Thinking Like a Geographer: Canada's Physical Setting

A country too big to see at once

Imagine flying from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, to the Yukon–Alaska border. You would cross more than 5000 km of land, pass through most of Canada's six time zones, and fly over rugged rock and lakes, flat farmland, and some of the tallest mountains in North America. Canada is the second-largest country in the world by total area (about 9.98 million km²), it touches three oceans (Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic), and it has the longest coastline of any country.

How do you even begin to study a place that big? Geographers use a toolkit of questions, maps and ways of thinking. This unit is about Canada's physical environment: the land, water, climate, soils and living things, the natural processes that shape them, and how people live with them. This first lesson gives you the toolkit.

Remember from earlier grades

In Grade 4 you learned Canada's eight physical regions (the Western Cordillera, Interior Plains, Canadian Shield, Hudson Bay Lowlands, Arctic Lowlands, Innuitian Mountains, Great Lakes–St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Appalachian Region). In Grade 7 you studied landforms, plate tectonics, glaciers, climate (including LOWERN), climate graphs and natural disasters around the world. In Grade 8 you studied settlement and global inequalities.

In Grade 9 you will go deeper and focus on Canada: why the land looks the way it does, how natural systems are connected, and what that means for the people who live here.

The four concepts of geographic thinking

Ontario geography courses use four concepts of geographic thinking. Think of them as four lenses. You can look at any topic through each lens and you will notice different things.

1. Spatial significance: Where is it, and why does its location matter? Example: most of Canada's fresh water flows north, toward Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean, away from the southern cities where most Canadians live. Location changes how useful that water is.
2. Patterns and trends: A pattern is an arrangement in space (where things are found). A trend is a change over time. Example of a pattern: earthquakes in Canada cluster along the west coast. Example of a trend: average temperatures in Canada have risen since the middle of the 1900s.
3. Interrelationships: How are things connected? Example: thin soil on the Canadian Shield → few farms → forests, lakes and mining instead.
4. Geographic perspective: Look at an issue from environmental, economic, political and social points of view, and from the viewpoints of different people. Example: a new dam might mean clean electricity (environmental and economic), flooded hunting grounds for a First Nation (social and political), and changed fish habitat (environmental).

Asking good inquiry questions

An investigation starts with a question. Good inquiry questions are open (they cannot be answered with yes or no or a single fact) and they need evidence. Geographers use several types:

• Factual (what, where, when): Where are Canada's active volcanoes? These are useful starting points, but they are not inquiry questions on their own.
• Comparative: How is the climate of Vancouver different from the climate of Winnipeg?
• Causal (why, how): Why does the Canadian Shield have so many lakes?
• Predictive (what if, what will): How might thawing permafrost change northern communities by 2050?
• Evaluative (which is best, should, how effective): How effective is the Red River Floodway at protecting Winnipeg from floods?

The strongest inquiry questions are often causal, predictive or evaluative, because you must use evidence to build an argument.

Where is Canada? Latitude and longitude

Latitude lines run east–west and measure distance north or south of the equator. Longitude lines run north–south and measure distance east or west of the prime meridian.

Canada stretches from about 41.7°N (Middle Island in Lake Erie, the southern tip of Canada) to about 83.1°N (Cape Columbia on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut). One degree of latitude is always about 111 km, so you can use latitude to estimate north–south distances. Degrees of longitude are a different story: lines of longitude meet at the poles, so the distance covered by 1° of longitude shrinks as you go north.

Every flat map lies a little

The Earth is (almost) a sphere. You cannot flatten a sphere without stretching or tearing it, just as you cannot flatten an orange peel without breaking it. A map projection is a way of drawing the round Earth on a flat surface, and each one distorts something: area, shape, distance or direction.

• The Mercator projection keeps shapes and directions correct over small areas (good for navigation) but makes places near the poles look far too big. On a Mercator map, Canada and Greenland look enormous. Greenland looks about the same size as Africa, but Africa is really about 14 times larger.
• Equal-area projections show sizes correctly but bend shapes.
• A globe is the only map that shows size, shape, distance and direction all correctly at once.

So when you compare sizes on a world map, always check the projection.