Canada Geography, Climate & Nature

Canada is the world's second-largest country by area, spanning six time zones from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with the Arctic Ocean forming its entire northern border. Its geography splits broadly into the Atlantic provinces' rocky coastline, the flat, fertile prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and the Rocky Mountains running along the western edge of Alberta and through British Columbia.

The Canadian Shield, an enormous expanse of ancient rock, lakes, and boreal forest, covers roughly half the country's landmass, stretching from Ontario and Quebec north into the territories -- one of the reasons Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. The Great Lakes, shared with the United States, sit along the country's most densely populated stretch.

The north -- Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut -- makes up more than a third of Canada's landmass but holds a tiny fraction of its population, dominated by tundra, Arctic islands, and, in the Yukon, Mount Logan, Canada's tallest mountain.

Canada's climate varies enormously by region and by season. Coastal British Columbia has a mild, wet, maritime climate closer to parts of Western Europe than the rest of Canada -- rarely extreme in either direction, with rain concentrated in winter rather than summer.

Most of the rest of the country has a continental climate: genuinely cold, snowy winters and warm, sometimes humid summers -- Toronto and Montreal regularly see summer highs near 30°C (86°F) and winter lows well below freezing in the same year.

The north is colder again, and for longer -- much of the Arctic sees only a brief summer thaw, with permafrost underlying the ground year-round and winter temperatures that can fall below -40°C for extended stretches.

Canada holds about 80,000 known species, excluding viruses and bacteria, spread across a country that runs from temperate rainforest to high Arctic. The most recent national assessment, Wild Species 2020, covered 50,534 of them, of which 47,314 are native and 3,220 arrived through human activity.

The pattern that matters to a visitor is that Canada's biological wealth is in its extent rather than its variety: relatively few species, but enormous, connected populations of them, in habitat blocks large enough to function. The boreal forest that crosses the country is one of the largest intact forest systems left anywhere, and the wetlands inside it are the breeding ground for a substantial share of North America's migratory birds -- which is why a prairie pothole in June is louder than most rainforest.

The southern fringe is the exception and the problem. The band where most Canadians live is also where the rarest ecosystems are, and Carolinian forest, tallgrass prairie and Okanagan dry grassland survive in fragments rather than at scale.

Canada has complete national species lists for 223 mammals, 696 birds, 49 reptiles, 47 amphibians and 1,395 fishes, alongside 8,238 beetles, 5,430 moths and butterflies, 4,007 true bugs and 1,439 spiders. The headline animals are the large mammals, and unusually for a developed country they are genuinely abundant rather than merely present.

Black bears are widespread and grizzlies hold the western mountains and the coast; moose, elk, caribou, wolves, cougars and bighorn sheep occupy the same ranges. On the coasts the draw is marine -- orcas and humpbacks off British Columbia, belugas in the Churchill estuary, right whales in the Bay of Fundy -- and in the Arctic it is polar bears, which is one of the few wildlife spectacles anywhere that has a town organised around it.

The practical rules are the same everywhere and are not decorative. Bears are a genuine consideration on any trail in the west and the north: food storage rules, bear spray and making noise are what the park services ask for, and the wardens enforce them. Wildlife is most active at dawn and dusk, and roadside animals in the mountain parks cause the collisions and the traffic jams in roughly equal measure.