Canada Emoji

🇨🇦 the Canadian flag emoji shows the red-white-red flag with its eleven-point maple leaf, first raised on 15 February 1965, the date now marked as National Flag of Canada Day. In Unicode it is not a picture but two letters: the regional indicator symbols 🇨 and 🇦, for CA, the country's ISO code. Phones and Macs draw the pair as a flag. Windows does not ship flag pictures, so on a PC you see the letters CA instead, while the person who receives your message on a phone still sees 🇨🇦. In Discord the shortcode is :flag_ca:.

🍁 Maple leaf is the second Canada emoji and often the first one people reach for: it is the leaf from the flag, so it reads as Canada all year, not only in autumn. Hockey fans also use it for the Toronto Maple Leafs. 🦫 Beaver has been an official symbol of Canada since 1975 and is on the five-cent coin; the emoji only arrived in 2020.

⚜️ Fleur-de-lis stands for Quebec. Its flag, the Fleurdelisé adopted in 1948, has four white fleurs-de-lis on blue, and there is no Quebec flag emoji, so ⚜️ next to 🇨🇦 is how people mark it. 👑 Crown belongs here because Canada is a constitutional monarchy: King Charles III is King of Canada, and Victoria Day in May is a holiday named after a queen.

Canadian symbols and meanings: wildlife and the great outdoors

🫎 Moose and 🪿 goose were both added in 2022, and the goose is the natural stand-in for the Canada goose. 🐻‍❄️ Polar bear recalls Churchill, Manitoba, and the two-dollar toonie, which carries a polar bear. The one-dollar coin is the loonie because it shows a common loon; Unicode has no loon, so 🦆 stands in. 🦉 fits as the snowy owl, Quebec's official bird, 🦬 is the bison of the Prairies and 🦝 is the raccoon every Torontonian has fought over a green bin.

On the coasts, 🐋 🫍 are the whales and orcas of British Columbia and the St. Lawrence, 🐟 is Pacific salmon and 🦞 is lobster from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. 🫈 Hairy creature is the Sasquatch of British Columbia; the name comes from sásq'ets in Halq'eméylem, a Coast Salish language.

For the land itself, 🏔️ 🌄 🏞️ are the Rockies, Banff and Jasper, 🌲 🛶 🏕️ 🎣 a weekend at the cottage or up north, and 🌌 the closest emoji to the northern lights, since there is no aurora emoji. Winter has its own row: ❄️ 🥶 🧊 🌡️, plus ° for the forecast. Canada reports weather in Celsius, and at −40° the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales agree, which is why −40 is the number Canadians quote.

Hockey and other Canadian sports emoji

Since 1994 Canada has two national sports by law: 🏒 ice hockey in winter and 🥍 lacrosse in summer. Hockey chats run on 🏒🥅 for a goal and 🏆 for the Stanley Cup, the trophy Lord Stanley, then Governor General, donated in 1892. 🥌 Curling stone covers the other great winter game, and ⛸️ 🎿 ⛷️ 🏂 the rinks and ski hills; Canada hosted the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1988 and Vancouver in 2010.

🏈 means the CFL and the Grey Cup as often as the NFL: Canadian football plays with three downs and twelve players a side. ⚾ is the Toronto Blue Jays, World Series champions in 1992 and 1993, and 🏀 the Raptors, who won the NBA title in 2019. Basketball itself was invented by a Canadian, James Naismith. ⚽ got a lift when Toronto and Vancouver hosted matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, shared with the United States and Mexico.

Canadian food emoji: poutine, maple syrup and a double-double

Unicode has no poutine, so Canadians build it: 🍟🧀, fries and cheese curds, with gravy left to the imagination. Maple syrup gets the same treatment: 🥞🍯 or 🍯🍁, since there is no syrup emoji. Most of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec, tapped at sugar shacks every spring.

☕🍩 is a Tim Hortons run: a double-double (two cream, two sugar) and a box of Timbits. 🥓 is peameal or back bacon, what Americans call Canadian bacon, and 🥯 the Montreal bagel, boiled in honey water and baked in a wood-fired oven. 🥧 covers butter tarts and the Quebec meat pie tourtière, 🫐 the wild blueberries of Quebec and the Maritimes.

To drink: 🍺 beer, 🥃 Canadian rye whisky and 🍷 for icewine, the sweet wine Ontario's Niagara Peninsula is known for. The Caesar, made with clam-tomato juice and vodka, was invented in Calgary in 1969 and has no emoji of its own.

Canada Day emoji and other Canadian holidays

Canada Day on 1 July marks Confederation in 1867, and the classic Canada Day emoji combo is 🇨🇦🎆🎉: flag, fireworks, party. 🍁 and ❤️ on either side make it a happy Canada Day wish. In Quebec, 24 June is the Fête nationale (Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day), and ⚜️ is the emoji for it.

Canadian Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday of October, so 🦃🍂🍁 shows up six weeks before the American one. On Remembrance Day, 11 November, people wear a red poppy; there is no poppy emoji, so messages use 🎖️ or 🕊️ with the words "Lest we forget".

Two more icons: 👮🐎 is the Mounties, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in red serge, famous for the Musical Ride, and 🤠🐎 is the Calgary Stampede every July. 🏙️ stands in for the Toronto skyline and 🚂 for the railway that tied the country together coast to coast.

How to type Canadian French letters and the Canadian dollar

English and French are both official languages of Canada; in the 2021 census about three in four Canadians reported English and about one in five French as their first official language spoken. Quebec works in French, and New Brunswick is officially bilingual. French adds the letters in the grid: é (Québec, Montréal, café), the grave accents è à ù, the circumflexes â ê î ô û, the diaeresis in ë ï ü ÿ (Noël, naïf), ç (français) and the ligatures œ æ (cœur). Quotations go in guillemets « like this ». The whole alphabet is on the French letters page; Canadian English needs nothing beyond A to Z, though spellings like colour and centre keep it apart from American English.

On Windows, add the Canadian French or Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard, or hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0233 é, 0232 è, 0224 à, 0231 ç, 0234 ê, 0201 É, 0156 œ, 0171 «, 0187 », 0176 °. On a Mac with a US layout, Option + E then a letter gives an acute (é), Option + ` a grave (è), Option + I a circumflex (ê), Option + U a diaeresis (ë), Option + C gives ç and Option + Q gives œ. On a phone, hold the plain letter and slide to the accent.

The Canadian dollar uses the plain $. English puts it first ($20), French after the number with a space (20 $), and when a price could be confused with US dollars people write C$ or CAD. ¢ is still used for prices, though the penny stopped being handed out in 2013 and cash totals are rounded to five cents. Nunavut also writes Inuktitut, an official language there, in Canadian Aboriginal syllabics: ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ.