Expand North! So much room up there.

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
- Every Canadian knows that the secret forests of magical splendour begin 101 miles from the border.
- What exactly are you guarding? I figure there’s a reason not many people live outside of that area depicted.
- 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
- 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.
- You just described Minnesota, minus the part about the services.
- Only correction is that gas is a bit cheaper in the winter
- 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.
Your instance saved you 😄
Who are you running and hiding from?
- The Canada goose.
Have you seen Canadians during war? I'll definitely pass on that, thanks.
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.

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.
- 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'.
- ICE isn't CBP though. They technically don't have jurisdiction over American citizens. CBP does.
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%
...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

FTFY

Winnipeg has almost a million people!!
- Peggers represent
- And the spots I left there have like 35 million

when Chile goes to sleep

Ayyyy one of the 15% that doesn't live near the border checking in 😎

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

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.
- 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
- 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.

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.

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].

::: spoiler 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: Article. Title: "British Columbia". Publisher: "Wikipedia". Published: 2025-08-08T03:18Z. Accessed: 2025-08-09T05:48Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia.
1. Type: Image. Filename: "BC_Elevation.svg". Author: "Awmcphee". Published: 2024-04-27. Location: §"Geography". URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BC_Elevation.svg.
  .
2. 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_K%C3%B6ppen.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. […]

the rest is on fire. burning for decades. wind shifted of late

It's hard to build stuff in the shield.

One day my son, all this muskeg will be yours

They've played the game "Risk" so much they have unrealistic expectations of settlement patterns in real life

The Canadian Musket

They come south for less life threatening healthcare

I wish I could move to Tuktoyaktuk

How Eastern Canada and BC thinks Canada looks like.

Drives me nuts that Ontario is considered "Eastern Canada"

I have a friend who grew up in northern canada. It's horror stories all the way down for my warm, balmy weather loving butt. Even my friend from minnesota scared me... I couldn't believe the canadian terror.

It’s not my fault my parents had me in the lower mainland, what am I gonna do, move north?

Yes, but it’s on provincial governments to build new cities north with tax money from the south.

Huh so that's what the 401 looks like

LOL! I believe the Quebecois along the St. Lawrence should be included.

Accurate.

As if I've traveled that much