Canada is a gigantic country — but most of its roughly 36 million people live in a very small area. This map, made by redditor Vugg, gives a sense of just how concentrated Canada's population is:

The area below the red line includes most of Nova Scotia, in Canada's east, but most of the population comes from the area a little farther west, in a sliver of Quebec and a densely populated stretch of Ontario near the Great Lakes.

Toronto's metropolitan area makes up the plurality the population in the region, around 6.1 million. Much of the Montreal metropolitan area is in there as well, which amounts to around 4 million people. Other relatively large population centers in Ontario — like London, Kitchener, and the nation's capital, Ottawa — fill out the remainder of the roughly 18 million people living below the red line. Here's a zoomed-in map of the heavily populated bit, with areas of the US included for perspective:

So why did so many Canadians settle here? According to the late William Lewis Morton, an eminent Canadian historian, it's basically about agriculture. The best arable land has always been in Canada's south — no surprise, given the cold weather farther north. A lot of that arable land is in the area we see below the red line.

"Intensive commercial agriculture," Morton writes, "gave rise to a dense network of villages, towns, and cities." When Canada industrialized, it made sense to do that where the people already were, so the population in this area grew.

Even outside of the red line, Canada's population is mostly very close to the US. Ninety percent of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. Maybe they just really wanted to be close to America.

2016ish: Moving to Canada