real test, and here Canada’s record isn’t a matter of opinion. There’s a habit of decency that shows up over and over, at every scale, in ways that are very hard to fake.

Gander

On the morning of September 11, 2001, when American airspace closed, 38 wide-body jets carrying about 7,000 people were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, a town of fewer than 10,000. The town took them all in. Schools and churches and legion halls became dormitories. Pharmacists filled prescriptions for free. People drove strangers to their homes for showers and dinner and came back the next day to do it again. When the passengers finally left, five days later, they had to be talked out of paying for anything. A scholarship fund they set up for Gander’s kids has since passed a million dollars. Nobody in Gander thought any of this was remarkable, which is the remarkable part.

The Everyday Version

Gander is the famous case, but the same instinct runs through ordinary Canadian life in ways that are easy to miss until you’ve lived somewhere without them. It’s a country where a stranger will stop in the snow to push your car out. Where the person you bumped into apologizes to you. Where people say sorry so reflexively that Ontario passed a law in 2009, the Apology Act, clarifying that saying sorry cannot be used against you in court, because otherwise the entire province would be permanently liable. Where universal health care has been settled policy for sixty years and is treated, across the political spectrum, as basic fairness rather than a fight. Where the national broadcaster still runs radio dramas, and a gentle program called Vinyl Cafe was, for two decades, one of the most beloved things in the country. Where a national coffee chain runs a contest called Roll Up the Rim and the whole country participates as though it were a civic duty. Canadians aren’t saints, and they’d be the first to say so. But there’s a baseline of consideration built into public life there that’s rarer than it should be, and it’s real, and it’s the reason the rest of this list exists.

Kindness at scale is a form of infrastructure. Canada has been building it for a long time.

The Strength of Their Diversity

In 1971 Canada became the first country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as official national policy. Half a century later, the 2021 census counted more than 450 ethnic and cultural origins, and immigrants now make up 23 percent of the population, the highest share of any G7 country and the highest in Canada’s own history.

What is striking is not the number but how little friction it produces. The country has absorbed wave after wave of newcomers, from the Irish and Ukrainians and Chinese railway workers of the nineteenth century to the Vietnamese boat people of the 1970s, the Hong Kong families of the 1990s, Syrians in 2015, Ukrainians again in 2022, and it has come out of every one of those waves richer, more interesting, and more itself. The bilingual foundation helped. A country that had to make room for two founding languages from the start had already done the hard work of learning that identity can be plural. Diversity isn’t something Canada puts up with. It’s how the place runs.

It is also, quite literally, what the cities look like. Toronto’s Kensington Market on a Saturday, Vancouver’s Richmond night market, the Jean-Talon market in Montreal, the Danforth in August: these are some of the most alive public spaces on the continent, and they’re alive because of who’s in them. It’s also how a country ends up with ketchup-flavoured potato chips, a Greek immigrant inventing Hawaiian pizza, and a national dish that’s French fries, cheese curds and gravy. Nobody planned any of it. That’s rather the point.

Why It Works

Landscape and kindness make for a good story. Institutions make for a good country, and this is where the case gets stronger, not weaker. Canada is one of a handful of countries that has managed to be both large and well run, and you can measure it.

Its people live longer than Americans, by about three years on average, and they do it under a public health system that has been settled policy for six decades. It has one of the most educated populations in the world: more of its adults hold a post-secondary credential than in any other large economy. Its cities routinely take two or three of the top ten places in global livability rankings, and they earn it, with transit that runs, streets that are safe to walk at night, and a housing stock that, for all its price problems, is dense and humane and full of trees. Its passport opens more doors than almost any other. Its banks did not fail in 2008. Its elections are boring, which is the nicest thing you can say about an election. Its two dollar coin is called the toonie, because the one dollar coin has a loon on it and is therefore the loonie, and the country arrived at this by consensus.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened because the country was rich in some way its neighbours weren’t. It happened because Canada made a series of choices, over a century and a half, about what a country is for. It decided that a founding compromise between two languages was a feature. It decided that newcomers were an asset. It decided that health care and public broadcasting and national parks were things a country owns in common, and it kept deciding that, election after election, when other places wavered. A country is the sum of its choices, and Canada’s have been unusually good.

The country also carries a hard history, above all in its treatment of Indigenous peoples, and to its credit it’s stopped pretending otherwise. The residential school reckoning, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the return of land and language and self-government to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities: these are unfinished, but they are underway, in public, with the country’s full attention. Being willing to look at yourself honestly is a national trait too, and not a common one.

What Canada Gave Everyone Else

A short and incomplete list, for the record. Insulin. The pacemaker. The paint roller. The snowmobile. Basketball, invented by a Canadian in Massachusetts. IMAX, born out of Expo 67 in Montreal. The Canadarm. Peacekeeping, for which Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize in 1957. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood. The architects Arthur Erickson, Moshe Safdie, Douglas Cardinal, and Frank Gehry, who was born in Toronto. Norman McLaren and the National Film Board, which more or less invented the animated short as an art form. A frankly unfair share of the best comedy of the last fifty years: Lorne Michaels, who built Saturday Night Live; SCTV, which gave the world Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, John Candy and Martin Short; Mike Myers; the Kids in the Hall; Schitt’s Creek. Superman, co-created by a kid from Toronto. Wayne Gretzky, Céline Dion, Ryan Reynolds, and the Heritage Minutes, sixty second history lessons that ran between TV shows for thirty years and that every Canadian can quote from memory, including the one about burnt toast. And, if you ask us, the most beautiful national flag on Earth, adopted in 1965 after a national argument about design, which is exactly the way a country should get a flag.

The Verdict

If you want more of the world at this scale, our guide to the planet’s natural wonders and our long list of the most beautiful places on Earth both keep going where this one leaves off, and our Canadian road trip piece is the practical companion to this one.

Our weekly newsletter, Fog Signals, is where we send the pictures we cannot fit anywhere else.

All photographs are by the credited photographers via Unsplash, used with gratitude. Several of them are Canadian, and we’re sorry we couldn’t fit more.

By Moss & Fog Staff