Canada is bigger than the United States. That sentence sounds wrong to most Americans, and that reaction is the whole problem. Canada covers 9.98 million square kilometres to America's 9.83 million. It holds the third-largest oil reserves on Earth, controls 20 percent of the world's freshwater with 0.5 percent of the population, and shares an 8,891-kilometre border that most of the country sitting south of it can't draw from memory. In 1995, one of its provinces nearly voted to become its own country and lost by 50,000 ballots. These are the 50 facts about Canada that rewrite the map.

In this video, we explore:

→ Quebec at 1.542 million square kilometres — nearly three times the size of France, with one-eighth the population, still governed as a province rather than a country

→ Alberta's oil sands holding 166 billion barrels of bitumen, putting one Canadian province ahead of Iran, Iraq, the UAE, and Russia in proven reserves — and Quebec still importing oil from the Middle East because no pipeline connects them

→ The 1995 Quebec referendum decided by 50,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast — and what would have happened to the St. Lawrence shipping corridor if 25,001 people had marked the other box

→ Quebec's strategic maple syrup reserve, an actual physical stockpile of barrels worth hundreds of millions of dollars, used to stabilize prices when global supply swings

→ The Acasta Gneiss in the Northwest Territories at 3.96 billion years old — surface rock that formed before complex life appeared anywhere on Earth

→ The Bay of Fundy tides moving more water twice a day than the combined flow of every river on Earth, with water levels rising and falling by up to 16 metres

→ Saskatchewan supplying roughly 12 percent of global wheat production and sitting on the world's largest accessible potash reserves — a province most Americans couldn't place on a map controlling food security inputs for entire continents

→ Canadian Forces Station Alert at 817 kilometres from the North Pole, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth, making a continuous physical argument about Arctic sovereignty as the ice retreats

→ Nunavut at 2.093 million square kilometres governed for under 40,000 people by a consensus-based legislature with no political parties, created in 1999 as the largest Indigenous land transfer in recorded history

→ Canada becoming fully constitutionally independent from Britain only in 1982, when changes to the Canadian constitution still required approval from Westminster — a separation finalized within the lifetime of most adults watching this

And at number fifty: 900 billion dollars a year in bilateral trade, the largest trade relationship in the history of nation-states, with Canada supplying more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia and Mexico combined — and most Americans surveyed unable to name five Canadian provinces.

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