What geographical changes does Canada need to have a far larger carrying capacity?

Question

Despite being larger than the USA, Canada has substantially fewer people. As a matter of fact, California has more people than Canada does. This is because Canada has much less arable land than the USA. I don't think climate is the only cause since a huge chunk of Canada is on the same latitude of central Europe. I suspect the Canadian Shield can be a huge factor.

I'm writing a timeline where Canada is the big superpower of Anglo America instead of the USA. What changes does Canada need on a physical geographical level and geological level to support huge farms like the Great Plains can?

Answer 1

Abundant rare resources

This is a bit of a frame challenge, but if you want to keep the map lines where they are it is a possible solution.

While the USA is known as the bread basket of the world, it is not the only factor in its emergence as a superpower. Take for example WW2: it is said that victory was gained by American steel, British intelligence, and Russian blood.

The point I am making is that it was the USA's level of industrialization during the war that played a major factor in its ascent to power. While having the ability to to feed the troops, the abundance of natural iron and coal were also paramount.

So you can modify the availability of these resources and how easily they can be mined in both Canada and the USA to pivot the industrial capacity of both countries in favor of Canada. As they were both Allied powers, there would have been a symbiotic relationship between them allowing the USA to provide the food, while Canada rose to the top as an Industrial powerhouse.

You can keep going with additional resources like oil, uranium, and even lithium to provide Canada with a leg up in the following years.

Answer 2

The US? What US?

The difficulty with Canada's climate, vs. European / Scandinavian climate, has a lot to do with ocean currents and the Gulf Stream, or, to put it another way, a lot to do with most of Canada having no nearby coast besides the Arctic ice.

If more of Canada had a warmer ocean next to it (say, to the south of it), Canada would be much warmer, more temperate and liveable. In other words, the geographic feature getting in the way of Canada's ascendancy is, well, the rest of North America.

If more of the Continental US was ocean, with warm, tropical currents flowing north, Canada would be much nicer.

Answer 3

This is a Frame Challenge

The latitude of central Europe is what, N48°? Per the Oregon Treaty (and ignoring some details) the US-Canada border is N49°. Claiming "a huge chunk of Canada is on the same latitude of central Europe" is a bit of a stretch. The bulk of Canada shares latitude with England and southern Sweden (well populated) and a huge chunk of the Russias and northern Asia (not well populated). It would be educational to understand why all that acreage in Russia and the northern Steppes is so underpopulated. Some of it is geography. A lot of it isn't.

Changing Canada's climate changes the planet

While I believe only a small fraction of the reasons Canada is less populated than the U.S. is due to geography and climate, let's briefly consider the apocalyptic idea that changing the climate would solve the problem.

Because it would! But not in the way you're thinking.

Let's widen the valleys and warm the latitudes such that there's more trivially farmed space and a much longer growing season. Our goal is the growing season enjoyed by the U.S. state of Kansas. Kansas' annual temperature is about 56℉/13℃. Saskatchewan's is 30℉/-1℃. Raising the average temperature of the region between the latitudes of N50° and N60° means turning everything from N50° to the Tropic of Cancer into arid-to-desert climes and everything between the tropics into boiling wastelands.

Everybody from the equator north moves to Canada. Instant population boom.

And this is ignoring the changes in weather. Doing this might actually allow for north Atlantic hurricanes to move up past Greenland into the now permanently unfrozen Arctic Sea and down into Hudson bay. Oorah.

Of course, you could declare your alternate Earth a Mazatlan-esque paradise... but then you'd have the same disproportionate population you're now trying to avoid. It's not enough to make Canada a better bread basket. Wheat isn't that expensive, so food isn't the reason Canada isn't bursting at the seams with people.

Looking past the easy assumptions

I understand the problems with the Canadian Shield. Indeed, the Internet believes...

The large size of Canada's north, which is currently not arable, and thus cannot support large human populations, significantly lowers the country's carrying capacity. (Source)

...but I think that's a rationalization that only addresses a small fraction of the problem. Even if we assume that Canada couldn't, of her own accord, support 8X the population... wheat (and a lot of other foods) is cheap. After all, Japan, which has only 1/27^th of Canada's landmass has 3X its population. Does Canada have that much less access to the ocean than Japan?

Culture & Politics, Not Geography

I agree with @elemtilas, the problem is only a bit geographical, most of it is cultural and political. You don't need to change the planet to raise the population of Canada...you need to change Canadians.

• Make them more aggressive traders.
• Make them more proficient fishers.
• Make them unparalleled diplomats.
• Make them breed like rabbits.

And while you're at it...

1. Eliminate the slow-population-growth French occupation of Canada and let Britain settle Canada in the 1600s.
2. Modify the acts and treaties that established the U.S.-Canada border to give just a little bit more to Canada. I'm thinkin' N42°.

Answer 4

The North American League and Solemn League and Covenant

Rather than mucking about with geology and rotating the Earth around so that Canada is in the middle of the map, rather than the USA, it might be easier to approach this from a historical & geographical perspective. Simply put: make your world so that Canada becomes Top Nation. American history will thus come to a .

Enter the NAL-SLC. Essentially, all you need to do is get Dick Whittington et al to agree that being British is a Good Thing and being American is a Bad Thing. Or rather, Not Quite as Good a Thing. Rather than throwing all their tea into the Hudson River, they decide to head down the pub to draw up a Declaration of Mutual Dependence with the Old Country:

BE IT RESOLVED that henceforth unto the ending of the world, WE THE PEOPLES of the divers colonies of North America do hold these truths to be self-evident: That All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life and Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, that to insure these Rights governments ought to be and are instituted among men. ...

Be it thus resolved that here in North America the supposed Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and mutually Dependent States with all the powers, privileges and responsibilities contained therein, saving always the Faith and Allegiance owed to our Sovereign.

Hey presto! You get a larger Canada with all the arable land you need, without the pesky US of A being in the way! Somewhere along the way, you might want to snap up Louisiana before the Tejanos get to it!

NAL: The Map

Answer 5

Frame challenge: France wins the Seven Years' War.

No change to climate and geography, but border changes instead.

The Seven Years' War opposed France (with Spain, Austria and Russia) to Britain (with Prussia and Portugal). It concluded in 1763 with France ceding its American territories to England and Spain, and was effectively the end of New France.

A mere decade later, in 1775, the Thirteen Colonies rebel, starting the Revolutionary War, with notable help from the Kingdom of France, in which Britain would have to cede much of the territories it had just gained. From there, the US expanded to the west to form the country we know today.

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Instead, the Seven Years' War still ends in 1763, with a French victory that allows Britain to keep its Thirteen Colonies. The rest of British America is split between France and Spain.

Still having reason to rebel, and with indirect support of the Kingdom of France still having reasons to spite the Brits, the United States formally gains independent in 1783.

The three colonies of New France - Louisiana, Acadia and Canada - remain under French control until some time during the First French Revolution, where New France is granted independence. The new country takes the name of the largest colony, Canada, with its capital in Québec.

Over the 19th and early 20th century, Mexico and Canada expand through the rest of the North American continent. Ultimately, the Mexico-Canada border follows a rough line from California to Louisiana, while the United States spans from Maine to Florida.

Due to its sheer side and access to a vast amount of resources, Canada becomes the powerhouse of North America, and forms excellent trade relations with the United States to access it vast Atlantic coastline.

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Other suggested changes may include:

Alaska is a Russian or Canadian territory. Hawaii is an independent territory. Various First Nations independent enclaves are peppered throughout the North American continent.

Slavery is abolished in France and its colonies, including Canada, by the French Revolution. The United States follows suits under the economic influence of Canada.

Canada's only official language is French, though still includes sizeable communities of Spanish and English speakers. The United States speak a version of English influenced by Canadian French.

Answer 6

Just wait a little while.

Climate change estimates ranged from 1.5 C of warming to 6 C of warming. Applying the rule of thumb for reading media estimates of anything we're not supposed to worry about too much, we took half the difference between the best case and the worst case they describe, and add it to the worst case, yielding 8.25 C of warming as the most likely real-world outcome. But 1.5 C is off the table already, and those estimates were pre-cryptocurrency, and now anyone who wants to have a say in the corridors of power needs to be restarting a coal power plant to run the ever-roaring fans of a new Bitcoin mine. So let's say 11 C of warming. Additionally, the Arctic seems to be heating much more than the rest of the planet, so maybe we can go up to +14 C over much of Canada.

Under these conditions, the most important port city of North America, Churchill, no longer has a climate ranging from -25 C to 13 C on daily average, but rather -11 C to 27 C. That's comparable to New York City, with a broader range of variation. Traffic from east and west arrives via the Northwest Passage year-round, though for now an icebreaker is still seen plying the shipping lanes in winter.

Warmth and melting permafrost [technically, this is the obstacle you wish to remove] have cleared the way for a much wider range of agriculture, and climate refugees have been pouring in from sunken nations like Nauru and Florida and uninhabitable desert wastelands like Saudi Arabia and California. The 'surprising' conquest of the United States by an alliance of drug cartels also led to a wave of political migrants. With much of the world's mineral wealth diverted from southern destinations, building infrastructure to sustain this population in Canada becomes more economically feasible than it was before, though this is not to say that it will be easy getting in.

Answer 7

Your premise that Canada has a lower population density than other countries due to having less arable land does not seem to be supported by the facts.

Singapore has the lowest amount of arable land per person in the world (Less than 1m^2 per person) Ref: List of countries by arable land density and yet it has the third highest population density in the world (8,250 persons per km^2) Ref: list of countries by population density

Macau in China has the highest population density in the world and is mostly urbanised with little area for growing crops.

Hong Kong has the 4th highest population density in the world (6,725 persons per km^2) and yet it has the 2nd lowest ratio of arable land per person (less than 3 m^2 per person).

Canada is the top 20% of countries on an arable land per person scale but it is in the lowest 10% of countries by population density.

There does not appear to be any correlation between greater arable land and greater population density.

A country does not need to have any arable land to support a large population density. If it provides goods and services that the rest of the world wants and and is fortunate to have plenty of natural resources such as oil, lithium, gold etc it can simply buy in food from other countries as is demonstrated by the league tables linked above.

If we are going to insist on having a greater area of arable land by geographic means then the following (drastic!) changes would help:

1. Global waring raising the average temperatures and thawing out previously unavailable perma-frost regions and extending the growing season and allowing crops and timber to grow further North.
2. Tectonic shifts flattening mountainous areas and raising the sea bed on the Western cost of Canada providing extra farmable area.

A combination of (1) and (2) with rising sea levels and a tectonic shift that puts most of the USA below sea level. The US population will either have to migrate to Canada or Mexico.

There are far less drastic changes that are easier and more plausible than geographical changes.

A review of the league tables indicates that the countries with some of the highest population densities can be accounted for simply by their cultures. By accepting or being used to lower standards of living and having a culture of large families they manage to have high populations densities without having particularly high arable land densities.

As mentioned before, high GDP is an important factor and having industries like Hollywood or Silicon Valley certainly helps. Political factors like having high average wages, high employment, low taxes, low crime rates, good security, high stability and low barriers to immigration all help to attract people to come and live in a given country.

Summary: Its not the arable land ratio that is holding back the population density of Canada.

Answer 8

So it is your world and you can take drastic means to change Canada's geography. Canada has a rather warm side (Pacific coast) and a cold side (everything east of the Rocky mountains. Shift the Rocky mountains eastward and create large coastal lowlands on the Pacific coast with much nicer climate than eastern Canada. Those lowlands will be the densely populated centre of your New Canada.