Planning of Canada's Atlas aids in easy revision

This article reviews the conception, production, and planned revision of the Atlas of Canada. The Geographical Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys intended to incorporate results from the latest national census as they became available. Revision would be facilitated by the atlas’s loose-leaf format, which allowed outdated sheets to be removed and new or corrected maps to be inserted. The article emphasizes that Canada’s immense territory, relatively small population, federal political structure, and official bilingual context created distinctive cartographic and administrative challenges. Preparation therefore depended on an interdepartmental committee and extensive cooperation among federal, provincial, and municipal agencies, private organizations, and individual contributors. The atlas was designed to document the nature, extent, and use of Canada’s physical resources and to show their effects on the country’s economy and society, while also preserving a historical record of national development. Planners established common standards for page size, scale, projection, visual clarity, and thematic organization. Because consistently bilingual cartography was judged technically impractical, separate English and French editions were produced. Approximately one hundred map sheets were arranged as a coherent geographical narrative, covering exploration and early maps, physical geography, climate, drainage, soils, forests, biological distributions, population, industry, agriculture, transportation, communications, institutions, urban growth, administrative divisions, and political evolution. Production required substantial technical ingenuity and generated new cartographic methods. The completed atlas thus combined authoritative data, aesthetic quality, national interpretation, and adaptability, while offering useful experience for comparable atlas projects in other countries.