Totem in the Byward Market

Wel­come to my new series, the “Cana­dian List of Ten”! Ten weeks, ten posts, ten lists and one hun­dred new Cana­dian things for you, from food to lan­guage, from city to weather.

Believe it or not, the stereo­typ­i­cal Cana­dian is not a lum­ber­jack, doesn’t live in an igloo some­where up North, and doesn’t always watch hockey.

Okay, the last part may be true. Hockey Night in Canada is prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar TV pro­gram here.

Cana­di­ans are inter­est­ing peo­ple, mainly because the pop­u­la­tion is extremely diverse, which is not sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing that Canada wel­comes around 250,000 new­com­ers every year.

All the sta­tis­tic are from the World Fact­book and Sta­tis­tics Canada.

1. Canada was first inhab­ited by var­i­ous groups of Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ple. They com­prise the First Nations, the Inu­its and the Métis, a cul­ture of mixed blood orig­i­nated in the mid-17^th cen­tury when First Nation and native Inuit mar­ried Euro­pean set­tlers. Abo­rig­i­nal cul­tures, lan­guages, art, and music are very much alive in today’s Canada.
2. As of July 2009, the pop­u­la­tion of Canada is 33,739,859. With over 278 mil­lions peo­ple, the U.S.A has 8.8 times greater population.
3. About 3/4 of Canada’s pop­u­la­tion live within 150 kilo­me­tres (93 mi) of the United States bor­der. 3/4 live in urban areas con­cen­trated in the Que­bec City – Wind­sor Cor­ri­dor (Toronto, Mon­treal, and Ottawa), the BC Lower Main­land (Van­cou­ver and sur­round­ings), and the Calgary–Edmonton Cor­ri­dor in Alberta.
4. In the 2006 Cen­sus, Canada had six met­ro­pol­i­tan areas with more than 1 mil­lion peo­ple: Toronto, Mon­tréal, Van­cou­ver, Ottawa — Gatineau and, for the first time, Cal­gary and Edmon­ton. Together, this “millionaire’s club” had a total of 14.1 mil­lion res­i­dents, or 45% of Canada’s population.
5. Accord­ing to the 2006 cen­sus, 67.1% of Cana­di­ans speak Eng­lish at home and 21.5% speak French at home. About 20% of Cana­di­ans are allo­phones, which means they have a lan­guage other than Eng­lish or French as their first lan­guage. The five most widely-spoken non-official lan­guages are Chi­nese, Pun­jabi, Span­ish, Ital­ian and Dutch.
6. Like in many other devel­oped coun­tries, Canada’s pop­u­la­tion is aging. The median age is 39.5 years old. Nunavut has the younger pop­u­la­tion with a median age of 23.1 while Nova Sco­tia, New­found­land and Labrador and New Brunswick have the high­est median age of 41.5 years old.
7. Accord­ing to the 2001 cen­sus by Sta­tis­tics Canada, Canada has 34 eth­nic groups with at least one hun­dred thou­sand mem­bers each, of which 10 have over 1,000,000 peo­ple and numer­ous oth­ers rep­re­sented in smaller amounts. 16.2% of the pop­u­la­tion belonged to vis­i­ble minori­ties: South Asian (4.0% of the pop­u­la­tion), Chi­nese (3.9%), Black (2.5%), and Fil­ipino (1.1%).
8. Accord­ing to a 2005 fore­cast by Sta­tis­tics Canada, the pro­por­tion of vis­i­ble minori­ties in Canada could rise as high as 23% by 2017. A sur­vey released in 2007 reveals that almost one in five Cana­di­ans (19.8%) is for­eign born.
9. As of May 2009, Cana­dian house­hold debt was $1.3 tril­lion. US house­hold debt has reached $14 tril­lion in 2009. Way too much for both coun­tries, if you want my opinion.
10. Over the past 20 years, Canada recorded much lower rates of vio­lent crime than the United States did. How­ever, rates for prop­erty offenses have gen­er­ally been higher in Canada. The homi­cide rate is three times higher in the U.S.A. (source)

Related arti­cles:

1. 10 Myths About Canada
2. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Like (Part 1)
3. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Don’t Like (Part 1)
4. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Like (Part 2)
5. Stuffs Cana­di­ans Don’t Like (Part II)