Let's ditch the 49th

I sometimes get a little miffed at the casual use of "the 49th parallel" to denote the Canada/US border.

It's a handy reference because you have that unbroken line from Lake of the Woods west to BC staring you in the face whenever you look at a map, but the 49th is an essentially meaningless line east of there. I'll demonstrate.

All of the Great Lakes, the entire Windsor-Quebec corridor, all of New Brunswick, PEI, and Nova Scotia, and a majority of the island of Newfoundland are actually south of the 49th. Even a lot of logging and mining towns in 'north' Ontario and Quebec come in south of the line. By my rough calculations, it adds up to almost 20 million people, which means almost 2/3 of Canadians live below the magic line that supposedly delinates us from the dread them.

As far as I can figure it, the most substantial settlements north of 49 in Eastern Canada are Sept-Iles and baie-Comeau, which, at about 25,000 each, are hardly comparable to a Winnipeg or an Edmonton. Saguenay, Timmins, Corner Brook, and others come close, but they all end up at 48.whatever north.

I know this is ignoring how Canadian identity is so often tied up with the frozen north and such (even though most of us live as far south as our part of the country will permit us to), but it's still a point I wanted to make. I want to make it bad enough that I spent 20 minutes in Google Earth and 5 minutes in MS Paint! That is a large investment of time, these days.