What are the key geographic features of Manitoba?

Manitoba is the easternmost of Canada's three prairie provinces, covering 647,797 square kilometres with a population of about 1.45 million. The province extends from the United States border at the 49th parallel north to Hudson Bay (which gives Manitoba a 645-kilometre saltwater coastline at the only Canadian deep-water Arctic port at Churchill). Manitoba joined Canadian Confederation on July 15, 1870 as the fifth province, formed from the Red River Settlement and the surrounding territory of the Hudson's Bay Company.

The province has three distinct geographic regions. Southern Manitoba (below about 53 degrees north) is part of the Interior Plains, with flat to gently rolling prairie that supports wheat, canola, soybeans, and oilseeds farming and large beef and pork operations. Central and northern Manitoba is Canadian Shield, with boreal forest, countless lakes (about 100,000 of them), and rocky outcrops. Far northern Manitoba transitions to subarctic taiga and tundra near Hudson Bay, with permafrost and treeless polar landscape.

Lake Winnipeg, which dominates the centre of the province, is the eleventh-largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area at 24,514 square kilometres. The lake drains the Red, Assiniboine, Saskatchewan, and Winnipeg Rivers and is itself drained to Hudson Bay by the Nelson River. Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis are two large additional southern lakes. The Winnipeg River, fed by Lake of the Woods on the Ontario-Manitoba border, supports hydroelectric stations at Pointe du Bois, Slave Falls, Seven Sisters, and Pine Falls, while Manitoba Hydro's Nelson River system in northern Manitoba (Limestone, Long Spruce, Kettle, Wuskwatim, and Keeyask generating stations) provides the bulk of the province's electricity.

Manitoba has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents of any Canadian province at about 18 per cent of the population. The Treaty 1 (1871), Treaty 2 (1871), Treaty 3 (1873), Treaty 4 (1874), and Treaty 5 (1875 and 1908) cover most of the province. The Manitoba Metis Federation represents about 130,000 Metis citizens and signed a self-government agreement with the federal government in 2021. The Indigenous and Northern Manitoba region is governed in part through the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (representing 26 First Nations) and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. Churchill on Hudson Bay is famous as the polar bear capital of the world, with about 1,000 polar bears moving through each autumn during the Western Hudson Bay sea-ice formation.