According to best-medical-schools.com, Canada is a State of North America. Second state in the world by extension after Russia, it occupies just under half of North America, approximately between 41 ° and 83 ° N latitude and between 52 ° and 141 ° W longitude, including numerous large islands (Newfoundland to the E; Baffin, Ellesmere, Vittoria and the other islands of the American Arctic Archipelago to the N; Vancouver to the West). It borders the United States only: to the South, the border line is relatively articulated in its easternmost section, where the first European settlers settled; then for a stretch it follows the parallel of 45 ° N; then it shares four of the five Great Lakes ( Michigan falls entirely within US territory); finally it follows the parallel of 49 ° to the Pacific coast. Also to the West the land border is with the United States (Alaska), and here too the southernmost stretch has an irregular course, subparallel to the coast, in correspondence with the area affected by the Russian expansion that gave rise to the constituency of Alaska. then sold to the USA; from the summit of the Gulf of Alaska (Sant’Elia Mountains), the border follows the meridian of 141 ° W to the Arctic Ocean.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROVINCES
Overall, the production potential still sees Ontario prevailing among the various provinces, characterized by a highly developed industrial sector integrated with the US one, despite the not all positive repercussions of the entry into force of NAFTA (1994); the region enjoys not only considerable natural potential (mineral resources), but above all settlement conditions that have allowed the densification of population, access to low-cost and very extensive communication routes (waterways), and finally the level of relatively high urbanization in the Great Lakes region, and therefore the presence of advanced services.
Not very dissimilar characters, but to a more tenuous extent, also presents the southern Québec, in the strip on the sides of the San Lorenzo. The maritime provinces as a whole have not participated in the most recent economic modernization, rather maintaining their traditional characteristics, both in terms of productive propensities, and of settlement and infrastructural model, of cultural system, of social relations.
Where the effects of the economic progression have marked the Canadian space most conspicuously, is in the Great Plains, which clearly bear the consequences of the extensive cultivation of land and the opening of enormous extraction plants, despite the vastness of the areas still today. covered by forests or in any case not reached by anthropization: within a few decades an area similar to that of Italy was made productive, uniformly cultivated with cereals or soybeans.
The consequences of modernization are also noteworthy on the peaceful front, although almost only in Vancouver and its metropolitan area, where the whole range of advanced urban activities has begun to develop, making the city the metropolitan reference point for the entire Canadian West.
The N regions, roughly, of the 50 ° parallel have an economic weight that cannot be compared, even though they are going through a phase of intense development; but this hinges on mineral resources, the cultivation of which has a significant local impact, which is inevitably limited to the less positive and less desirable effects (deforestation, waste production, pollution and so on), but at the same time it cannot activate in places of extraction of further activities: the minerals are processed, that is, elsewhere, not the least reason for the lively opposition of the indigenous populations who consider the activities started in the North to be ‘predatory’ and complain of almost non-existent positive effects, compared to the negative ones that are too numerous and conspicuous.
A large part of the Canadian territory, finally (almost all of the North, almost the entire region of the western mountains), is either not susceptible to economic use or has been protected in various ways and destined to the preservation of natural balances. Furthermore, after the establishment of Nunavut, the infrastructural interventions and the start-up of modern productive activities are subject to the prior agreement of the indigenous peoples and to forms of safeguarding and compensation that make their enhancement even more burdensome, up to the inconvenience of economic value., according to the companies concerned; the exploitation of the resources of the North could thus remain interrupted, however guaranteeing the country the preservation of reserves that are largely known, to be used for exploitation.
