Random Facts About Canada

All Canada Facts

• Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world, stretching about 243,000 km across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans, longer than the next several countries on the list combined.
• Basketball was invented by a Canadian. James Naismith, born in Almonte, Ontario, nailed up two peach baskets at a YMCA gym in Massachusetts in December 1891 and wrote 13 basic rules to keep his students active indoors during winter.
• Insulin was discovered in Toronto. On July 27, 1921, Canadian surgeon Frederick Banting and medical student Charles Best successfully isolated the hormone, a breakthrough that won Banting the Nobel Prize just two years later and still appears on the Canadian $100 bill.
• Canada has had two official languages, English and French, since the Official Languages Act of 1969. About 6.6 million Canadians, roughly 18% of the population, can hold a conversation in both.
• The Great Lakes, mostly shared between Canada and the US, form the largest freshwater system on the planet, holding about six quadrillion gallons of water, roughly a fifth of the world's fresh surface water.
• Canada produces about 71% of the world's maple syrup, and more than 90% of that comes from Quebec alone, where tens of thousands of maple farms tap the trees every spring.
• Canada became the first country in the world to adopt an official policy of multiculturalism, in 1971, and later became the first to pass a national multiculturalism law when the Canadian Multiculturalism Act took effect in 1988.
• The small town of Churchill, Manitoba, is nicknamed the Polar Bear Capital of the World because it's the only easily accessible place on Earth where humans can watch wild polar bears up close, as roughly 1,000 of them gather near the town each autumn waiting for Hudson Bay to freeze.
• Canada is the second largest country in the world by area, at about 9.985 million square kilometers, behind only Russia and just ahead of the United States and China.
• Canada's newest territory, Nunavut, was created on April 1, 1999, carved out of the eastern Northwest Territories to give the Inuit formal control over their traditional homeland. Its name means 'our land' in Inuktitut.
• After losing a leg to cancer, 21 year old Terry Fox set out in 1980 to run across Canada on an artificial leg to raise money for cancer research. He covered 5,373 km in 143 days before the disease forced him to stop, and his Marathon of Hope has since raised more than $850 million worldwide.
• Canadians nicknamed their $1 coin the 'loonie' after the loon bird stamped on its back when it launched in 1987, then naturally called the $2 coin introduced in 1995 the 'toonie', a name so popular the Royal Canadian Mint trademarked both words in 2006.
• The Canadarm robotic arm, built by Canadian engineers, first deployed on a Space Shuttle in 1981 and helped unload cargo for 30 years, while its successor, Canadarm2, has been assembling and maintaining the International Space Station since 2001.
• Canada has two official national sports by law: ice hockey as the national winter sport and lacrosse, originally played by First Nations peoples, as the national summer sport, both designated under the National Sports of Canada Act in 1994.
• The Trans-Canada Highway runs 7,821 km from Victoria, British Columbia, to St. John's, Newfoundland, making it one of the longest national highways on Earth and connecting the country coast to coast.
• The Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia has the highest tides on Earth, with the water level near Nova Scotia's Minas Basin rising and falling by as much as 16 meters between low and high tide.
• Toronto's CN Tower was the tallest freestanding structure in the world for more than 30 years after it was finished in 1975, a record it held until Dubai's Burj Khalifa overtook it in 2007.
• The Canadian Pacific Railway, connecting Montreal to Vancouver, was finished with a ceremonial last spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia, on November 7, 1885, a condition British Columbia had set for joining Canada back in 1871.
• Poutine, fries topped with cheese curds and gravy, was invented in rural Quebec in the late 1950s. Several towns still argue over who created it first, but it didn't reach Montreal until 1983, decades after it first appeared in small town snack bars.
• Banff, established in 1885 after railway workers discovered hot springs in the Rocky Mountains, is Canada's oldest national park and only the second national park created anywhere in North America, after Yellowstone.
• The Royal Canadian Mounted Police traces back to 1873, when it was formed as the North-West Mounted Police to bring law and order to the western territories. It didn't get its current name, or the title 'Royal', until King Edward VII granted it in 1904.
• Canada's maple leaf flag only became official on February 15, 1965, after a bitter parliamentary debate. Before that, Canada had flown Britain's Union Jack or an unofficial Red Ensign, and the new design was chosen from thousands of submissions.
• Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky retired holding 61 NHL records, including career goals (894), assists (1,963), and points (2,857). His assists total alone is higher than the career point total of any other player in league history.
• Old Quebec is the only fortified city north of Mexico that still has its original walls intact, complete with bastions and gates from its days as the capital of New France. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 1985.
• Canada spans six time zones, a full four and a half hour difference between the Pacific coast and Newfoundland, which uniquely runs 30 minutes offset from every neighboring zone instead of a full hour.
• Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas introduced North America's first universal hospital insurance plan in 1947 and pushed through full public medical coverage in 1962, laying the groundwork for Canada's national Medicare system. In a 2004 national poll, Canadians voted him the Greatest Canadian of all time.
• When gold was discovered on Bonanza Creek in the Yukon in August 1896, word didn't reach the outside world until 1897, but once it did, roughly 100,000 prospectors set out for the Klondike, turning a patch of wilderness into Dawson City, briefly one of the largest cities in Canada.
• O Canada was composed in 1880 for a Quebec City patriotic banquet but didn't become the official national anthem until exactly a century later, on July 1, 1980. The English lyrics aren't even a translation of the French ones, they were written separately in 1908.
• About 2.5 million liters of water thunder over the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, known as Horseshoe Falls, every single second during peak daytime hours, making it one of the highest flow rate waterfalls in North America.

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