85% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the American border. And yous claim you don’t want to be part of them.
*(runs and hides)*
We stand on guard.
The average Canadian
Yes, but instead of guarding against white walkers from the north it’s pedos from the south.
And in this case winter is going, as global temperatures rise
Summer is coming. ⛱️🕶️☀️🧴
Oh fuck… winter is cumming ☹️
I would not throw pedo-shaped stones in a Canadian shaped house. For every Jeffery Epstein there’s a Peter Nygard.
In Canada pedo businessmen go to prison. In the US pedo businessmen go to the White House. We are not the same.
Muh Queen!
Every Canadian knows that the secret forests of magical splendour begin 101 miles from the border.
yukon is where all the magic is.
What exactly are you guarding? I figure there’s a reason not many people live outside of that area depicted.
The guards are facing south.
The canadian shield is a rough and rugged strech of land of exposed rock intermixed with swamps. It covers most of the north/central eastern part of the country and it is very difficult and expensive to build settlements on. It also only provides a few pockets of farmland. The land closer to the border is more hospitable for settlements and farming.
The canadian shield
… is that USAins can’t read maps. With any luck we’ll just end up re-invading Connecticut.
Have you seen Game of Thrones?
For thee?
If anything, this proves how much Canadians don’t want to be Americans.
Canadian weather is shitty, you can’t grow crops for most of the year. During the fraction of the year where the climate is suitable for growing crops, the variety of things that grow is small compared to what’s possible in the US. And, as bad as winter can be, summer’s no good either. You don’t want to be outside in the winter because it’s -30, and you don’t want to be outside in the summer because it’s +35. The cost of living in Canada is high because you need to heat your home in the winter and cool it in the summer. Almost everybody drives a car because of that “being outside sucks” thing, but cars are expensive to own and operate in Canada. There’s the cost of winter tires, more expensive winter fuels, antifreeze in the windshield washer, plus the constant freeze/thaw cycle wrecks the road surfaces, which results in potholes, which results in more wear and tear on cars. In addition, to make driving safe they drop a lot of salt and sand, which just rusts your car. Because the country is a thin strip, everything is far away, and everything communications-related is expensive. And, a low population relative to the US means that a lot of companies just don’t offer services in Canada because it isn’t worth it to comply with Canadian laws just to get the same number of customers you could get from a single American state. I could keep going on and on.
Yet, despite all that, Canadians huddle up as close as possible to the border for warmth, but refuse to go any further south because that would mean entering the US. As bad as Canada’s climate is, putting up with that is an easy decision to make when the alternative is 'Murica.
One minor correction. The reason Canadians drive is not because the weather sucks, Canadians drive so much because our country refuses to build real transit or walkability. Hell half our country is going to court because a few of our provincial premiers want building bike lanes to be illegal. There are other countries with similar climates to Canada where people don’t need to extensively rely on their car to live their daily life.
Id also say that the biggest factor to cost of living is cost of housing, which is largely related to our cities making it nearly impossible to build any housing that isnt detached single family homes with minimum lot sizes and set back requirements. This also reinforces the car dependancy
Seriously, half the fucking country lives in the Québec City - Windsor corridor and we don’t even have a high speed train there?? It’s a political issue, not a geographical one.
But Canada is “too big” for rail. Except of course all those railways 100 years ago that pretty much made this nation possible, or how nearly every city had trams in most neighborhoods.
And the Trans-Siberian railway has existed for years, is thousands of miles long in awful conditions, AND electrified. We don’t have an excuse.
Isn’t there an HST project’s route being prospected between Calgary and Edmonton?
except for the places in the north where people CURRENTLY LIVE that are only reachable by train and airplane (not even sure about the last one, might be helicopter if the terrain is shitty enough)
I agree that Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit. But, I still think winter has a lot to do with that.
Mass transit means waiting outside for a bus or tram, and waiting outside when it’s either +35 or -30 sucks. Many people will prefer cars for that reason. It isn’t the only factor, but it is definitely a factor.
As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor. It’s certainly possible to bike in the winter, I’ve done it for many years, but it isn’t easy. In Canada as it exists now, biking in winter means biking in traffic most of the time. Bike lanes exist, but often in winter they just shove the snow to the side of the road and block the bike lanes. I don’t know of anywhere in Canada where they clear bike lanes as a priority. That could be done. It is done in some places in Finland, for example. But, there’s a catch 22. It’s not worth it to clear the bike lanes because there aren’t enough winter bikers; there aren’t enough winter bikers because it’s dangerous and unpleasant to bike during winter because they don’t clear the bike lanes.
As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor.
But actually, even in Canada. And even with bike share programs.
So actually:
Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit [and bike lanes]
Is all you need. End of post.
The video says that there were more than 500,000 bike share trips in Toronto in the winter months. Let’s be conservative and say that “the winter months” are just December, January and February. The reality is that there’s ice on the ground until May pretty often, but let’s just pretend it’s 500,000 trips in 3 months to make the numbers seem as big as possible.
Is that big? Not really, 500,000 trips in 3 months is 167,000 trips per month. Meanwhile in the summer it’s 1 million trips per month. So, cycling drops by a factor of at least 6 in the winter. That’s massive.
And yes, I’ve watched that Not Just Bikes video. It makes the point that in order for people to bike in the winter, you need massive infrastructure that Canada refuses to spend on. The city in question in the video, Oulu, makes it a priority to clear the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall. Theoretically could that be done in every rich city in the world? Sure. Is it realistic it will ever happen anywhere in Canada? Doubtful.
I stand by what I said, “winter is a major factor”. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to commit to clearing all the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall? You could argue that the cost is worth it, and that the cost is smaller than doing similar things for cars, but it remains a major factor.
Besides, it wouldn’t even make sense to have snow clearing like Oulu unless they first built a dedicated bike network for the city. There’s no point in just clearing the “bike lanes” which are just a tiny strip of pavement next to the gutter.
Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit and bike lanes. But, even if they did, the weather sucks in the winter. And Oulu, is colder than Toronto. But it’s slightly warmer than Ottawa and Montreal, and significantly warmer than Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. So, even if you replicated all the bike lanes from Oulu, committed to clearing the snow as quickly as they do in Oulu and made cars and fuel as expensive as they are in Europe, Canada would probably have nowhere near the number of winter bikers as Oulu per capita. Canada is much colder, cities are designed around cars, and people have “car brain”.
Snow plows for roads exist and often just run and run and run to keep roads open.
This is the counter to your whole point my guy.
It’s will not ability
Snow plows for roads exist and often just run and run and run to keep roads open.
Which is very expensive, but necessary because of the shitty climate. What’s your point?
All the problems you’ve described are infrastructure abd policy problems We can build climate controlled mass transit stations. We can maintain separated and safe bicycle networks in the winter. We can clear pedestrian pathways of snow instead of plowing the car lane snow onto them. Its all policy and infrastructure. If you make transit the fastest while being convenient and clean, people will use it over cars because it takes less time, not everyone, but certainly enough to make it worth it.
We can’t fairly use the there are no cyclists now argument because we haven’t given them any real options. We need to provide safe and effecient cycling infrastructure to truly see how many people would prefer to bike. If a city had no roads you could make the argument not to build any roads because nobody drives anyway.
It’s not just that. Trains don’t run as well or brake as efficiently in cold weather, they have slippery metal rails for a reason. That’s why we switched to cars and trucks too readily, and as sad as that is, I think we might need electric cars more than Americans ever needed any cars.
(That said, electric cars should be thanks to electrified smartroads, not stuffing the car itself full of computer hardware.)
Do you have a source for this? Our cargo trains run through some pretty frigid winters. Many European countries have a similar climate and they have trains. Aren’t the swiss famous for sending trains through snowy mountains?
They certainly are. They have some of the steepest adhesion railways in the world on those mountains.
Yes, and tunnels too. The issue’s not just the temperature but the altitude, at least on the west coast, and lack of adhesion rail or deep bore passenger train tunnels on Canadian mountain routes. On the flat lands eastwards it’s mostly that passenger engines are built differently than freight locomotives that makes the difference.
The problem can be fixed, but is it worth it? Maybe. Sadly, no politicians here seem too interested in building rail services in BC, unless it’s to feed the KelVicVanSeaTac metro-economic machine.
I will say I was trying to make something resembling small talk, so I admit I’m wrong if you know otherwise. Just as far as I’ve seen, that’s what seems to be the truth.
trains are the most reliable mode of transport in winter conditions, the fact that they’re so monstrously heavy and have tiny points of contact with the rails means they will simply squeeze out snow and crush ice, no plowing needed.
go ahead and try to drive a car through 20cm of slushy snow, it ain’t happening.
You’re right, except in British Columbia where all the most expensive highways were built. Not better, but affordable because Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna dgaf about the rest of the province and outnumber everywhere else. If we didn’t have all these tourist-focused roads, they’d have still torn up the rails and left us to drown.
Canadian here, you summed it up perfectly. Everyone I know would agree with your points exactly. It’s a bit of a shit deal living here sometimes, but it’s infinitely better than being an American. Just look at the amount of disgust a Canadian tourist has when asked if they’re American when visiting overseas.
Canada should join the Nordic countries in a new Kalmar Union. Everything you mentioned is in common, unlike USA and EU, which both span different climates, and thus different ways of life.
Don’t get me wrong, I like both EU and the former USA, but I think there’s just more mutual ground in latitude than longitudes.
Canada should really just wait until the US collapses and then move south into the wreckage.
The Nordic countries don’t understand bad climate. Maybe they want to continue existing as they are, but Canadians will want to move south as soon as the US destroys itself.
Measure Oslo Stockholm Helsinki Ottawa Coldest Mean Daily Minimum -4.7 -3.2 -6.3 -14 Coldest Mean Minimum -15.9 -13.7 -20.6 -27 Coldest Record Low -26.0 -28.2 -35 -38.9 Hottest Mean Maximum 29.6 30.6 27.9 32 Hottest Record High 34.6 35.4 33.2 37.8 Ottawa is significantly colder than those country’s capitals during the winter, and significantly hotter in the summer. It might be unpleasant at times to live in those European climates, but it’s truly miserable to live in Ottawa for much of the year.
People in the Nordic countries might want to stay there because it’s the only place where their language is spoken, or because there are thousands of years of tradition in living there. Meanwhile, Canada as a country is barely 150 years old, and speaks the same language (with roughly the same accent) as the neighbour to the south.
There’s a lot in common in terms of culture too. Sure, Canada plays a bit more hockey than the southerners, but they have the NHL too. The other sports are largely shared: Toronto has NBA and MLB teams. Unlike Europe where “futbol” is big, it’s pretty small in the English-speaking part of North America, but to the extent it exists, Canada is part of the same system, with teams in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. The only split is that Canada plays a superior version of gridiron football with far inferior players, and the US has a mass market hugely popular version of gridiron football with worse rules but much better players.
Canadians watch the same TV shows and movies, and listen to the same music. Many of the stars of stage and screen in the US are actually Canadian, and many shows that are set in the US and air on US TV are actually filmed in Canada.
So really, there isn’t a lot that Canada has in common with the Nordic countries. I like the idea of working more with the EU and less with the US, but culturally Canadians are part of the English-speaking North American culture… except when it comes to politics, guns, and healthcare.
I just hope the US hurries its collapse up so that the remnants of the fractured states can petition to join Canada and the border can be shifted down. Then Canadians can move to a more hospitable climate without having to abandon the parts of their culture that matter.
Only correction is that gas is a bit cheaper in the winter
You just described Minnesota, minus the part about the services.
Meanwhile they have wheatfields 4 hours north of Edmonton. Posts like this always remind me how much I hate most Canadians and their whiny, weak, entitled, arrogant, half clever bullshit.
Ooh, wheat! Great. What about fruits? They’re important for a balanced diet.
It turns out that Canada imports 50% of its vegetables and 75% of its fruit.
But do go on, tell me how Canada’s climate isn’t limiting in what it can produce domestically.
how much I hate most Canadians and their whiny, weak, entitled, arrogant, half clever bullshit.
oh look it’s you.
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
Some mindless blather about fruit is all you got? There’s fucking vineyards in Saskatchewan.
Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.
Your instance saved you 😄
Who are you running and hiding from?
The Canada goose.
Hell, the US is all they talk about here on lemmy. I’m not sure they don’t want to join either.
Kind of like all you would talk about is the festering boil in the middle of your face.
Edit: I misread your comment, apologies.
Have you seen Canadians during war? I’ll definitely pass on that, thanks.
America isn’t any better. Depending on what statistic you are looking at, 40% to 75% of all Americans live within 100 miles of the border
Not so fun fact: if American border patrol agents stop you within the 100 mile zone, they can ignore parts of the fourth amendment and perform what would normally be illegal search and seizure
Lake Michigan isn’t a border…
Due to the Straits of Mackinac, the CBP considers it to be so.
That would still make Chicago. The third largest city in America further than 100 miles from the border.
I reckon you can sail from lake superior to Chicago and not pass customs until Chicago.
I don’t get it. The border is north of the UP.
Why do the straights count?
Because they want more jurisdiction and got it.
It is a border between wet and dry.
can ice do more shit in the 100 mile zone or nah?
Yes and it includes ‘within 100 miles of an airport’.
so basically the entire us?
Yep, which is why its more or less blatant ignorance of the constitution
Pretty sure it’s not ignorance, otherwise how would they clean their butts?
who ever claimed ICE cleans their butts?
Then how do they get so nuch shit and ass hair on the constitution?
Don’t be such a hyperbolic drama queen; I’m sure theres like a ten square foot area in south dakota or something.
ICE isn’t CBP though. They technically don’t have jurisdiction over American citizens. CBP does.
technically dont have jurisdiction
Oh. Im sure all the citizens they kidnap are very comforted by that.
They’ve started using CBP agents for immigration raids…
Considering the relative surface areas, with those percentages you provided, actually, yes, America is less consolidated.
The United States also has eight times the total population. I only saw one source that said 40% and the overwhelming majority said either 2/3 or something in the low 70%
Could it be that one source referred only to places with an actual border, while the rest included anything within 160 km of any coast?
…of which border?
The American one
The border with the ocean probably, humans love to live on the crust of the land
Sorry. I clarified with a photo in my post.
I did a quick search online to get the percentage and I saw one result at 40% and the rest were all between 70 and 75% of the US population lives in the 100 mile zone
Bold of you to think any part of the Constitution actually applies down here.
Well the exemptions to border patrol agents have been on the books for a lot longer than the current administration
FTFYWinnipeg has almost a million people!!
Peggers represent
Jesus Christ!!!
Snort STRAP IN…OR ON…OR BOTH
And the spots I left there have like 35 million
when Chile goes to sleep
deleted by creator
Ayyyy one of the 15% that doesn’t live near the border checking in 😎
How’s the weather up there?
#COLD
username checks out
No one lives in the Maritimes and Newfies are a figment of our imagination?
Tbf, the Newfies I’ve met certainly feel like a figment of my imagination.
That’s most of my family and yes.
The implication of that map is skewed hard though. It’s only cause of Montreal, Toronto, S & SW ontario and Vancouver. 3 small spots compared to the size of the border, with 90% of the border population.
John Candy tried to warn us. They’re preparing for an invasion!
Us? You-S-A tarriff’d the world!
<sincerity> I know you’re joking :P It’s legit a potential weakness actually. Trump could invade with very little resistance beyond the border, our population was too focused on trade by land and now we’ve had to reconsider our priorities. Also, the image neglects Edmonton’s existence. </sincerity>
Yeah, and that whole TransCanada highway being a massive choke point
Wait, are you implying it can’t be a choke point as an East-West route? Or implying it is a choke point for Edmonton? Or am I missing the point?
I was just saying that during a hypothetical invasion by Trump it would be a choke point
Fun Fact, a lot of North Dakotans live higher north than half of Canadians.
If I understand correctly based on a map and Wikipedia, the concept of “a lot of people” does not exist in North Dakota, though.
I had never heard of the city of Bismarck, their state capital of more than 70 thousand inhabitants, a bit over 10% of the state’s population. But, now I do. I also had not thought there can be a state capital with that little population. (And then this made me curious and I learned that in Germany the smallest state capital is Schwerin, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and it has about 98 000 inhabitants in a state of 1½ million inhabitants.)
The subset is a lot of and the set is North Dakotans.
If you have a room of ten people a lot of them can have things in common.
Don’t worry, I did already understand this :)
Speaking of Germany, Bismarck is named after Otto von and when he was still alive! Greater Bismarck includes Mandan too, so it’s a bit more like 100k+ people in the area, but yeah it’s pretty small. Lots of the middle west is like that. They need to be consolidated into a single state for the senate lol
Awesome trivia! Thanks! :)
Trenton, NJ, the most densely populated state in America, only has 91k. This represents only 1% of the population, versus 10 in ND. I’m not sure how it is around the country, but of the capitals of NJ, NY, PA, none are amongst the most populated cities in the states. And I don’t really care about the rest of the states (and I like Mass, but it doesn’t fit my example), so that’s that.
You’ve certainly piqued my interest in regard to populations of capitals v. the states they represent.
EDIT: And the first search result on the Google is from a Reddit post from seven years ago, listing 17 states in the US where the capitals are the most populated cities. With a map, because who doesn’t like pictures?
EDIT 2: I’ll just take this opportunity to spout some nonsense I like to spout: NYC (at least Manhattan, but maybe even out to Montauk, but of course excluding garbage ass Staten Island) and Philadelphia should be part of NJ, as they have more in common with NJ than they do their own states. Upstate NY and pretty much the entirety of PA are rural hick people. And sure there’s some exclusions, Pittsburgh, the finger lakes, Rochester, but for the most part, rural hick people.
Its pretty cool city with great food and terminally bad traffic problems. Source: live there.
This makes me wonder if NY drivers drive like the crazies on the 401 and gardiner
We have, it’s called Winnipeg. Also I love how it stops in the before the Quebec border.
Also, Edmonton
😞 Canada
😎 French Canada
It’s because the rest is all degens from upcountry.
Fuckin’ hate degens.
There’s plenty of room for activities! Like… sledding.
And ice fishing in some spot which you’ve sledded to.
And freezing.
You can also have a foot race with a Polar Bear. It’s fun and if you win, you get to live for another day.
Legitimate question: what may be the actual reason for this concentration? Is it weather? Natural resources? Is it political? On a related note: what is the reason that Canada as a whole has so few people? It is still mindblowing for me that the entire country has less people than each of the world’s top 3 metropolitan areas
Yea weather, but also the Canadian shield. There is just a thin layer of soil on top of the bedrock over a huge portion of Canada.
Also this map is kinda misleading. Edmonton and the entire 4 maritime provinces are not here, and the main reason so much of the population is close to the border is that something like 1/3 of the population is clustered around the great lakes/st Laurence, because people came here by boat.
The great lakes area was the first area extensively settled and thus has the most developed cities. The great lakes area is also rich in fresh water and farmland.
50% of our population is below the 49th parallel. 90% is within a half a day of the southern border
for reference:
Further south is warmer in winter
But I think a lot of it is economic. Port cities are where money changes hands, and we’ve effectively smeared them all along the boarder.
I’d argue the weather as the biggest one, at least for BC. Northern BC is absolutely beautiful but it’s cold af in the winter and burny as hell in the summer. If we’re talking far north in the territories, I know another issue is infrastructure because it’s much more difficult to build/get stuff up there. Though this meme misses a big part of the Indigenous/Inuit population that lives up there.
Also, this country is just fucking huge, like bigger than I think any of us realize. If our population were to spread out, it would be a very thin spread.
Edit: I kept thinking about this and got help with some math on it. If the population of Canada were to spread out, we’d each have about 64 acres (0.256km) to ourselves. By comparison, the same calculation in the US with the US population would equal approx 0.03 km, or just over 7 acres per person.
the rest is on fire. burning for decades. wind shifted of late
In B.C.'s defense, imo, most of the land to its North is either too mountainous [1][2.1] or has too harsh a climate [2.2] to be realistically inhabitable. I think it’s also worth noting that 15.4% of B.C.'s lands are protected [3].
References
- Type: Document (PDF). Title: “BC Fact Sheet”. Publisher: “Super, Natural British Columbia”. Accessed: 2025-08-09T04:10Z. URI: https://www.hellobc.com/content/uploads/2019/04/TM_BCFactSheet.pdf.
- Type: Text. Location: [§“The Land”. ¶2]
Ten mountain ranges push west from the Canadian Rockies in the east to the Coast Mountains and the Vancouver Island Ranges in the west, and ancient temperate rainforests hug the coast. In between are rolling grasslands, lush valleys, tens of thousands of lakes, glacier-fed rivers, and even semi-arid desert. Mountains cover 75% of the province.
- Type: Text. Location: [§“The Land”. ¶2]
- Type: Article. Title: “British Columbia”. Publisher: “Wikipedia”. Published: 2025-08-08T03:18Z. Accessed: 2025-08-09T05:48Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia.
- Type: Image. Filename: “BC_Elevation.svg”. Author: “Awmcphee”. Published: 2024-04-27. Location: §“Geography”. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BC_Elevation.svg.
. - Type: Image. Filename: “British_Columbia_Köppen.svg”. Author: “Adam Peterson”. Published: 2016-08-12. Location: [§“Geography”§“Climate”]. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:British_Columbia_Köppen.svg.
- Type: Image. Filename: “BC_Elevation.svg”. Author: “Awmcphee”. Published: 2024-04-27. Location: §“Geography”. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BC_Elevation.svg.
- Type: Article. Title: “Protected Lands & Waters in B.C.”. Publisher: [“Environmental Reporting BC”. “Ministry of Environment”. “British Columbia”.]. Published: 2016-06. Accessed: 2025-08-09T05:59Z. URI: https://www.env.gov.bc.ca/soe/indicators/land/protected-lands-and-waters.html.
- Type: Text. Location: ¶1.
[…] Protected lands and waters cover 15.4% of B.C.'s land base and 3.2% of B.C.'s marine areas. […]
- Type: Text. Location: ¶1.
- Type: Document (PDF). Title: “BC Fact Sheet”. Publisher: “Super, Natural British Columbia”. Accessed: 2025-08-09T04:10Z. URI: https://www.hellobc.com/content/uploads/2019/04/TM_BCFactSheet.pdf.
