Canada
Geography: Canada is an amazing country and it is surprising that it does not play a larger part on the world stage. It is a big place in terms of land area and is actually larger than Europe, Asia, Australasia, North and South America combined. Everything in Canada is measured on a grand scale, to drive across it would take two weeks and wealthier Canadians use motorised golf buggies to traverse their kitchens.

Southern Canada is intolerably hot in the summer and intolerably cold in the winter. Spring and Autumn only last two weeks each but are apparently very nice.
Northern Canada is a frozen wasteland only fit for arctic beasts and snowmen.

History: The first European visitors to Canada were probably the Vikings about a thousand years ago. Five hundred years after that, the French discovered it and finding no-one living there except for a couple of frozen Native American Indians, decided to take it for themselves and call it New France. In 1758 the British noticed that the French had had the effrontery to have claimed a bit of land that wasn't either in France or composed entirely of North African desert. As Britain owned the whole of the discovered world at that time they didn't like it a bit. So they stole it. The British allowed the remaining French to live in the province of Quebec and to speak whatever language they wanted, so long as they stopped moaning.

The French speaking Quebecois to this day pretend that they didn't finally surrender to the English on September 18th 1759 and that they actually live in a different country.

People: For such a vast country the population is very small, if you laid all the Canadians end to end, they would be nearly as long as a 1971 Cadilac Eldorado. Canadians are similar to Americans except they aren't trying to shoot each other all the time, don't keep invading other people's countries and don't meddle in the politics of other nations. They still drive cars the size of ocean liners but justify it because small cars get lost in the snow drifts on their driveways during winter.

There are two national languages in Canada, English and Mandarin. A smaller number of locals also speak French, Urdu and Korean.

The national sport is Ice Hockey, which is much like you would imagine a game of high speed team heavy weight boxing on skates.

Canadians are an ethnically diverse bunch 57% white, 49% Asian Oriental, 44% Asian, 20% Black with the remaing 2% made up of Native Americans.

Canadians as a people are warm and welcoming and unlike their southern neighbours talk meaningfully about politics without mentioning God. They also believe that access to education and healthcare should not be the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and have well founded state run systems for the population at large.

For the fast facts check out the CIA World Fact Book, for something more interesting there is the National Lampoon version.

Not all of the facts contained in this article are strictly true!