Some elements in the development of the national atlas of canada

Summary

This paper presents a systematic account of the problems encountered in the production of the National Atlas of Canada and the ways in which they were resolved. Canada's distinctive circumstances—its immense area of nearly 4,000,000 square miles (the second largest country in the world), its relatively small population of barely 18,000,000, its federal political structure, and its bilingual culture—made the task unusually complex. The compilation was organized by the Geographical Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys in cooperation with an interdepartmental advisory committee representing major government agencies such as the Departments of Agriculture, Fisheries, Transport, and Northern Affairs and National Resources, together with the Dominion Bureau of Statistics, the Army Survey Establishment, the Canadian Meteorological Service, and the Public Archives of Canada. The committee first established the atlas's dual purpose: to portray the nature, extent and use of Canada's physical resources and their effect on the country's economy and society, while also serving as a historical record of national development at a particular point in time (the 1951 census period). A survey of existing single-country atlases guided decisions on format, projection and content. A loose-leaf binding was adopted to allow sheets to lie flat, be removed for study, and be revised as new data became available. The page size was designed to accommodate a full-page map of Canada on a scale of 1:10,000,000 using the Lambert conformal conic projection with standard parallels at 49°N and 77°N. It was decided that the atlas would be primarily topical in organization, with some regional maps for populated places. Approximately equal space was allocated to physical geography, human geography, and economic geography. Since a truly bilingual map series was judged technically impracticable, two separate editions were produced—one entirely in English (110 sheets, printed from September 1955 to October 31, 1958) and one entirely in French. The French edition posed three major challenges: toponymy (French equivalents were used only where established local usage already provided them—e.g., Nova Scotia became Nouvelle-Écosse, but London, Ontario was not changed to Londres); the adaptation of scientific terminology to Canadian French usage (e.g., physiographie for morphologie); and the technical adjustment of English printing materials to accommodate French lettering of different lengths and sizes without obscuring map detail. The atlas is arranged to provide a coherent geographical narrative: early exploration routes and historical maps; modern survey examples; physical geography including relief, geology, magnetism, tides, a fourteen-sheet climatic series, drainage basins, soils, forests and biogeographical distribution maps; human resources (population distribution, ethnic origins, religions, vital statistics); economic geography (fisheries, forestry, pulp and paper, agriculture, mining, electric power, manufacturing, transportation and communications); and finally institutional and settlement geography, including large-scale urban plans of eight major cities, census divisions, electoral districts, and maps showing Canada's political evolution and international affiliations. The author notes a progressive decline in reliance on statistical diagrams from the 1906 and 1915 editions, attributable to improved methods of field data collection and socio-economic analysis. The atlas thus serves both as a record of current knowledge and, through its gaps, as a guide for future geographical research—hence the deliberate choice of a loose-leaf format facilitating ongoing revision and supplementation. While no other country will face precisely the same conditions, elements of Canada's experience in organization, content planning, bilingual production and cartographic technique may offer useful lessons.