I've done a lot of work with the Canadian offices of international companies.  Every so often, someone from headquarters would fly into town and the agency would be asked to present a bit of orientation info on Canada.  One time, the direction I was given was to "explain Canada" and to do it using only one powerpoint slide, as the executive I was to present to had an extremely short attention span.

As you can imagine, this was no easy task.  But the approach I finally settled on was to not simply explain what Canada is, but to explain why Canada is the way it is. 

What resulted was possibly one of the most mind-numbingly complicated charts I've ever made.  But I've since found that it's got just the right mix of confusion, complexity, vagueness and breadth to explain just about any point I'm trying to make about Canada.  And if you speak really fast when you present it and sound like you mean it, people will nod their heads in agreement. It's not that they really understand what you're talking about (though to be honest, the chart does make sense when it's explained properly), it's more that they're afraid to question you because the complexity of the chart makes you look like you might actually know what you're talking about.

The way the chart works is to simply substitute whatever phenomenon about the Canadian market you're trying to explain into the bottom box where it says "> small car segment" in the example below.  Everything else can stay the same.  Want to explain why Toronto is the Facebook capital of the world?  No problem -- just type that in the bottom box and explain that once the BNA Act was signed, it was only a matter of time until hundreds of thousands of Torontonians were throwing sheep at each other.



I can explain exactly how the chart works, but it will cost you a beer.  Three beers if you want it all to suddenly make sense.