Do you have to be Canadian-born to become Prime Minister?

- YL

The qualifications for Prime Minister of Canada are the same as for a member of the House of Commons: You must be at least 18 years old (of legal voting age) and you must be a citizen of Canada. That's pretty much it for the "hard" legal requirements. (There are no intelligence, integrity or honesty clauses, which explains how [insert name of your least favourite PM] got appointed, ha ha.) Of course, by convention the position goes to the leader of the political party holding the most seats in the House of Commons, so it's not exactly wide open.

You do not have to be Canadian-born to be the Prime Minister, as long as you have become a naturalized citizen — which typically involves living in Canada for three years, passing a test and demonstrating "good character." (If you moved to Canada as a minor, the requirements are more lenient.)

In fact, four former Prime Ministers were born outside Canada: Alexander Mackenzie (1873-1878) and Sir John A. Macdonald (1867-1873, 1878-1891) were born in Scotland, and Mackenzie Bowell (1894-1896) and John Napier Turner (1984) were born in England. The first three were born before Confederation, when being "Canadian-born" didn't mean what it does today anyway; Turner had a Canadian mother and moved to Canada when he was 3.

Sources: Parliament of Canada, MSN Encarta, Wikipedia: John Napier Turner

We are big fans of your trivia column! Continue the great work!!!

We do have a question that has been baffling even the 1-800-O-Canada people: why is Canada abbreviated CDN? Shouldn't it be CND as these are the right order of three consonants making up the name? Or, alternatively, why not CAN? Germany is GER and France is FR, Belgium is BEL and Luxembourg is LUX. So Canada should be CAN, not CDN.

- Francois and Audrey

There are several different abbreviations for Canada. For the Olympics and FIFA soccer, the official three-letter abbreviation is CAN. The United Nations also uses CAN, but international airports use CA and the Internet goes with .ca. CND is sometimes seen, but not in any "official" uses that I know of, and I can only think of two areas that use CDN: international licence plates and foreign exchange.

The CDN that appears on vehicles was originally CA, and changed to CDN in 1956. Supposedly this stood for Canadian DominioN (or CanaDiaN Dominion) — the country was commonly known as the Dominion of Canada until the '50s, when we began to move away from the term. (Though "Dominion of Canada" remains the official title.)

For currency, CAD is the official ISO currency code for CAnadian Dollars, but Can$ and CDN$ are also still used. Here, the CDN is clearly an abbreviation of the adjectival CanaDiaN, with the letters in the right order.

Sources: Where's That Vehicle Come From?, Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia: Canadian dollar

From Answer Man column of Nov. 28, 2007:

I am puzzled that so often Canada is referred to as "north of the 49th parallel." Is it not true that most Canadians in fact live south of the 49th parallel?

- Wayne

You are correct. While Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as Nunavut, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, are completely above the 49th parallel, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are entirely below the 49th parallel. Much of the area of Ontario and Quebec is above the 49th, but all the major population centres (including Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City) are comfortably below. Most of British Columbia is above the 49th, but Vancouver Island (including Victoria) dips below. Labrador is north of the parallel, but most of Newfoundland is below.

So I would estimate that about 2/3 of Canada's population is actually below the 49th parallel. (Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and P.E.I. combine to make up 67.7% of Canada's population as of July 1, 2007 — we can give Victoria and St. John's to the Above-49th Club in exchange for northern Ontario and Quebec and call it a wash.)

Yeah, if you're talking about the people and not the landmass of Canada (the majority of which is above the 49th), "north of the 49th parallel" is misleading. But you can think of it as shorthand. It's easier than saying "north of the 49th parallel, spiking at the Lake of the Woods, flowing through the Rainy River, touring the Great Lakes, levelling off around the 45th parallel, then looping around the arbitrarily defined border of Maine." That's a mouthful.

Where did the term "double-double" (meaning two sugars and two creams in your coffee) originate from?

I'm convinced that Tim Hortons popularized it if not coined it entirely. My friend thinks that it's just a Canadianism that all coffee shops use. Please help solve this debacle.

- Christiaan V.

I think both you and your friend are correct. "Double-double" is:

(i) Distinctly (if not exclusively) Canadian slang.

It's widely used in coffee-selling establishments across Canada, but is less commonly heard outside Canada (or from non-Canadians). Countless sites denote it as "Canadian slang," and in 2004, the term was considered important enough to be added to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. CBC News reported:

[Canadian Oxford Dictionary Editor-in-Chief Katherine] Barber cites the research into "double-double" — a coffee with double cream and double sugar added — as an example.

"We had to determine if it was used only in Tim Hortons doughnut shops or more widely," Barber said. "We found evidence in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and the book Men with Brooms, based on the curling movie."

Researchers also surveyed Canadians across the country and were sent to eavesdrop in coffee shops to gauge whether people really use the term.

In the U.S., "double-double" is uncommon in coffee shops, and is much more frequently used in a basketball context (when a player reaches double digits in two statistical categories, e.g., points and rebounds). The California-based In-N-Out Burger chain sells a "Double-Double," but it's a burger (double meat, double cheese).

(ii) Most famously used in connection with the Tim Hortons chain.

Tim Hortons clearly played a large role in popularizing the term nationwide, as the CBC passage quoted above amply demonstrates — the dictionary needed to determine if "double-double" was ever used outside Tim Hortons.

(ii) Of uncertain origin.

Most Canadians immediately think of Tim Hortons when they hear "double-double," but the company does not have ownership of the term, and has been unsuccessful in attempts to register a trademark for it. (Interestingly, In-N-Out Burger has registered a trademark for "Double-Double" cheeseburgers in Canada.) When Tim Hortons uses "double-double," it's usually written in lower-case letters, and as far as I can tell the company has never claimed that it invented the term.

Most likely the first person who used "double-double" in reference to sugar and cream did it in a now-forgotten diner or coffee shop long before the Tim Hortons chain was founded in 1964. It might even have been — sacrilege! — coined in the United States.

Sources: CBC News, Canoe CNews, Canadian Trade-marks Database, Tim Hortons Trivia, Smart & Biggar Fetherstonhaugh

I heard that before the maple leaf with red borders, Canada once had other flags. The red ensign and the blue ensign. Is this true? Yeah, I know I could probably look this one up myself, but where's the fun in that?

- Bernie

The Maple Leaf flag, now perhaps the most recognizable symbol of Canada worldwide, is a relative newcomer to the scene, designed in 1964 and adopted in 1965. Prior to 1965, the official flag of Canada was the Royal Union Flag — the familiar "Union Jack" of the United Kingdom — but the Canadian Red Ensign emerged as the de facto national flag, and was the one flown by the federal government.

Wikipedia reports:

[The Canadian Red Ensign] was informally adopted following Canadian Confederation in 1867 and, from 1892, it was the official flag for use on Canadian merchant ships. On land, however, the official national flag was the Union Flag. Despite its unofficial status, the Red Ensign was widely used on land as well. In 1924, the Red Ensign was approved for use on Canadian government buildings outside Canada, and from 1945 for those inside Canada as well.

The Canadian Red Ensign looked very similar to the current flags of Ontario and Manitoba: the Union Jack in the canton (the upper left corner) on a red background defaced by a shield featuring the Coat of Arms of Canada. (This shield design changed a few times over the life of the flag.)

The Blue Ensign was essentially the same flag, but with a blue background, resembling the flags of Australia and New Zealand. The Blue Ensign was used by the Royal Canadian Navy and other government vessels, but was rarely (if ever) flown on land.

Sources: Flags of the World, Wikipedia: Red Ensign, The Flags of Canada

Another flag question from the July 11, 2007, column:

When you look at the flag there are two faces showing, who do they represent?

- David K.

If you look at the Canadian flag the right way, it does look like two long-nosed men butting heads in an argument. [If you've never done this before, try to view the centre portion of the flag as a "negative," with the red maple leaf moving into the background and the white part in the foreground. The "faces" will be in the top left and right corners.]

Some have suggested that these hidden silhouettes were placed there intentionally by the flag designers to reflect the contentious Great Flag Debate of 1964. But most believe (rightly, in my opinion) that this is just a coincidence and the maple leaf on the flag is nothing more than a stylized and simplified rendering of a real maple leaf.

After all, the Toronto Maple Leafs' logo also includes two "faces" (though they don't look as angry)... as do many actual maple leaves.

No one who was involved with the design of the flag has ever admitted to embedding a hidden message.

Sources: Canadian Heritage, Paradigms and Perception, CBC: Great Canadian Flag Debate

I have a question about city names.

We all know that many cities take their names from more famous locations (e.g., London, Ontario) but when I was in Australia two years ago I noticed that there was a town called "Toronto" just outside of Sydney.

I've also seen a few examples of places called "Ottawa" in the U.S.A.

Who has the bragging rights to say that they were the original "Ottawa" and "Toronto" and why did these other cities go about naming themselves after the originals?

- Jamie H., Ottawa (the original), Canada

The first one is easy. The town of Toronto, New South Wales (Australia), was knowingly and intentionally named after its older, larger Canadian brother. Here's the story from the town's website:

The Excelsior Land Investment and Banking Company purchased the whole of the estate in 1885 with plans for the creation of a tourist resort. It is believed that the Toronto Hotel built of local bricks in 1887 was erected on the site of Threlkeld's mission house.

A suitable name for the town had yet to be chosen and at that particular time Edward Hanlon, world rowing champion, was visiting New South Wales from the city of Toronto in Canada. To capitalise on publicity, the name Toronto was selected for the new resort on Lake Macquarie.

There are at least four different Ottawas in the United States: Ottawa, Ohio, was founded in 1834; Ottawa, Wisconsin, was founded in 1843; Ottawa, Illinois, was incorporated in 1853; and Ottawa, Kansas, was incorporated in 1866.

Canada's capital was founded as Bytown in 1850 and renamed Ottawa in 1855, when it was incorporated as a city. Looking at all those dates, you might assume that our Ottawa borrowed its name from one of the American towns.

The truth is that all of these towns/cities were named after the First Nations/Native American people who lived around them: the Ottawa or Odawa (from the word adawe, meaning "to trade"). The Ottawa inhabited the Great Lakes region, with one band being pushed out to Kansas and then Oklahoma by the United States' reprehensible Indian Removal Act of 1830. (Ottawa, Kansas, in fact, sprang up by the Ottawa Reservation.) So all of these Ottawas took their name from a common source, but not from each other. If anyone deserves the "bragging rights," it's the Ottawa people.

How many trees are there in Canada? 500 million? 1 billion? 1 trillion?

- Andrew, Markham, Ont.

Trees are notoriously bad about returning census forms, so it's impossible to get a precise count, but based on some related statistical data we can get a rough estimate:

• NASA estimated that there are 400 billion trees on the planet.
• Forests cover about 4 billion hectares of the Earth's land area.
• This gives us an average density of 100 trees per hectare of forest.
• Canada has more than 400 million hectares of forest. (Not all trees are in forests, but the number found in backyards and lining boulevards is negligible in comparison.)

Thus, based on an average density of 100 trees per hectare, Canada should have about 40 billion trees. Give or take a few billion.

Sources: Natural Resources Canada, NPR

[From Answer Man column May 10, 2006...]

Please come to my rescue and help me answer international cousins who ask "why are you guys called hosers, anyway?" Sadly, I do not know! I think it may have something to do with SCTV, eh, but couldn't bet my life on it! Help!

- Amanda

According to Bob and Doug McKenzie, "hoser" is "what you call your little brother when your mother's in the room." It's a fairly mild insult, an in normal usage it refers to a beer-drinking, hockey-obsessed, none-too-bright Canadian male, but it's also used as a blanket slur for all Canadians.

Perhaps you are too young to remember Bob and Doug McKenzie (they're still around, but not quite the sensation they once were). Played by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, Bob and Dog were dim-witted Canadian brothers who hosted a show called "The Great White North" in a popular recurring SCTV sketch. These bits on SCTV spawned an album and the movie Strange Brew, a cult hit north and south of the border. Bob and Doug played up traditional Canadian stereotypes and made frequent use of the word "hoser." Viewers would soon follow their lead.

It's largely because of Bob and Doug McKenzie that "hoser" gained popularity in the '80s, but they didn't invent the term. The etymology is not clear, but it appears to be an old Canadian slang term dating back to at least the '30s. The most likely explanation I've seen was that "hosers" and the related "hoseheads" were originally Depression-era farmers in western Canada who would steal gasoline by siphoning it off from tanks with a hose, which required sucking on one end of the hose and thus often left the hoser with a mouthful of gasoline. (This covers "Canadian" and "not too bright.")

This is not the only possible origin, however. "Hoser" could have been derived from other slang uses of "hose." For example, "hosed" is sometimes used as slang for "drunk" ("I was so hosed last weekend!"); "to hose" is a verb meaning "to cheat" or "to put in a very unpleasant position" ("We got hosed on that exam!"); and "hose" also falls into the category of slang terms describing the male genitalia, many of which are used as insults (this would explain "hosehead"). But the gas-siphoning explanation seems more Canadian in origin and makes more sense in terms of usage.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hoser, HomeEnvy, American Dialect Society Mailing List, Origins of Racist Terms