Canada, which occupies the top half of the North American continent, is the second largest country in the world. With an area of 9,970,000 km², it stretches over 5,500 km from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and over 4,600 km from the northern tip of Ellesmere Island to the United States border. Its population is 26 million.

This vast country is not of course, fully inhabited; 89 per cent of the land has no permanent population. In sharp contrast are the urban areas, where nearly 80 per cent of Canadians live in large centres located within 300 km of the southern border. Fiftyeight per cent of the population is concentrated in a relatively small area in the extreme southern parts of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

Geography, trade and history have made Canada's ties with the United States, Western Europe and Japan particularly close. In many cases these links have been strengthened with economic, political and military agreements of a bilateral and multilateral nature.