🇨🇦 Canada · 🇸🇪 Sweden
By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office
There are countries that have green space and countries that are green space. Canada, with 10 million square kilometres of forests, tundra, mountains, and lakes stretching from three oceans to the geographic centre of nowhere, is arguably the latter — a country so thoroughly constituted of wilderness that its relationship with nature is less a lifestyle choice and more a geological fact. Sweden, smaller but similarly forested, similarly lake-distributed, similarly cold in ways that would stop most countries from going outside at all, has done something Canada has not: it has written the relationship between citizen and landscape into law, and the resulting concept — allemansrätten, the right of public access — is so fundamental to Swedish identity that attempting to explain it to a Canadian produces a kind of baffled respect.
Both countries have solved the problem of how to be in nature. They have done it differently. Canada has built a national parks system of remarkable scope, with infrastructure, interpretation centres, and a booking system for backcountry sites that manages the human impact on ecosystems that would otherwise be overwhelmed. Sweden has decided that the landscape belongs to everyone by right, that the right to walk through a forest or pitch a tent by a lake does not require a fee or a system or a booking, and that this arrangement has functioned for centuries and requires no further design intervention. Both are correct. Both are, from the perspective of someone accustomed to neither, almost incomprehensibly generous.
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| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Get a Parks Canada Discovery Pass if you plan to visit more than two national parks in a year — it covers unlimited entry to over 80 national parks and pays for itself quickly if you use it with any frequency | Enter the backcountry without telling someone your route, your expected return time, and a plan for what happens if you don't return on time. Canada's backcountry is real wilderness and the search and rescue services are not unlimited |
| Respect bear safety protocols completely — this means bear spray, food storage in approved canisters or bear boxes, knowing the difference between black bear and grizzly behaviour, and not treating the wildlife like a photo opportunity that also happens to be able to kill you | Approach wildlife for photographs. This rule, which seems obvious, is broken with remarkable frequency by people whose risk assessment is overridden by the desire for content. The elk in Jasper is not posing. The bear in Banff is not interested in your presence |
| Explore beyond the famous parks — Canada's national park system extends to dozens of lesser-known parks in Newfoundland, northern Ontario, and the territories that offer equivalent wilderness with a fraction of the visitor traffic | Underestimate distances. Canada is very large and the distances between things in it are designed at a scale that consistently catches out people whose spatial reference points come from smaller countries. "It's only two hours" sometimes means "it's only two hours on a highway through wilderness where there is no service |
| Take the seasonal window seriously — Canada's hiking and camping season in mountain parks is genuinely limited, with many high-altitude trails inaccessible before July and weather turning by September, and planning within this window rather than around it saves significant frustration | Leave litter in any outdoor space, anywhere, under any circumstances. Canada's relationship with its wilderness is not sentimental — it is foundational — and the person who drops something in a national park will be encountering genuinely strong feelings from everyone around them |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Understand and use allemansrätten — the right to walk, cycle, camp for a night or two, pick berries, and swim in any lake regardless of land ownership, with the corresponding responsibilities to leave no trace and respect ongoing agriculture | Camp in the same spot for more than one or two nights without landowner permission, or camp within visible distance of a private house — these are the limits of allemansrätten that people most commonly misunderstand |
| Learn to forage — Sweden takes mushroom and berry picking with a seriousness that elevates it from activity to seasonal practice, and the forests in late summer and autumn contain chanterelles, lingonberries, blueberries, and cloudberries at a density that makes the supermarket feel like a significant downgrade | Light open fires during dry periods or in prohibited areas. Swedish fire safety rules exist because Swedish forests are significant and their loss is irreversible, and the rules are followed at a level of compliance that suggests genuine understanding of the stakes |
| Embrace friluftsliv — the Swedish concept of outdoor life as a component of good living, not an optional activity — which means accepting that weather is not a reasonable excuse for not going outside and that appropriate clothing is the solution to most objections | Treat Swedish national parks as destinations requiring extensive planning in the Canadian sense — most of them are accessible, free, and part of a landscape that allemansrätten already makes available. Parks are protections for specific ecosystems, not the only place you're permitted to experience nature |
| Take the Allemansrätten seriously in its responsibilities as well as its freedoms — leave gates as you found them, avoid disturbing nesting birds, keep to marked paths where asked, and treat the land as something you are borrowing from everyone else who uses it | Come to Sweden in winter expecting outdoor activity to stop. Swedish winter outdoor culture — skiing, skating on frozen lakes, ice fishing, the ritual of a cold lake followed immediately by a hot sauna — is serious and practiced at all ages and temperatures |
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To fully appreciate what Canada's parks system represents, it helps to understand the scale of the wilderness it is protecting and managing. Banff National Park, Canada's first and best-known, is 6,641 square kilometres. That is larger than the land area of Cyprus. It is a single national park. Canada has 48 of them, plus 9 national park reserves and a network of marine conservation areas. The combined protected area is approximately 350,000 square kilometres, which is a larger area than Germany.
Within this framework, Parks Canada has built an infrastructure of trailheads, backcountry campsites, interpretation centres, and wildlife management that attempts the difficult task of making the wilderness accessible without making it merely a destination. The backcountry camping system, which requires reservations for sites in popular areas, is an explicit attempt to manage the human footprint in landscapes that were not designed to absorb it. The bear safety protocols — bear spray carry, food hung or canned, camp cooksite separated from sleeping site — are not bureaucratic conservatism. They are the accumulated knowledge of a country that takes its relationship with apex predators as residents, not attractions, seriously.
Canadian urban green space culture is an extension of this relationship at city scale. The trail networks in Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa, the ravine systems of Toronto, the waterway parks of Montreal — these are not decorative amenities. They are part of how Canadian cities understand themselves, and the proportion of city residents who use them for exercise, commuting, and mental health purposes is high and consistent across seasons that would discourage outdoor activity in more equivocal climates.
The Canadian wilderness carries a weight of meaning in national identity that is not easily explained to people from countries where "national park" means a managed landscape with visitor centres and a gift shop. Canada's wilderness is genuinely vast, genuinely wild in parts that the infrastructure has not reached, and the cultural relationship with it reflects this: there is an expectation of competence, an understanding of risk, and a baseline of preparedness that shapes how Canadians approach outdoor activity in a way that distinguishes it from the recreational consumption of nature that other countries practice.
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The Morning Brief
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Allemansrätten — the right of public access — is Sweden's most interesting cultural export and its least understood. The concept is simple: anyone has the right to move through, be in, and temporarily use the Swedish landscape regardless of who owns the land, subject to responsibilities of non-damage, respect for cultivated land, and the courtesy that proximity to private homes requires. You can walk through a forest you do not own. You can swim in a lake on private land. You can pitch a tent in a field for a night or two. You can pick the berries and mushrooms you find. None of this requires permission.
This right is ancient, pre-dating the concept of private land ownership that came to dominate European legal frameworks, and it survived because Swedish society chose to maintain it. The corresponding responsibilities — leave no trace, close gates, avoid disturbing nature, don't camp too close to houses, don't pick rare species — are not enforced primarily through law but through culture, which is the more effective mechanism. Swedes do not need to be told to leave the forest as they found it. They do it because that is what you do.
The result is a relationship between population and landscape that is more integrated than almost anything comparable. Swedish children learn to forage. Swedish families plan forest weekends as naturally as other families plan city trips. The concept of friluftsliv — outdoor life — is not a wellness trend or a Scandinavian marketing concept. It is a description of how people actually live, and the data on Swedish outdoor recreation participation bears this out: the percentage of the Swedish population that engages regularly with outdoor environments is among the highest in the world, and it is sustained through winter conditions that would produce universal indoor retreat in most comparable nations.
The Swedish urban park is an extension of this landscape philosophy: designed for use, accessible from all points, treated as shared space in the deepest sense. Stockholm's Djurgården, the forest park that sits within the city itself, is used daily by commuters on foot and cycle, dog walkers, runners, and the people who simply want thirty minutes of trees before returning to the office. It is not remarkable that this space exists. It would be remarkable if it didn't.
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Canada wins on scale and drama — the mountains, the lakes, the sheer vertiginous scale of a country that could comfortably contain most of Europe and still have room — and on a parks infrastructure that is genuinely trying to make that wilderness available without destroying it. Sweden wins on philosophy: allemansrätten is one of the most civilised pieces of legislation that isn't even legislation, a social agreement so deeply embedded that it functions as law without requiring enforcement, and the friluftsliv culture it enables is among the most functional models of human-landscape relationship currently in operation. Canada will make you feel small in the best possible way. Sweden will make you feel free in the best possible way. Both feelings are worth having. Pack accordingly, and tell someone where you're going.
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<small>"First Canadian national park, first bear encounter. It was a black bear, 40 metres away, eating berries, completely uninterested in me. My bear spray was on my pack. It should have been in my hand. I read the bear safety literature properly after that, and now it is always in my hand." — Reddit r/canada</small>
<small>"Allemansrätten took me a year to actually believe. I kept expecting someone to ask me to leave the lake I was swimming in. Nobody did. It turns out Sweden just works like this. I have never felt more trusted by a country I didn't grow up in." — expat.com, Moving to Sweden</small>
<small>"Swedish chanterelle season is a revelation. The forest has them everywhere, they are free, and your Swedish colleagues will quietly compete about who found the best location. Nobody shares the location. The mushrooms are shared. The location is personal." — Internations Stockholm</small>
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The relationship between a country's people and its landscape is one of the most revealing things about that country's values — what it thinks belongs to everyone, what it thinks requires protection, what it thinks is the correct response to an afternoon with time in it. Canada's answer involves booking systems and bear spray and the sober acknowledgment that its wilderness is genuinely capable of killing you, which makes the relationship honest. Sweden's answer involves a four-hundred-year-old social agreement that the land is ours to share, which makes the relationship profound. Move to either one and you will find yourself outside more than you expected, in conditions colder than you prepared for, and substantially happier than the temperature would suggest was reasonable.
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Suki Nakamura
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.