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Canada - The biggest country in the new world

Canada - It's not the USA

Imagine yourself sitting in a café one day in your home town, when on the next table you hear some people speaking English with a strong North American accent. Being a friendly person, you lean over and say, "Hi! Are you American?"

"No," comes the immediate answer. "Canadian!"

Calling a English-speaking Canadian an American can be as bad as telling a Scotsman that he's English or a Swiss person he's German. In spite of a common language, there are differences in culture and national feeling. "No," many Canadians will tell you with insistence, "We're not Americans! We're Canadians."

In the same way as Quebecers are determined to keep their identity, Canadians from the other provinces are determined to keep Canada's identity. Although the Canadian way of life is more and more like the American way of life, lots of details are different, and many Canadians, particularly Quebecers, are worried about the survival of their own differences.

Canadians use metres and kilometres and measure temperatures in Celsius; Americans use feet and miles, and measure temperature in Fahrenheit. The USA has states, Canada has provinces.

Yet about 80% of Canadians live within 150 km. of the U.S. border, and this has had a bad effect on the Canadian economy. Like most European countries, Canada has a national health service, and a good social security system; but good welfare services have to be paid for by high taxes, so the cost of living in Canada is high. Because of this, hundreds of thousands of Canadians often get in their cars and drive over to the USA to go shopping. This is one cause of economic problems in Canada. Over half of Canada's imports come from the United States, and Canada has a trade deficit with the USA.

But the American influence is not just a question of shopping. Lots of Canadians drive American cars, and cars are almost as important in Canada as they are in the USA. There is television too. While Quebecers tend to watch their own French-language TV stations, English-speaking Canadians have a choice between local English-speaking channels, national programmes from CBC, and dozens of American channels brought to them by cable or satellite. Unless they specifically want to watch local stations, they're just as likely to tune in to one of the big American channels as they are to a Canadian channel.

Perhaps it is not surprising if some Canadians are afraid that their country will soon be just like another part of the USA. If, one day, Quebec becomes independent, many Canadians fear that the rest of Canada could break up. Perhaps that's an exaggeration; many Canadians feel it is a real risk. 

Constitutional issues

Canada's official Head of State is King Charles III, who is also the nominal head of state of 15 other Commonwealth countries. His function is purely symbolic. Many Canadians would like Canada to have a Canadian head of State; but many others want to keep the monarchy. Opinion is divided, but there is no great opposition to the King as head of state, except in Quebec.

It was not until 1982 that Canada became constitutionally an independent nation! When this happened, many Canadians were quite surprised, as they thought that their country had been independent since 1867. In practice they were right; the Canadian government in Ottawa has governed Canada since that date.

The links between Britain and Canada remain very strong, all the same. About 40% of Canadians have ancestors from the British Isles, and about 30% have ancestors from France. In particular, lots of Scottish people emigrated from Britain to Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the British Isles remained the main source of immigration to Canada until the 1980's.

Today, most new Canadian immigrants come from Asia, particularly from southern and south east Asia. 

Source: https://linguapress.com/intermediate/focus-on-canada.htm