Although there is a lot of land, people don't want to live in 90% of it (as Nick's picture shows). There's much less habitable land relative to the United States. chscag seems to know what I'm talking about.

Here's some math to give you some context: the three territories have a total land surface area of 3,493,013 square kilometres which is roughly 35% of the total land surface under Canadian jurisdiction. However, only 106,455 people live in them which is roughly 0.32% of the population. To put that into perspective (as if that wasn't enough), there are more people in my electoral riding than in the three territories combined.

The population is also clustered around urban centres primarily. The Windsor-Quebec City corridor (the area in Nick's map that is offset in the top left hand corner and home to Groovetube and I) is home to about 18 million people or roughly 54% of the population. If you add Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary to that (the three largest urban areas outside of the W-QC corridor), you've got 68% of the population. That concentration is unlikely to change since that's where all the job opportunities are.

vansmith: providing lessons on Canadian demographics.