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Notes -
For most of history, Canadians could just move to the US. There were no immigration restrictions. And even today, it's one of the easier countries to move to the US from. It also used to be easier and more attractive to move to the US than to move to Canada. So most Canadians are descended from people who either chose to move to Canada over the US or chose to stay in Canada and not move to the US, generation after generation, despite the worse weather and the worse economy.
It also might be worth noting that tens of thousands of loyalists from the 13 colonies moved to Canada during the American Revolutionary War, and this was at a time when the population of what is now Canada was only about 150,000 or so. So a non-trivial fraction of Canada's founding stock were people who fled what ended up becoming the United States for political reasons, sometimes because of well-justified fears of violent repression from the revolutionaries.
Yes, that's part of what I was referring to. In fact, most of the population was French when the loyalists came. The loyalists basically were the founding stock of English Canada, while the French had their own reasons for not joining the US in their rebellion.
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