Happy Canada Day to our Canadian Friends 2009

July 1st is Canada Day, also known as Fête du Canada. That is Canada's national holiday, and it celebrates the anniversary of the British North America Act that united Canada as a single country of four provinces in 1867.

Here are a few links so you can learn more:

• The entry from Encyclopedia Brittanica about Canada Day. Just a brief overview so you know what the holiday is.
• Here is the CIA World Factbook page for Canada, so you can learn some basic facts. The U.S. Department of State also has some basic information in their Background Notes series. Here is the one for Canada.
  
• Traveling to Canada? The U.S. Department of State's travel site also has a page for travelers to Canada. Yes, they also have information for travel to other parts of the world too.
  
• And get a whole lot more stuff about Canada from the Library of Congress. There are a lot of good links here. This is part of the LOC's Portals to the World series.
• As many readers know, the U.S. has embassies around the world. Here is the website for the Embassy of the United States in Ottawa. Personally, looking at a site like this gives you a sense of what it is the U.S. portrays about itself to Canada. This particular page is pretty good, and it even features feeds and sharing options (like for Facebook, for instance). Try looking at other embassy pages as well.
• And I recently discovered this Foreign Information by Country series from the UCB (University of Colorado at Boulder) Libraries. Here is their page for Canada. Just about anything you could want is here. The series is great as well.
  

Here are some Canadian links:

• From Canada's Ministry of Canadian Heritage, here is their page for Canada Day. The site does have other sources of information about Canada worth a look.
• Here is the Canada Day page from Canada's National Capital Commission. You can search for events throughout Canada here.
  
• From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, "Celebrating Canada Day" with clips and information.
• And because Canada Day is celebrated in the U.S. as well by many folks, here is Canada Day Across America, a nice mash-up tool where you can see if there is a party going on nearby. Sadly, there are none going on in Tyler, TX.
• And to test your knowledge, here is a quiz about Canada. Answers are included.
• And here is an online exhibit with a "Chronology of Canadian Postal History" from the Canadian Museum of Civilization. They do have other online exhibits as well, so go have a look.
• From the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry (the Foreign Affairs and International Trade site), you can learn about protocol for the foreign community. In plain English, these are the people that " facilitates the presence in Canada of approximately 8,000 foreign representatives and their dependents."
• And we cannot miss the official Canadian government portal, which you can find here.

And finally, a little humor, because a lot of us may want to be Canadian for a Day. In my case, there are days when I wish it could be for more than a day, but I digress. Anyhow, it is a catchy tune:




A hat tip for the video to Stephen's Lighthouse.

As a side note for myself, here is the post I made for my library's blog. It is a bit more basic than the one here, and obviously, I left out any possible humor out since it is the official library blog.