CANADA

1. CANADA

3. BASIC FACTS The name Canada comes from the Iroquoianword kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement„. Theindigenous inhabitants used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona.

4. HISTORY and ECONOMY The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America to Britain in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy, culminating in the Canada Act 1982. Canada is a federal state governed as a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. The country is officially bilingual and multicultural. Canada's advanced economy is one of the largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its rich natural resources (oil, nickel, zinc, uranium, gold and lead)and well-developed trade networks, especially with the United States, with which it has had a long and complex relationship.

5. The First Nations The characteristics of Canadian Aboriginal societies included permanent settlements, agriculture, complex societal hierarchies, and trading networks. Therewereupto 2million aboriginalpeoplesin the 15th century. As a consequence of the European colonization, Canada's aboriginal peoples suffered from repeated outbreaks of newly introduced infectious diseases such as influenza, measles, and smallpox (to which they had no natural immunity), resulting in a forty- to eighty-percent population decrease in the centuries after the European arrival. Aboriginal peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations,Inuit, and Métis.TheMétis are a mixed-blood people who originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit people married European settlers

7. GEOGRAPHY

8. WILDLIFE

9. Big Cities Montreal Quebec Vancouver Ottawa

10. The Commonwealthof Nations is an intergovernmental organization of 54 independent member states. Most are former British colonies. The member states cooperate within a framework of common values and goals, as outlined in the Singapore Declaration. These include the promotion of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism and world peace.[1] The Commonwealth is not a political union, but an intergovernmental organization in which countries with diverse social, political and economic backgrounds are regarded as equal in status. Alongside shared values, Commonwealth nations share strong trade links; trade with another Commonwealth member has been shown to be a third to a half more than with a non-member.[2] The Commonwealth was first officially formed in 1931 when the Statute of Westminster gave legal recognition to the independence of dominions. Known as the "British Commonwealth", the first members were the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Dominion of Newfoundland, although Australia and New Zealand did not adopt the statute until 1942 and 1947 respectively.[4] In 1949, the London Declaration was signed and marked the birth of the modern Commonwealth and the renaming to its present name.[5] The most recent member is Rwanda, which joined on 29 November 2009