With an area of 9,967,139 square kilometres, Canada, the second largest country in the world after Russia, covers a geographical area bigger than the USA (about 9,519,617 square kilometres) or China (about 9,575,000 square kilometres). With a population at the turn of the millennium of about 30.5 million, Canada has only 0.5% of the world's population of about 5.5 billion. Canada has one of the lowest population densities in the world: about 3 people for every square kilometre (compared to about 132 Chinese for every square kilometre (if Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan are excluded from the calculation and the population is at 1.262 billion), and 29 USAmericans per square kilometre (277 million).

There are many isolated places in Canada, especially in the North, where you would have to walk for more than one week before reaching the next nearest people, and in some places, such as Baffin Island and the islands of the arctic archipelago, where you would have to walk for several weeks. Thus, many Canadians are very aware of isolation as a concept. Some Canadians delight in this idea. They believe that wilderness is one of the great attributes of the country. Other people, especially those who have lived elsewhere in the world before coming to Canada, often respond negatively to the low density of population. They feel as if life is being lived somewhere else, but not where they are.