Culture of Canada

[16] Over the course of three centuries, countless North American Indigenous words, inventions, concepts, and games have become an everyday part of Canadian language and use.

[28] By the 21st century Canada had thirty four ethnic groups with at least one hundred thousand members each, of which eleven have over 1,000,000 people and numerous others are represented in smaller numbers.

Being a cold country with long winter nights for most of the year, certain unique leisure activities developed in Canada during this period including ice hockey and embracement of the summer indigenous game of lacrosse.

[32][33][34] By the 19th century, Canadians came to believe themselves possessed of a unique "northern character," due to the long, harsh winters that only those of hardy body and mind could survive.

[37] In a society in which most middle-class families now owned a harmonium or piano, and standard education included at least the rudiments of music, the result was often an original song.

[42] French Canada's early development was relatively cohesive during the 17th and 18th centuries, and this was preserved by the Quebec Act of 1774, which allowed Roman Catholics to hold offices and practice their faith.

[43] In 1867, the Constitution Act was thought to meet the growing calls for Canadian autonomy while avoiding the overly strong decentralization that contributed to the Civil War in the United States.

[44] The compromises reached during this time between the English- and French-speaking Fathers of Confederation set Canada on a path to bilingualism which in turn contributed to an acceptance of diversity.

[60] Canada has a multi-party system in which many of its legislative customs derive from the unwritten conventions of and precedents set by the Westminster parliament of the United Kingdom.

[62] The historically predominant Liberals position themselves at the centre of the political scale,[63] with the Conservatives sitting on the right and the New Democratic Party occupying the left.

[69][70][71] Canada's foreign policy of peacekeeping, peace enforcement, peacemaking, and peacebuilding has been intertwined with its tendency to pursue multilateral and international solutions since the end of World War II.

[76] Canada has since been engaged with the United Nations, NATO and the European Union (EU) in promoting its middle power status into an active role in world affairs.

[85]Numerous scholars, beginning in the 1940s with American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset; have tried to identify, measure and compare them with other countries, especially the United States.

[89] Canada's large geographic size, the presence of a significant number of indigenous peoples, the conquest of one European linguistic population by another and relatively open immigration policy have led to an extremely diverse society.

[93][94] As Professor Alan Cairns noted about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms , "the initial federal government premise was on developing a pan-Canadian identity"'.

[100]In 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defined the country as the world's first postnational state: "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada".

[109][110] While these traditions are distinct and at times very different, there are common themes that relate to Canadians' shared history and geopolitical situation in the Western Hemisphere and the world.

[114][115][116] The beginnings of Canadian national radio comedy date to the late 1930s with the debut of The Happy Gang, a long-running weekly variety show that was regularly sprinkled with corny jokes in between tunes.

[119] Humber College in Toronto and the École nationale de l'humour in Montreal offer post-secondary programmes in comedy writing and performance.

[124][125][126] Many official symbols of the country such as the Flag of Canada have been changed or modified over the past few decades to Canadianize them and de-emphasise or remove references to the United Kingdom.

[133] Like the peoples that produced them, indigenous art traditions spanned territories that extended across the current national boundaries between Canada and the United States.

These themes, and Canada's literary history, inform the writing of successive generations of Canadian authors, from Leonard Cohen to Margaret Atwood.

The question of national identity recurs as a theme in much of Canada's literature, from Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes (1945) to Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (1999).

[150] Munro is also a recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, and three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction.

French-language television, like French Canadian film, is buffered from excessive American influence by the fact of language, and likewise supports a host of home-grown productions.

Canadian producers have been very successful in the field of science fiction since the mid-1990s, with such shows as The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, Highlander: The Series, the new Battlestar Galactica, My Babysitter's a Vampire, Smallville, and The Outer Limits all filmed in Vancouver.

[191][192] The Broadcasting Act declares "the system should serve to safeguard, enrich, and strengthen the cultural, political, social, and economic fabric of Canada".

[199] In an effort to reduce the amount of foreign-made media, government interventions in television broadcasting can include both regulation of content and public financing.

[214][215] Other popular Canadian made foods include indigenous fried bread bannock, French tourtière, Kraft Dinner, ketchup chips, date squares, nanaimo bars, back bacon, the caesar cocktail and many many more.

Film genre preferences were largely as the same across age categories, with comedies and action films the most popular, except that only one percent of older people (>55 years old) were fans of animated movies compared to eleven percent in young adults, while older adults showed a strong preference for dramas compared to younger people.