Canada

Canada is the northern country of North America, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, the second-largest country on earth by total area with the longest coastline of any nation. Its ten provinces and three territories hold over forty-one million people, most of them clustered in cities near the American border while the far north stays nearly empty. Ottawa is the capital; Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver are the great metropolitan centres. French and British expeditions settled the Atlantic shore from the sixteenth century, and after armed struggle France ceded nearly all of New France in 1763. On 1 July 1867 three British North American colonies united in Confederation as a federal dominion of four provinces, and the new state grew by accretion, buying Rupert's Land, building the transcontinental railway to British Columbia by 1885, and displacing Indigenous peoples as it spread. Autonomy widened step by step: separate signature at Versailles, the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and finally the Canada Act of 1982, which cut the last legal tie to London. Bilingual, federal and trading above all with its southern neighbour, Canada entered the Second World War in September 1939 as a sovereign belligerent.