The next time you’re down in the pub drinking an ice cold Molson Canadian, you can astound your mates with these ten facts about The Great White North… which is Canada’s nickname, in case you didn’t know.
From having the longest street in the world to having the world’s largest lake within a lake (say whaaat?), here are JOE’s ten interesting facts you probably didn’t know about Canada…
- With a total area of 9,984,670 sq. km, Canada is comprised of 6 different time zones. Just remember, Ireland only has the one.
- Canada is home to the longest street in the world. Yonge Street starts at Lake Ontario and runs through Ontario to the Minnesota border, a distance of almost 2000km. Ireland’s O’Connell Street in Dublin measures in at just 500m long.
- A bear cub named Winnipeg was exported from the Canadian wilderness to the London Zoo in 1915. A little boy named Christopher Robin Milne loved to visit Winnipeg the Bear (or Winnie for short) and his love for the bear cub inspired the stories written by his father, A.A. Milne, about Winnie-the-Pooh.
- Ontario is believed to be home to the world’s smallest jail, The Coby Jail (below), which measures only 24.3 sq. metres.
- Canadians consume more Macaroni and Cheese than any other nation on earth.
- Canada has more lake area than any other country in the world.
- The average low for the month of January in Ottawa is roughly -14.4C. However, a temperature recorded in 1947 in Snag, Yukon makes the rest of Canada’s winter weather seem like a beach vacation. A temperature of -63 C was recorded in the small village of Snag on Feb. 3, 1947. That’s roughly the same temperature as the surface of Mars.
- At 3,855,103 square miles, Canada is the second largest country in the world, behind Russia, and it is 1.04 times bigger than China.
- Manitou Lake on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron is the world’s largest lake within a lake (41.1 square miles).
- In January 2013, three people were arrested (two have been charged) in connection with a $18-million maple syrup heist that occurred in Quebec in the summer of 2012. At the time, the stolen maple syrup was priced at $32 per gallon, that adds up to $1,800 a barrel, which was approximately 13 times the price of crude oil and the incident was dubbed “The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist” by media outlets.
Now that you have ten interesting facts about Canada to tell all your mates, why not check out our feature on “Five famous Canadians who are regularly mistaken as Americans”. You might be surprised to see who’s on our list…
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