Canada is larger, colder and slightly more populous than Australia: about 9.98 million square kilometres and 41 million people against Australia's 7.69 million square kilometres and 27 million. Both are among the emptiest countries on Earth, with around four people per square kilometre, because most of Canada is frozen for half the year and most of Australia is desert. They share a British colonial past, a federal parliamentary system, King Charles III as head of state and an economy built on digging things up.
Two Vast, Empty Countries by the Numbers
Canada is the second-largest country in the world by total area, behind Russia, and Australia is sixth. Strip out water and the gap narrows: Canada has about 890,000 square kilometres of lakes and rivers, more than any other country, so its land area of roughly 9.09 million square kilometres is only about 1.4 million more than Australia's. Population-wise, Canada passed 41 million in 2024 after several years of record immigration, while Australia reached about 27 million the same year. Both grow mainly through migration rather than births.
- Total area: Canada about 9,985,000 square kilometres; Australia about 7,692,000.
- Population (2025): Canada about 41.5 million; Australia about 27.5 million.
- Density: Canada about 4 people per square kilometre; Australia about 3.5. Only Mongolia, Namibia and a handful of others are emptier.
- Largest cities: Toronto about 6.5 million; Sydney and Melbourne each a little over 5 million.
- Where people live: around two-thirds of Canadians live within 100 kilometres of the United States border; around 85 per cent of Australians live within 50 kilometres of the coast.
The empty middle is the defining feature of both maps. Canada's interior north is boreal forest and tundra on permafrost; Australia's interior, the Outback, is desert and semi-desert covering about 70 per cent of the continent. In each case the population clings to a strip along one edge of the country.
Frozen North Against Red Centre: Climate Extremes
Canada's coldest recorded temperature is minus 63 degrees Celsius, at Snag in the Yukon on 3 February 1947, the lowest ever measured in North America. Winnipeg's January average is around minus 16, and roughly half of Canada's land sits on permafrost. Yet the country can also be hot: Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6 degrees on 29 June 2021 during a heat dome, a day before the town burned down in a wildfire.
Australia's record is 50.7 degrees at Oodnadatta, South Australia, on 2 January 1960, and summer days above 45 are routine in the interior. Its coldest reading is a comparatively mild minus 23 at Charlotte Pass in the Snowy Mountains. Northern Australia has a tropical wet season from November to April, driven by the monsoon, while the south has Mediterranean winters and the interior gets under 250 millimetres of rain a year. Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with a mean annual rainfall of about 470 millimetres; Canada's southern cities typically receive 800 to 1,200 millimetres, and the Pacific coast north of Vancouver is temperate rainforest with more than 3,000. The two countries have swapped disasters as the climate has warmed: Australia's Black Summer fires of 2019 and 2020 burned about 24 million hectares, and Canada's 2023 season burned about 15 million, the worst in its history.
Coastlines, Lakes and Reefs
Canada has the longest coastline of any country, about 202,000 kilometres when its thousands of Arctic islands are included, enough to circle the equator five times. Australia's mainland coast measures about 25,760 kilometres by the same World Factbook method, though Geoscience Australia's figure including every island is closer to 60,000. Canada also holds more lakes than any other nation, close to 900,000 larger than 10 hectares, and shares four of the five Great Lakes with the United States; Lake Superior alone is larger than Tasmania. Australia's biggest lake, Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, is usually a dry salt pan and has filled completely only a few times in the past century.
Australia's answer is offshore. The Great Barrier Reef stretches about 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast and covers roughly 344,000 square kilometres, the largest living structure on Earth and larger than Italy. Rivers are a mismatch too: Australia's longest, the Murray, runs about 2,500 kilometres, yet the whole Murray-Darling basin sends less water to the sea in a year than the Mackenzie, Canada's longest river at about 1,740 kilometres for the main stem and 4,240 for the full system, carries in a couple of weeks. Our guide to the geography of the Great Barrier Reef covers the reef's structure and its bleaching record.
Mountains and the Shape of the Land
Australia is the flattest continent, with an average elevation of about 330 metres, and its highest point, Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales, reaches only 2,228 metres; a fit walker can reach the summit on a paved path in a few hours. The Great Dividing Range runs about 3,500 kilometres down the east coast, long but low, and separates the wet coastal strip from the dry interior. Most of the rest of the country is ancient, worn-down shield and sedimentary basin, which is why Australia has no active volcanoes on its mainland and few serious earthquakes.
Canada's highest point, Mount Logan in the Yukon, stands at 5,959 metres, the second-highest peak in North America. The Rocky Mountains and the Coast Mountains of British Columbia are young, steep and still rising, with glaciers, active faults and a serious subduction-zone earthquake risk off Vancouver Island. East of the Rockies lie the prairies and then the Canadian Shield, a vast dome of Precambrian rock, some of it almost 4 billion years old, scraped bare by ice-age glaciers and dotted with the lakes they left behind. The ranges that shape the western provinces are profiled in our Rocky Mountains guide.
Canberra and Ottawa: Two Compromise Capitals
Neither country's capital is its largest city, and for the same reason. In 1857 Queen Victoria chose Ottawa, then a small lumber town on the river between English-speaking Canada West and French-speaking Canada East, to end the rivalry between Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Kingston. It became the capital of the new Dominion of Canada at Confederation in 1867. Fifty years later Australia copied the idea: the 1901 constitution required a capital inside New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, to placate Melbourne. The site of Canberra was chosen in 1908, an international design competition in 1912 was won by the Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin and his partner Marion Mahony Griffin, and Parliament moved from Melbourne in 1927.
Ottawa today has about 1.1 million people in its metropolitan area and Canberra about 470,000. Both sit in their own federal districts, the National Capital Region and the Australian Capital Territory, and both are frequently mistaken by outsiders for Sydney or Toronto. Canberra's story is told in Canberra, capital of Australia.
Mining, Oil, Wheat and Who They Sell To
The two economies look alike from a distance: rich, resource-heavy, service-dominated at home and dependent on commodity exports. Australia is the world's largest exporter of iron ore, coking coal and lithium and among the top three for liquefied natural gas, and China takes around a third of its exports. Canada holds the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, mostly in the Alberta oil sands, and is also a leading exporter of potash, uranium, wheat, canola, lumber and aluminium. Its trade is far more concentrated on a single partner: about three-quarters of Canadian exports go to the United States, which makes the relationship with Washington the central fact of Canadian economic life.
Politically the parallels are close. Both are federations, with six states and two mainland territories in Australia and ten provinces and three territories in Canada. Both are constitutional monarchies under the Westminster system, both became fully independent in law through statutes in the 1980s (the Canada Act 1982 and the Australia Act 1986), and both have had referendums about their relationship with Indigenous peoples and the Crown. Canada is officially bilingual in English and French, with Quebec's 9 million people mostly francophone; Australia has no official language in law but more than 250 Indigenous languages, most of them endangered.
How Each Compares With the United States
Americans provide the natural yardstick, since both countries are often described as being "about the size of the US". Canada is in fact slightly bigger than the United States in total area (9.98 against 9.83 million square kilometres) but a little smaller in land area once its lakes are removed. Australia, at 7.69 million square kilometres, is almost exactly the size of the 48 contiguous states, which cover about 8.08 million. In population neither comes close: the United States has around 340 million people, eight times Canada and twelve times Australia, and a density of about 36 per square kilometre against their 4.
The deeper contrast is in how the land is used. The United States has farmland, cities and rivers across almost its entire area, with no equivalent of Canada's frozen north or Australia's arid centre. That is why two countries of continental size still behave, in most practical respects, like mid-sized nations strung along a single coast or border. For the full physical picture of each, see our Australia geography and Canada geography guides.