How much do you know about the territories? Put your Northern knowledge to the test, and check out our survey's shocking results.
Take our North Poll quiz, an edited version of the national survey we commissioned, to test how much you know (or don't know) about the North. And for the results and analysis of the North Poll, conducted by pollster DataPath Systems, pick up the May 2011 issue of Up Here, on newsstands across the country.
When comedian Rick Mercer got President George Bush to answer questions about Canadian Prime Minister Jean Poutine, Canadians laughed. When he had the Arkansas governor congratulate us on finally building a dome over our "National Igloo," we roared. Then, when Mercer found American professors who would sign petitions for Canadians to stop the practice of abandoning our elderly on ice floes, and to ban the Saskatchewan seal hunt and the Toronto polar bear hunt, we ate it up. We simply couldn't get enough.
His show Talking to Americans was the highest-rated TV special in Canadian history, one show attracting a record 2.7 million viewers. Why did we love it so? Because it made Americans look stupid and us, the underdogs, look smart and funny.
But what happens when you ask Canadians what they know about their country and they screw up in equally absurd and embarrassing ways? Laughter, yes, but also shame and guilt. Mercer's Americans can be forgiven. Canadians aren't so lucky. Canada prides itself on being a Northern nation. "Oh Canada," goes our national anthem, "the true North strong and free." But 80 per cent of Canadians live within 200 kilometres of the U.S. border. To the average Canuck, the Far North is a vast white-out, a wilderness of complete obscurity, the last frontier of the imagination. It's a place that gives our country its reputation as being bitterly cold, full of igloos and roaming with polar bears. What it's not, say Canadians participating in the North Poll, is a place we know very much about.
The North Poll is made up of 36 multiple-choice questions about culture, economy and geography, and 10 more to collect opinions and demographics. Up Here worked with DataPath Systems out of Marsh Lake, Yukon -- a small-town Northern pollster, yes, but with big-city credentials. It's run by a former vice-president of the Angus Reid Group in Calgary, Donna Larsen, who's got decades of polling experience. They surveyed 303 Canadians in February 2011, and results were demographically balanced. (Margin of error is +/- 5.6% at 95% confidence levels.)
To be fair, even Up Here editors struggled with some questions (namely, the official languages one). Is it really a crime to be ignorant about life in the North? Perhaps it's willful -- maybe the Canadian psyche needs the North to be a vast unknown.
Nah. Smarten up.
