Why The World's Second Largest Country is Out of Room

Canada is the second largest country in the world by area, technically. But look at it closely, and something strange starts to reveal itself. Canada is much smaller than you might think. In fact, Canada's usable land is probably closer to Spain or France. Which means, mathematically, Canada is running out of room. So why is Canada actually much smaller than it first appears? And why has it made living in Canada almost impossible today? I'm Jeff, and this is the deceptively minuscule geographic story of Canada. Hey, I have a book coming out in 2027 called Badlands. Stick around to the end to learn more about it. Canada is an absolute behemoth of a country. In fact, it's the second largest country in the world behind only Russia. That's right, it's larger than the United States, China, and Brazil. And most surprisingly, it's larger than the combined size of every country in Europe except for the western end of Russia. In fact, coming in at just a bit under 10 million square kilometers, and with a population of just under 42 million people, this makes Canada one of the least densely populated countries in the world with just 4.2 people per square kilometer. This is a bit mind-boggling if you think about it, because Canada should have more people, right? After all, if you look at the population of those four other countries, they all absolutely dwarf Canada's population. Brazil has 214 million people, or about five Canada's worth of people. The United States has around 341 million people, or about eight Canada's. China is home to a whopping 1.4 billion people, or a staggering 34 Canada's. And yet each of these countries have less land and space to grow. Even Russia, which admittedly is much larger, still completely dwarfs Canada with 143 million people, or three and a half Canada's. And unlike the other three, Russia is of a similar latitude and climate as Canada. Which means, something's amiss here. Something is keeping Canada from growing, and it's not what you think. There's a common misconception about Canada at play here, that Canada is mostly empty because the climate forces it to be empty. This makes a certain amount of sense, of course. Unlike Europe, which sits at a similar latitude or higher than much of Canada, Canada is quite a bit colder overall. if we take the country as a whole, the average January temperature is somewhere around negative 15 degrees Celsius. And that's just the average across the whole country. Some places, like the prairie provinces, or the deep north, get much colder. So, while the weather's impact does have some truth to it, it's not the entire truth. Because Canada has milder, more temperate regions as well. Coastal British Columbia, mostly where Vancouver, Victoria, and Nanaimo all sit, can be quite temperate, by Canadian standards. Even Toronto and Montreal can be quite nice outside of a few cold winter months. Basically, if all Canada had to do was contend with the weather, they'd be much better off. So there must be something else hiding here. Something big sits underneath most of Canada. It's not a monster, of course, but it does prevent normal human settlement and agriculture from existing. This is something we call the Canadian Shield. It's an almost unfathomably large piece of pre-Cambrian igneous and metamorphic rock that takes up most of the eastern half of Canada. And while it is a geologic marvel, it's one of the Earth's oldest geologic regions with parts of it dating back as much as 4.2 billion years old. It's also absolutely terrible for agriculture. You see, the Canadian Shield is not normal land. It's not even normal rock. Because of severe glaciation over many different ice ages, the land was basically scraped clean and what was left couldn't really grow much. While the Canadian Shield is covered in vast boreal forests, the soil itself is coarse and really doesn't hold much moisture, which means the only thing that can really grow here are really those same boreal forests. But it goes beyond that, because while cities don't necessarily need to have vast agricultural fields surrounding it, though it does help, cities still need to dig into the ground to put things like telecommunications lines, sewers, transportation, and even basements for homes. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the Canadian Shield is very, very hard to dig into, which means putting in basic infrastructure on top of the Canadian Shield is prohibitively expensive. Of course, the farther west you go, the less you have to deal with the Canadian Shield. But there's another big obstacle in the way. While things flatten out and become much more agriculturally productive as you head west, it's not long before you hit the Canadian Rockies. But unlike down south in the United States, where the Rocky Mountains start and then quickly fade away into the Basin and Range regions, the Canadian Rockies are just the start of a labyrinth of tall peaks, jagged ridges, steep canyons, and coursing rivers. In fact, if you were to fly from Calgary to Vancouver, you'll basically see mountains and nothing else until you land. Even surrounding Vancouver, one of Canada's most temperate cities, are the tall, razor-sharp peaks of the Coast Mountains. All of this physical geography severely limits Canada in a way that none of those other countries have to contend with. In fact, in terms of actual livability, Canadians can basically pick between the small Atlantic provinces in the Far East, the St. Lawrence River Valley around Montreal, Lake Ontario with Toronto, the agricultural southern parts of the Prairie Provinces, or the tiny flat parts of southwest British Columbia. When you take all of this in, you can start to understand why Canada may actually be more out of space than it first appears. But then, the United States, Brazil, China, and Russia have all had different, but just as daunting geographic hurdles to overcome. So then why does it seem like Canada is mostly impossible to live in? Well, to understand that, we need to first understand how Canada developed as a country. But just like navigating Canada's impossible geographic labyrinth requires the right tools to map your way, navigating a labyrinth of daily meetings requires a tool that actually captures the right details. That's why I want to talk about today's sponsor, Whisperflow Notetaker. Whisperflow Notetaker is an AI meeting notetaker that actually gets your names, technical terms, and numbers. But the absolute best part of it is that it runs entirely on your device, meaning no awkward bot ever joins your call. It handles every phase of your workflow. Before an external meeting, it preps you before the important conversation starts. During the call, it generates a live transcript. And if you ever zone out, you can literally ask the AI, what did I miss, to instantly catch up. Or ask it questions mid-meeting without interrupting the flow. The moment your meeting ends, your summary is already ready. WhisperFlow Notetaker then double checks its own work using a more powerful model to ensure the final transcript is even sharper. WhisperFlow Notetaker is available right now for Mac and Windows. It's free to use, and my link gets you one month of Whisper Pro free with unlimited meetings. Just click the link in the description below to download it and completely upgrade how you take notes today. Thanks to WhisperFlow for supporting the channel. Now let's get back to Canada. By and large, human beings mostly know where they do and do not want to live. It's almost instinctual. Case in point, prior to European colonization, the country we now call Canada was inhabited by a wide array of indigenous peoples. From the Far East, where tribes like the Abenaki and Mi'kmaq thrived, to the region around the Great Lakes with the Anishinaabe, Iroquois, and others. Then to the Blackfoot Confederacy of what we now call the Prairie Provinces. And finally, over on the far west coast where the Haida, Salish, and others lived, mostly isolated from the rest of Canada. While there were tribes in the far north, such as the Inuit, and throughout the Canadian Shield, the vast majority of Canada's indigenous peoples lived basically in the same place Canadians do today. Places with abundant food sources, relatively moderate climates, and navigable waterways. So when Europeans arrived, the blueprint for where you can and can't live was already there. Canada's European colonization began with an unlikely colonizer, the French. In the mid-1500s, while Spain was busy in Central and South America and well before the British would colonize the eastern shore of what is now the United States, France decided to go north. Specifically, they were searching for a route to the Pacific Ocean. To that end, in 1534, a French explorer named Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the St. Lawrence River, basically to where the modern-day city of Montreal sits. And while they ultimately didn't find their route to the Pacific, they did find something almost as valuable. Fur. The French colonized the Americas in a different way than Spain or the British. Instead of establishing large cities, they opted to trade with the indigenous populations and send back their goods to France, bringing the riches of their North American holdings without needing a large distant French population to stick around. In fact, despite attempts at minor settlements, Canada would be mostly French-free until 1605, with the Acadian settlement of Port Royal in modern-day Nova Scotia, followed quickly in 1608 with a permanent and lasting settlement at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, Quebec City. From there, the French would establish colonies all along the St. Lawrence River down to Lake Ontario, never straying too far from it. The French saw where the indigenous peoples lived, and decided to live in the same places. Fast forward about 150 years, and Canada was now in the hands of the British, after France lost most of its New France territory in the French and Indian War. But the British didn't colonize in the same way as France. They saw open land not as something to be avoided, but as something to be conquered, and made to bend towards their needs. After all, this was the start of what would become a world-spanning British Empire. an empire that would go on to claim distant and desolate islands, the legendary Australian Outback, large parts of Africa, and even a big chunk of Antarctica. Certainly the British weren't going to be constrained to the St. Lawrence River Valley like the indigenous tribes and the French before them, right? Wrong. Mostly. You see, the British actually did make some successful attempts to colonize the northern regions of Canada well before they conquered New France. In 1670, the King of England granted a royal charter to the Hudson's Bay Company, to colonize and extract resources from the entire drainage basin of the Hudson Bay. This meant that the Hudson's Bay Company controlled a region larger than the original 13 British colonies of the Americas, stretching as far north as the literal Arctic, completely encircling the Hudson Bay, and all the way to the Rocky Mountains in the west. But even the Hudson's Bay Company could not establish much of a presence in this region. The company managed to build a few trading outposts, a single fort named Prince of Wales Fort, and a settlement called York Factory within the region, and that was mostly it. When a profit-driven corporation can't make the land work, you know there's something inherently challenging with the land, and so they headed west. By the late 1800s, Canada was officially given its own unique form of government and confederation within the British Empire. Canada was its own unique entity, stretching from the west coast by way of British Columbia, all the way to the east with Nova Scotia, but there was a looming problem for the young country. Their neighbors to the south were constantly trying to get more territory, and so to unite the country and keep British Columbia from either joining or falling into US hands, Canada embarked on its largest infrastructure project at the time, the Canadian Pacific Railway. But here's the thing, because the Canadian Shield was so hard to build on, the eastern part of the track had to hug as as closely to the Great Lakes as possible, never venturing too far north. It wasn't until the railroad hit the Prairie Provinces, basically where Winnipeg is, that it could finally head north, connecting with Prince Albert and Edmonton. The land just wouldn't allow for anything else. And so, what we have by the turn of the 20th century was a system of urban areas that were increasingly concentrated on the only land that would allow for them, Halifax on the east coast, Quebec City, Montreal, and Ottawa in the St. Lawrence River Valley, Toronto hugging the shores of Lake Ontario, Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, and Calgary in the Prairie Provinces, and Vancouver and Victoria tucked in the far southwest, the only mild and temperate part of the country. Even though the British Empire had big plans to conquer all of the land of Canada, they ultimately fell back onto the same land that the indigenous peoples lived on. But today, Canada is still a relatively small country by population with a lot of land, and technology has gotten better. So why is Canada mathematically running out of room to keep growing today? In a lot of ways, Canada flies under the radar a bit. Compared to the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, or many other countries in the world, it's been relatively easy to overlook Canada. But over the last few years, something dramatic has been happening in the Great White North, something that is quite shocking when you compare it to most other countries. Canada is absolutely booming in population. When we compare Canada to the United States, Brazil, China, and Russia, they are the undisputed king of population growth. Between 2021 and 2026, Canada has grown by nearly 5 million people, or a 13% increase overall. By comparison, over the same period of time, the United States grew by a relatively measly 3%, Brazil by a moderate 5%, and then China and Russia both lost population, negative 0.5% and negative 2.5% respectively. Needless to say, there's something very attractive about moving to Canada right now. Of course, growing by nearly 5 million people in just 5 years is bound to incur some growing pains because those newcomers aren't moving to the Yukon. While Canada at first appears to have an endless amount of land to build and grow on, the reality is that the people moving to Canada are largely flocking to the same few regions that the physical geography dictates humans can live on, and where humans have always gravitated towards throughout history. They're moving to Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Halifax, and Toronto, mostly. And this makes sense because those cities are largely where the economy of Canada is located, but there are also unique issues with each one that put the squeeze on how much space is actually available. At the end of the day, people move to where the economy is, and that is increasingly within these cities. Let's start with Vancouver, Canada's western temperate paradise. This city is physically constrained in a way that few other cities in the world are. To the north and east, the Fraser Valley is completely hemmed in by the Cascade Mountain Range and the Coast Mountain Range, and to the south is the international border with the United States. Look at a topographic map of the region, and you'll see that Metro Vancouver has spread just about as far as it can in all directions. There's simply no more room. Then you have the prairie province cities of Calgary and Edmonton, both quite large and, yes, they do technically have a lot of open space. It's the prairies, after all. But this is also where most of Canada's agriculture comes from. In fact, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba account for over 80% of all of Canada's agricultural land. So, to build out is to actively take away from one of Canada's most necessary resources. Additionally, the sheer cost of infrastructure in cities as cold as both make it prohibitively expensive to continue sprawling outward. Basically, they don't have as much land to build on as it might first appear. And then there's Toronto, Canada's largest and most economically dominant city. has something of a bureaucratic problem. They're trapped by their own legislative rules. Surrounding the entire Toronto metro region, the golden horseshoe as it were, is the legendary Greenbelt. This is a huge area of protected natural land and rural farms where cities can't build into. And this is great in a lot of ways, but it has also artificially limited Canada's available land. But shockingly, this is not the real bureaucratic problem. And of course, similar issues all persist for Montreal, Ottawa, and Halifax, no matter what major city you choose in Canada, there are reasons why that city is located there and why they're severely limited in what and where they can build. The geography constrains each of them. And make no mistake, I'm not against protecting the land via the Greenbelt. My own home city of Portland does something very similar. But when you do this, you also need to do something about the homes you're building. Here's the reality of Canada's current situation. Like many North American cities, during the mid-1900s all the way up until about 10 years ago, Canadian cities effectively outlawed all types of housings that weren't single-family homes or gigantic skyscrapers condensed into one small area, usually downtown. Which means nearly every Canadian city started sprawling outward with an endless sea of large lot single-family homes, all connected by large roads and little to no public transit. This was Canada's greatest mistake because unlike Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas, or almost any other U.S. city, Canada was eating into its already low supply of actual usable land by plopping down the least efficient type of house on top of it. When we factor in that large parts of Canada are effectively unlivable due to the Canadian Shield, Canadian Rockies, Cascade and Coast Mountains, Appalachian Mountains, and of course the bitter bone chillingly cold climate of the north, you can start to see Canada's true size as a country. Of those 10 million square kilometers, only about 5% or 500,000 square kilometers are actually usable for building and agriculture. Which means, Canada's population density is not 4.2 people per square kilometer. It's actually somewhere around 82 people per square kilometer, or about as densely populated as Romania or Greece, and more than twice as dense as the United States. So Canada isn't technically running out of land, but they are running out of usable land. And when it comes to building homes and growing food, usable land is the only thing that really counts. And it's for this reason that you see every Canadian city adding more housing that fits within their already small footprints. Though it should be pointed out that, as of 2025, both Vancouver and Toronto lagged very far behind every other major Canadian city in terms of building what we call missing middle housing, duplexes, triplexes, and the like. Instead, both of those cities have continued to build large skyscraper style apartments in relatively small parts of their respective cities. And so there you have it, Canada, the second largest country in the world by area size, is forced to squish itself into relatively tiny pockets all around the country. This might have been fine when the country was 5, 10, or even 20 million people in size. But now that it's approaching the population size of countries like Spain, it's starting to feel the pinch of not having enough usable land. This is my book Badlands, the geography of cities that shouldn't exist and why they do. It's all about cities like Phoenix, Tokyo, and more which are geographically in a tough spot. Whether it's water scarcity, seismic activity, sinking land, or huge volcanoes, this is the deep dive you've always wanted about the places that feel like they shouldn't exist at all. So let's go get a geography book on the New York Times bestseller list and preorder it today. There's a link in the description below, and of course, head over to my site, thebyte.co, for even more details. I hope you enjoyed learning all about Canada's real size. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about why the state of Utah doesn't actually own most of its land. Thanks for watching. See you next time.