This book has been organized according to the principle that a textbook on Canadian Studies will be useful in almost any academic setting in which Canada is an important topic. It is intended either to stand alone as a basic textbook about Canada or to serve as a resource for comparative studies courses in the humanities and social sciences. Its key learning objectives are as follows:

You will be able to identify Canada’s key geographic features and political divisions.

You will be able to describe how Canadian culture differs from American culture.

You will be able to identify and communicate...

Canada is the world’s second-largest country, covering nearly 3.9 million square miles and six time zones (including a separate one for Newfoundland and Labrador), yet much of it is sparsely populated. In 2011, its population of 34.4 million was less than California’s (37 million). Most Canadians live in cities along their country’s southern border with the United States. The country’s three largest metropolitan areas, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, account for over a third of the country’s population, and each is within an hour’s drive of the US border. Between and to the north of these areas is a vast and...

This chapter explains to American university students with little or no background on the subject how Canada came to be. Historians of Canada – Canadians writing for Canadian readers – have written textbooks that are just as long as the ones an American student reads in an American history class. We must do that same job in one chapter: present a narrative of five centuries as well as enough historical context to understand the rest of this book. To enable American students to begin to understand Canada, we have made the similarities and differences between Canadian and American history our central theme....

As the chapters in this book reveal, the Canadian experience has many important similarities and differences when compared with the United States. This is certainly true in the sphere of politics and government. Both countries are advanced liberal democracies that strive to give political voice to citizens in pluralistic societies through institutionalized systems of political representation. Both political systems integrate enormous geographies and distribute power over space in federal arrangements. These and numerous other commonalities have made the two countries natural allies, sharing the world’s longest undefended border, as well as partners in what is one of the most intimate...

The Canadian economy is vitally important to the United States. Canada is the top export market for close to three quarters of the fifty states. The trade relationship between the two is the world’s largest, with over $1.5 billion of exports and imports crossing the border every day. Canada is the United States’ largest foreign supplier of oil and petroleum products. Big Canadian companies such as the Bank of Montreal, Magna, and CN Rail have an American presence. Many large American companies such as Procter & Gamble, General Motors, and Dow Chemical have Canadian operations.

Now that you appreciate...

As seen in the chapters on geography and history, the story of Canada needs to include immigration. Before the constitutional arrangement of 1867 that established the county as a federation that started with four provinces, there had been the arrival of Aboriginal populations who crossed the Bering Straits from Asia, then the arrival of Europeans across the Atlantic, who were later followed by peoples from all continents of the planet. Immigration is often portrayed as a point of unity across these populations, with the concept that “we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants.” Of course, for some the immigration...

Americans need to understand the power that the sense of identity holds for today’s Quebec. Quebec is a Canadian province. But for a majority of its inhabitants, Quebec, with its predominantly French-speaking population, is also a nation. Long resisted by the Canadian government until Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked Parliament to officially recognize that “the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada” on 26 November 2006,¹ this identification with the idea of nation is unfamiliar to most Americans.

For Quebec, the use of the province’s name to designate the national character of its inhabitants is, likewise in historical terms,...

This chapter examines aspects of Canadian literary and popular culture. It is a curious subject: popular culture is among the most empirically accessible expressions of what it means to be Canadian, but at the same time is the most evasive and difficult to capture in any neat analytical depiction. Though even the newest student of Canada could likely cite at least one example or manifestation of “Canadian culture” – ice hockey, good beer, the Group of Seven or Emily Carr, the music of Michael Bublé and Justin Bieber, the writing of Douglas Coupland and Margaret Atwood, or films of Sarah Polley...

There has been a general change in the political climate over the past three decades: as the Canadian government has gone from a desire to rid the country of the “Indian problem” through cultural assimilation to the imperative to compensate Aboriginal peoples for the damage done to their cultures, traditions, and values, to efforts to establish Aboriginal self-government as a third sovereign order. The situation is made all the more interesting by the relatively high percentage of Aboriginal people in the Canadian population (especially in Western and Northern Canada), most notably in comparison to the United States. Other factors that...

Although certainly women have been included elsewhere in this book, the present chapter stresses issues that specifically affect women in Canada, mainly in the political and social arenas. It needs to be noted that “woman” is in no way a unitary identity; there are many ways to be and experience womanhood, and this varies in particular by race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, language, and region of the country. Thus, the discussion below highlights situations of a variety of women in Canada as they have struggled to achieve rights in the political and social arena. One of the key points...

This chapter covers several aspects of Canadian environmental policy. We examine constitutional features such as the internal federal–provincial relationship regarding the environment and the dominance of the provincial policy. The relationship between Canada and the United States also merits consideration. The dominance of the United States in its advocacy in environmental protection and Canada’s supportive role and eventual adjustment to the policy priorities of the United States is emphasized. We then focus on the domestic environmental policymaking process and public opinion about the importance of the environment in relation to other public policy concerns. Then we highlight the influential international...

The organizations and activities of civil society are vitally important in meeting human needs. Yet, while any consideration of the dominant forces in contemporary Western societies like the United States and Canada will readily acknowledge the roles that both government and private business or the marketplace play in providing goods and services to meet human needs, civil society is more likely to remain unseen and unacknowledged. This is true in spite of the fact that responsiveness to the needs of citizens by both the market and the state often derives from the pressures exerted and innovations modelled by actors in...

Canada’s role in the international community has changed and developed over time in response to an evolving agenda of global and domestic issues and concerns. While it can be argued that there has been some degree of continuity in the manner and approach by which Canada has sought to conduct its foreign policy, it is equally clear that the country has followed a number of distinctive paths in its dealings with the world beyond its borders. Canada’s international relations reflect both continuity and change. As with other global actors, Canada’s foreign policy is a response to immediate needs and pressures...

Having studied the chapters of this book, dear reader, you now have a comprehensive introduction to Canada as compared to the United States. We started with Canada’s most fundamental characteristics: its geography and history and how Canada evolved differently from the United States as a result of these forces. Additional chapters deliberately went back and forth between highly encompassing and more focused subjects to strike a balance between the conventional and more recently topical. Thus, the journey through Canada continued with a look at government institutions and politics in general, along with the economy, population, and immigration. This discussion was...