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Lesson 100 Canada

Lesson 100 Canada (5′54″)

Canada has pieces of landscape to match every spot on the globe, except tropical jungle. In 1867, they joined the pieces together and made a new nation of it. And they kept adding to it until 1949 when they finally talked Newfoundland into joining her.

Since there are 3,851,809 square miles of it, you can't see too much in one trip, but you can get an idea.

All sorts of visitors come to Toronto, and the people of Toronto like to make them feel right at home.

Canadians are very proud of their sophisticated industries and make things like the fastest autogiro in the world. They are very good at making vehicles of various sorts because they still have to spend much of their time getting from place to place.

Certain parties in the rest of the world still think Canada consists mainly of fur-bearing animals and the people who trap them. Of all the animals to choose from, the Canadians pick the beaver as their national animal, the creature whose one outstanding characteristic is stubborness.

However, if the majority of Canadians were once trappers, most of them have gone on to other pursuits.

Canadians have a lot of space to fill. They can't have cities everywhere … . This city's on wheels. When nobody wants to live here any more, they just move the town away. There are companies who rent towns like this. They'll rent you one for about 5,000 dollars a week and deliver it anywhere in the world.

On the other hand, there are places in Canada which stay put and everybody comes to visit.

The Indians called it “the Great Thunder.” It is their legend that, when Princess Lelowalo was sacrificed to Niagara, she floated calmly over the falls in a white birch canoe dressed in soft doe-skin with a garland of flowers in her hair.

It has been said that the west coast is more British than the British. But it is also a land of exceptional exceptions. There's nothing British about Mr Nikolas. “I think I will build a Greek island in Canada,” Nikolas said one day. And eighteen years later, he proved that all things are possible if you go far enough west.

It has been said that Canada is the oldest underdeveloped country in the world, that she has the size of China with the population of Iran, that she has the cultural development  of Afghanistan, the economic structure of the Congo, and the climate of Siberia. But the people who see these things are Canadians. The rest of the world seems to like her. She is generally good-natured. From all we've been able to see of her, she looks just fine.