“My fiction is really about sensual details—and luckily, we have them here.” Newfoundland and Labrador novelist Lisa Moore is right.

The province in the geographic centre of the country—easternmost in the prairie bed—can’t be pegged as “east” or “west,” in the same way that no genuine creative spirit can be stereotyped. Manitoba’s an artist.

In a country that just doesn’t toot its own horn because it seriously doubts anyone’s listening, here’s a province that knows it matters. (And maybe the only one that particularly cares.) Ontario has enough steam to make noise globally.

“Throw a penny against the sky and it rings,” the Swift Current-born poet Lorna Crozier once said of her home province. That’s Saskatchewan.

Canada’s only officially bilingual province? Not Quebec, but New Brunswick, bien sûr. The English/French split is around 50/50. But New Brunswick French, you can’t help notice, sounds different.

Tanya Tagaq, the superstar Aboriginal throat singer from Cambridge Bay, NU says this of the powerful, otherworldly noises that issue from her: she is giving voice to tags: 13 provinces and territories, 2010 Winter Games, About Canada, IQALUIT, Canada 101, culture & arts, distinct Canada, food, music, Nunavut, native, outside, sports

Consider this as you double down at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s during one of its summer Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournaments. In 1898, in this selfsame Dawson City, rather more would have been at stake.

There used to be an expression “As fake as Canadian diamonds….” (Long story, involving Jacques Cartier mistakenly bringing back bags of worthless quartz to the New World.) No one says it anymore—not since a prime stri

“There’s such a lot of different Annes in me.” Oh, yeah, that’s 11-year-old Anne Shirley, orphan-heroine of Anne of Green Gables. But her beloved Prince Edward Island could say the same about itself.

The most populous prairie province is cattle country, wheat country and above all, oil country.