Canada's economy

Canada has always been a trading nation. The official guide opens this chapter with that claim and adds that commerce remains the engine of economic growth. Goods leave the country, money comes back, and a great deal of the work Canadians do is the work of making, moving and selling those goods.

That trade adds up. Canada has one of the ten largest economies in the world. It sells to many countries, but geography decides most of the traffic. The boundary with the United States runs straight across the continent, and it is the longest undefended border in the world.

What crosses that border, and on what terms, has been settled by trade agreements the test expects you to know.

In 1988 Canada enacted free trade with the United States. Six years later, in 1994, Mexico became a partner and the arrangement became the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. That created a market of over 444 million people. In 2008 the three countries traded over $1 trillion in merchandise with each other.

The guide also places Canada in the G8, the group of leading industrialized countries, alongside the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Japan and Russia.

Both of those have changed in the real world, and the study guide has not been rewritten. NAFTA was replaced by CUSMA, the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, and the group of leading industrialized countries has been the G7 since 2014, without Russia. On the citizenship test, give the guide's answers: NAFTA, and the G8 including Russia. Knowing the newer names is useful for life in Canada; it is not what the test is asking.

The United States is Canada's largest trading partner by a wide margin. Over three-quarters of Canadian exports go there, and the guide calls the two countries' commerce the biggest bilateral trading relationship in the world.

What Canada sells reads like a list of the country itself: energy products, industrial goods, machinery and equipment, automotive products, agricultural, fishing and forestry products, and consumer goods. Learn those six together.

The guide sorts the whole economy into three main types of industry. Services come first, and by a wide margin. Most newcomers will work in one of them: transportation, education, health care, construction, banking, communications, retail, tourism and government. More than 75% of working Canadians are employed in services.

Next come the manufacturing industries, which make things for sale at home and abroad: paper, high technology equipment, aerospace technology, automobiles, machinery, food and clothing.

Third are the natural resources industries: forestry, fishing, agriculture, mining and energy. They still shape which province does what, as the regions chapter shows.