| An Introduction to the Canadian and U.S. Political Systems |
| Americans often say to Canadians that "you are just like us," considering this comment to be a compliment. Many Canadians, however, do not appreciate the comment. They believe that they are very different from Americans, and they want their neighbors to the south to appreciate these differences. |
| Extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the U.S. border to the Arctic, Canada is the second-largest country in the world after Russia and is more extensive than all of Europe. This vast nation has only 30 million people, a population about one-ninth the size of the United States and smaller than that of California. Canada's economy is also less than one-tenth the size of the U.S. economy when measured by annual gross domestic product. Nonetheless, Canada has the world's eighth-largest economy and is a member of the exclusive G-7 club of prosperous nations (the others being the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy). |
| Both nations have opted for federal systems that divide authority constitutionally between national and regional governments, but Canada's regional governments, the provinces, have much more authority than the American states. Canada has ten provinces and two federal territories (the Yukon and the Northwest Territories), whereas the United States has fifty states, one federal district (the District of Columbia), two self-governing territories (Puerto Rico and Guam), and several non-self-governing territories (including American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands). |
| Both countries are democratic, but the United States is a republic, whereas Canada is a constitutional monarchy with the head of state being the same monarch who reigns in Great Britain. In addition, Canada has a parliamentary system of government that has much more in common with Great Britain than with the United States. Canada also continued to maintain close relations with Great Britain after securing its independence from the mother country in 1867 peacefully and democratically; whereas the United States engaged in a violent revolution against British authority, finally emerging victorious in 1783. A large number of American colonists who were persecuted for opposing the Revolution eventually fled to Canada (which was then British North America) and later vehemently objected to any political and economic integration between their new homeland and the United States of America. |
| Both the United States and Canada were explored and settled by the French as well as the British, but France yielded its territory in what became the United States in the eighteenth, and again in the nineteenth, century, so that relatively |
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