CANADA GOOSE

Canada goose (Branta canadensis) (species Branta canadensis), a brown-backed, light-breasted goose with black head and neck and white cheeks that flash when the bird shakes its head before taking wing. It belongs to the family Anatidae (order Anseriformes). The subspecies vary greatly in size, from 1.3 kg (3 pounds) in the cackling goose (B. canadensis minima), to about 8 kg (20 pounds) in mature males of the giant Canada goose (B. canadensis maxima). The latter race has a wingspread of up to 2 m (6.5 feet), second in size only to that of the trumpeter swan among common waterfowl. Canada geese breed across Canada and Alaska and winter mainly in the southern United States and Mexico. They are an important game bird. Attention is drawn to their V-formations during migrations by almost incessant honking during flight. Canada geese were introduced into England for sport and as ornamental waterfowl in the 17th century and, subsequently, into other countries. History Canada to 1763 Prehistory to early European contact Precontact aboriginal history The first humans to make their homes in North America migrated from Asia. It is generally thought that this migration took place over a now-submerged land bridge from Siberia to Alaska sometime between about 20,000 and 35,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age; the argument has been made, however, that some people arrived earlier, possibly up to 60,000 years ago. Unknown numbers of people moved southward along the western edge of the North American ice cap. The presence of the ice, which for a time virtually covered Canada, makes it reasonable to assume that the southern reaches of North America were settled before Canada, and that the Inuit (Eskimo) who live in Canada's Arctic regions today were the last of the aboriginal peoples to reach Canada. There is general agreement that Native American peoples are related to Asiatic peoples, and that the closest resemblances are between North American Arctic peoples and their counterparts in Siberia. Although there are no written records detailing the history of American Indian society prior to the first contact with Europeans, archaeological evidence and oral traditions give a reasonably complete picture of the precontact period. There were 12 major language groups among the peoples living in what is now Canada: Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, Athabascan, Kootenaian, Salishan, Wakashan, Tsimshian, Haidan, Tlinglit, Inuktitut, and Beothukan. Within each language group there were usually political and cultural divisions. Among the Iroquoian people, for example, there were two major subgroups, the Iroquois and the Huron. These subgroups were also divided; at the time of contact the Iroquois had organized themselves into a confederacy, the Iroquois League, consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joined later. There was much variety in cultures, means of subsistence, tribal laws and customs, and philosophies of trade and intertribal relations in precontact Canada. The peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, such as the Huron, Iroquois, Petun, Neutral, Ottawa, and Algonquin, created a mixed subsistence economy of hunting and agriculture supplemented by trade. Semipermanent villages were built, trails were cleared between villages, fields were cultivated, and game was hunted. There was a high level of political organization among some of these peoples; both the Huron and the Iroquois formed political and religious confederacies and both created extensive trade systems and political alliances with other groups. Peoples living in the far north do not appear to have formed larger political communities, while those of the west coast and the Eastern Woodlands formed sophisticated political, social, and cultural institutions. Climate and geography undoubtedly were major factors affecting the nature of the societies that evolved in the various regions of North America. The one characteristic virtually all the groups in precontact Canada shared was that they were self-governing and politically independent. European contact and early exploration At the beginning of the 9th century AD, seaborne Norse invaders pushed out of the Scandinavian Peninsula to Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe. In the mid-9th century a number of Norse craft reached Iceland, where a permanent settlement was established. Near the end of the 10th century the Norse reached Greenland and ventured to the coast of North America; at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland are the remains of what are believed to be as many as three Norse settlements. According to available evidence the Norse settlers and the Inuit (whom the Norse called Skraeling) initially fought each other then established a regular trade relationship. The Norse settlements were soon abandoned, probably as the Norse withdrew from Greenland. Europeans did not return to northern North America until the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, known in English as John Cabot, sailed from Bristol in 1497 under a commission from the English king to search for a short route to Asia (what became known as the Northwest Passage). In that voyage and in a voyage the following year, during which he died, Cabot and his sons explored the coasts of Labrador, Newfoundland, and possibly Nova Scotia. They discovered that the cold northwest Atlantic waters were teeming with fish; soon Portuguese, Spanish, and French fishing crews braved the Atlantic crossing to fish in the waters of the Grand Banks. Some began to land on the coast of Newfoundland to dry their catch before returning to Europe. Despite Cabot's explorations, the English paid little heed to the Atlantic fishery until the early 1580s; in 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert laid claim to the lands around present-day St. John's in Newfoundland, probably as a base for an English fishery. The French also claimed parts of Newfoundland, primarily on the north and west coasts of the island, as bases for their own fishing endeavours. The fishery ushered in the initial period of contact between the Indians and the Europeans. Although each was deeply suspicious of the other, a sporadic trade was conducted in scattered locations between the fishing crews and the Indians, with the latter trading furs for iron and other manufactured goods. History Canada since 1920 Canada between the wars Turmoil at home During the war, discontent had increased in virtually every region of Canada and in almost all of its social classes. When the fighting ended, patriotic constraints on demands for change disappeared, and organized labour and farmers mounted a revolt that swept across Canada. In 1919 the Conservative government of Ontario was turned out by a farmer-labour alliance led by the United Farmers of Ontario. United Farmers governments were elected shortly afterward in Alberta (1921) and Manitoba (1922). In federal politics the agrarian-based Progressive Party in the 1921 election became the second largest party in the House of Commons. The agrarian revolt was marked by demands for farm price supports and regulation of the grain and transportation industries. At heart, however, it was aimed at curtailing the growth of the power of the cities. A labour revolt paralleled the uprising on the farms. The virtual doubling of union membership across Canada during the war and the failure of the Borden government to control inflation stimulated militancy. There was an upsurge of industrial unrest despite governmental efforts to impose peace. In 1919 the unrest peaked with a six-week general strike that paralyzed Winnipeg and sparked sympathetic strikes across Canada. The Winnipeg General Strike was crushed by a federal government gripped by a hysterical fear of revolution. By 1921 the labour revolt had subsided, partly because of federal intervention and partly because of the onset of an economic downturn that brought increased unemployment and a virtual collapse of union power. Commonwealth relations As a result of their efforts during the war, Canada and the other dominion powers demanded separate signatures to the treaties with the defeated countries and won at least the right to sign as members of a British Empire Panel. They also demanded and received, despite the doubts of the United States and France, membership in the newly organized League of Nations. Thus, Canada finally became a full-fledged member of the community of nations. Canada followed an isolationist policy between World Wars I and II. This was mainly a consequence of the return to government in 1921 of the Liberal Party, which had come to depend on French Canadian support. French Canadians were isolationist, and they strengthened the general disposition of Canadians to express their new national feelings by the completion of autonomy in the empire and by resuming their material development as a North American country. The new prime minister, W.L. Mackenzie King, and his government were firmly nationalist and isolationist, as evidenced by their refusal to back the United Kingdom's policy in Turkey in 1922. Canadian isolationism effectively ended the hope of a common imperial policy. Instead, there would be conference, consultation, and sharing of information, but freedom of action. King was primarily motivated by his desire to maintain national unity. He knew that a close relationship with Britain would further alienate French Canadians, who had not forgotten the conscription crisis, and he was determined not to split Canada over questions of foreign policy. Canada thus worked with the Union of South Africa and the Irish Free State to weaken the formal ties of empire; King was instrumental in restricting the authority and status of British governors-general in the self-governing dominions. This change and others were embodied in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which ended all legislative supremacy of the Imperial Parliament over the dominion parliaments and made them, when they proclaimed the Act, sovereign states sharing a common crown. The British Commonwealth of Nations had become a legal reality and Canada an independent nation. Canada's new independence was reflected by its establishment of its own foreign service. Canadian ministers were appointed to Washington, D.C., in 1927 and to Paris and Tokyo in 1928 and 1929, respectively. (In the United Kingdom and Canada, officers called high commissioners played much the same role after 1928, although the office was to some degree political and not just diplomatic.) The economy The early settlement and growth of Canada depended on developing and exporting natural resources. During the 20th century, manufacturing and service industries became increasingly important. By the end of the 1980s agriculture and mining accounted for less than one-tenth of Canada's labour force, while manufacturing stood at one-fifth and the service industry, including transportation, trade, finance, and other service industries, at about two-thirds. For many years Canada encouraged its manufacturing industries through protective tariffs on the import of manufactured goods. This high tariff policy resulted in the establishment of Canadian branch plants by many U.S. firms in order to supply the Canadian market. Another cornerstone of Canada's economic policy was the encouragement of economic development in slow-growth regions of the country by grants and subsidies. In the 1980s Canada began moving away from these two basic policies. Compliance with international rules on trade and the signing of a free-trade agreement with the United States (1988) reduced protection for the manufacturing industry. Funding for regional economic development programs was also scaled down. Canada's economy is oriented to the private sector, with only relatively few enterprises such as postal services, electric utilities, and some transportation services publicly owned. The agricultural industry is firmly private, although it has had to become dependent on government subsidies in order to compete with the highly subsidized agricultural industries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the United States. Several marketing boards for specific farm commodities practice supply management and establish floor prices. About one-third of Canada's labour force belongs to trade unions. Of this total, two-thirds belong to unions with international affiliations, mostly with unions in the United States. The Canadian unions tend to strive for wage parity with their counterparts in the United States. This causes labourmanagement tensions because Canadian productivity levels are generally lower than those in the United States, due primarily to smaller production runs. Resources Minerals Canada is rich in mineral resources. The vast Canadian Shield, with its masses of igneous and metamorphic rocks, contains numerous large deposits of iron ore and such other metallic minerals as gold, silver, copper, platinum, nickel, lead, zinc, titanium, cadmium, molybdenum, uranium, and cobalt. Metallic minerals are also found in the igneous and metamorphic zones of the Western Cordillera and the Appalachians. Although there are some metallic mineral and fossil fuel deposits in sedimentary rocks in the Western Cordillera and the Appalachians, the largest volume of coal and petroleum has so far been found in the interior plains of western Canada. The land Nachvak Fjord in the Torngat Mountains, Labrador, Canada; it is the highest range in the Canadian Relief In general terms, the landform structure of Canada can be considered as a vast basin more than 3,220 miles in diameter. The Cordillera in the west, the Appalachians in the southeast, the mountains of northern Labrador and of Baffin Island in the northeast, and the Innuitian Mountains in the north form its high rim, while Hudson Bay, set close to the centre of the enormous platform of the Canadian Shield, occupies the basin bottom. The western rim of the basin is higher and more massive than its eastern counterpart, and pieces of the rim, notably in the far northwest and in the south, are missing. The main lines of Canadian landforms continue well into the United States, intimately linking the geography north and south of the border. To create a nation from sea to sea, Canada had to forge transportation and communication links in an eastwest direction, against the physiographic grain of the continent. The Canadian North remains one of the least settled and least exploited parts of the world. Canada can be divided into several physical regions, including the Canadian Shield, the interior plains, the Great LakesSt. Lawrence lowlands, the Appalachian region, the Western Cordillera, and the Arctic Archipelago. The people Ethnic composition Ice skating on the Rideau Canal, Ottawa, Canada. Canadians do not form a compact, homogeneous people. They are, rather, a collection of diverse national and cultural groups. In the strictly legal sense, there was no such thing as a Canadian citizen until the Canadian Citizenship Act came into force on Jan. 1, 1947. Principal ethnic groups About one-half of Canadians descend from one of the two founding nations, Britain or France. At the time of the first census of Canada (1871), about 50 percent of the population was British and 30 percent French. Since that time the proportion of Canadians of British and French origin has dropped to about 25 percent each. This decline has resulted from a reduction in the number of people coming from the United Kingdom and France and an increase in the number from other countries in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Immigrant groups tend to retain their cultural identity in Canada largely because they have tended to settle in colonies. For example, Ukrainians have been attracted to the prairies, where the land and climate are similar to their homeland, and many Dutch have settled on the flat fertile farmland of southwestern Ontario, where they practice fruit and vegetable growing as they did in The Netherlands. Many Chinese, Portuguese, Greeks, and Italians have settled in specific sections of large cities, particularly Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Census data show that the mix of ethnic origins differs greatly from province to province. The proportion of people of British origin ranges from about 80 percent in Newfoundland to 5 percent in Quebec; the proportion of people of French descent ranges from about 80 percent in Quebec to less than 3 percent in Newfoundland, British Columbia, and the territories.