Hooray for Canada!
Reputation: In 2013 the Reputation Institute’s “Country RepTrak” named Canada the most reputable country on earth—for the third year in a row.
Academic salaries: Average monthly salary of a full-time Canadian professor: $7,196.
Educated adults: 40% of the workforce has a post-secondary college degree, and Canadian students are also the most likely to read for pleasure.
Translators: One in twenty of the world’s accredited translators are Canadian.
Coastline: Canada’s 151,600 miles of coastline would stretch around the equator six times.
Lakes: Minnesota is the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” but Canada has more than two million.
Space robots: The Canadarm helped shuttle astronauts grab onto orbiting satellites, and Dextre, on the ISS, proved that an orbiting robot could refuel a satellite.
Social media astronauts: Shuttle Commander Chris Hadfield has over a million Twitter followers. (American Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, has 800,000.)
American “brain-drain”: When science and engineering Ph.D. recipients from the U.S. choose to work abroad, the majority choose Canada.
Natural capital: In 2012 natural commodities like lumber, rivers, and minerals amounted to CAD $89,000 per capita.
Polar bears: Four out of five of the world’s polar bears are Canadian. (Russia and Alaska are home to the rest.)
Hemp food: In 2011 Manitoba’s Hemp Oil Canada, Inc. received the world’s first safety accreditation for hemp-based food.
Online census: Canada was the first country to have an “online option” for census responses. 54.4% of the 2011 census were completed online.
400 million years ago, Canada was home to sea scorpions as big as cars.