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Canada is a country occupying most of northern
North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean
in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into
the Arctic Ocean. It is the world's second largest
country by total area, and shares land borders with the United States
to the south and northwest. The land occupied by Canada was inhabited
for millennia by various aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late
15th century, British and French expeditions explored and later
settled the Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies
in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with
the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation,
Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This
began an accretion of additional provinces and territories and a
process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted
by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and culminating in the Canada
Act in 1982 which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the
British parliament. |