Canada: strong and free, but maybe not as north as you think

Canada is farther north than the United States: everybody knows this, and for the most part it's true. An article in Monitor on Psychology says people tend to take these geographical mental shortcuts too far: most Americans are surprised to find that all of Florida is farther south than the Mexican border, for example.

So let's see how much of the United States is below Canada's most southerly city, Windsor, Ontario (I won't cheat and count the little islands in Lake Erie that belong to Canada):

For the record, the red area comprises 22% of the surface area of the contiguous United States (38% if you include Alaska), and 15% of its population. Windsor is just 25 km further north than the California-Oregon border.

The paper also states that both Americans and Canadians tend to imagine Europe more southerly than it is in relation to them (they equate Spain's latitude with the southern states, for example). Let's have a look, without that pesky Atlantic Ocean in the way:

Once again using the online tool Mapfrappe, I've marked the Latitudes of Windsor and of the 60th parallel, which divides the Prairie provinces from Northern Canada. You'll notice Windsor, which has some cold winters, is even with northern Spain, which decidedly doesn't. That's another mental shortcut we all share: north = cold, but it's not that simple when you have a nice Gulf Stream warming your coastline.

The geographical comparison was less surprising to me than the demographic one. Six weeks ago, I posted a blog about Canadian population by latitude, whose data was a little coarse because Canada Post and Statistics Canada have copyrighted the most finely detailed geographical boundaries used in the census. A wonderful reader pointed me to the ISLCP II Project, which lists the population of the entire planet for every quarter-degree of latitude and longitude -- albeit from 1995, but I'll take it. Have a look at the relative* populations by latitude of the United States, Canada and Europe:

The most northerly Canadian city with over half a million population is Edmonton, Alberta: it's at about the same latitude as Dublin, Manchester and Hamburg, and 15% of Europeans live farther north than this. (The demarcation of Europe and Asia is fuzzily defined; I chose it as including Istanbul and Moscow, which is north of Edmonton.) And the median latitude of population in Europe is 7 degrees higher than in Canada -- that's over 800 kilometers.

Thanks to these histograms I realized I'm as susceptible to that misfiring geography heurism as anyone: in my mind, Hawai'i was about the same latitude as Sacramento, California, but it's over 500 kilometers farther south than the mainland United States.

Next week, I finish my latitudinal triptych with some sundry interesting tidbits I picked up while writing the last two.

*That means all the bars in each column add up to 100% of the population of the area; obviously, there are more people in Europe and the United States than in Canada.