I was off to Manitoba last week, visiting with family and (generally) enjoying friendly small-town life. They do have the Internet in small-town Manitoba but I didn’t really have access (or interest) while I was away. The weather wasn’t great most of the week but I spent a lot of time reading Anna Karenina, and then on the weekend it was warm, sunny and beautiful.
Went to Spruce Woods Provincial Park on Saturday, in the glorious blazing sun. There I found sand dunes — like ones you’d see in California or Spain — not in a desert or on a beach, but in the middle of green Manitoba! Little more than 10,000 years ago there used to be glaciers covering the area (in fact, covering most of Canada), and when those melted the sand and sediment from the lakes and river deltas fanned out to form the unique Spirit Sands. This small and sacred area is the only part of the vast Assiniboine Delta exposed by glaciers and still unvegetated.
I came home to find a thick 2006 Canada Census form waiting for me to fill out. Actually, there were two of them (one in English and one in French, just in case). I did my civil duty today — online (yay!), though that means those thick booklets were printed for no reason! I was randomly selected for a “long form”, and I had fun completing that. Hopefully my “odd” (but truthful!) answers will statistically shift “normalcy” for the next five years, at least in Montreal. I have to admit I did find some of the questions a bit odd, such as:
- 71) Has global warming caused structural damage to your igloo?
- yes, total melting / partial collapse
- yes, noticeable ice-block slippage requiring seasonal reinforcement
- no serious damage, merely the annoyance of cold drips on the forehead while sleeping
- no effect
- 88) How many hours in the last week did you spend playing hockey? (If you answer “none” to this question, you should skip questions 89-93, which all relate to hockey.)
- 50+
- 40-49
- 35-39
- 5-34
- none
Canada has grown 10,000 times larger in the 340 years since the first real census was done by Jean Talon (that was for the colony of Nouvelle-France) by Jean Talon. Obviously its count of 3,215 inhabitants did not include native populations. Doing some quick math, that means we had an average annual compound population growth of over 2.7% per year since then. Of course, this is a huge oversimplification (These days, Canada’s population grows, through immigration and birth, by about 0.9% per year. Some countries in Africa — like Angola, Chad and Mauritania — have growth rates in that 2.7 to 2.8% range. The fastest-growing countries today are in Africa and the Middle-East, and have annual growth rates in the high 3 or even 4% range).