Short answers, pulled from the story.
Canada is a country in North America, the second-largest in the world by total area, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean. It has the world's longest coastline at 243,042 kilometres and its border with the United States is the longest international land border.
The name Canada comes from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning something like village. In 1535, Indigenous inhabitants near present-day Quebec City used the word to direct the French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona, and by 1545 European maps applied Canada to the region along the Saint Lawrence River.
Canada was formed on the 1st of July 1867, when the British North America Act, 1867 proclaimed Confederation, uniting four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The Canada Act 1982 later patriated the constitution and severed the remaining legal dependence on the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Canada has a population of over 41 million people, with its population estimated to have surpassed 40,000,000 in 2023. Its capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition. The head of government is the prime minister, who is appointed by the governor general representing the monarch of Canada, the ceremonial head of state, and Canada is officially bilingual in English and French at the federal level.
English and French are Canada's official languages, the mother tongues of approximately 54 percent and 19 percent of Canadians respectively. The country also has 11 Indigenous language groups made up of more than 65 distinct languages and dialects, and Inuktitut is the majority language in Nunavut.
Quebec's secular nationalist movement grew out of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. The Parti Québécois held an unsuccessful referendum on sovereignty-association in 1980, and a second referendum in 1995 rejected sovereignty by a margin of 50.6 to 49.4 percent, after which the 1997 Supreme Court ruling and the Clarity Act addressed the terms of any departure from Confederation.