Today, I'm gonna be talking about some stereotypes about Canada and its residents, and the truth about some of them.
Firstly- Canadian accents are a very real thing. They don't sound quite like the ones you hear on TV- the average person could pass as being American, honestly- but there are a handful of people I know with a pretty unique accent (and yes, some people say "eh" periodically, but not at the end of every sentence). There's also an accent unique to the East coast, colloquially known as a Newfie accent- I've never been East of Alberta, so I'm no expert, but from what I've heard it sounds vaguely like Australian with a bit of Scottish.
Canada is also weird in terms of units. We're very quick to mock Americans for using imperial measurements (the same way we mock them for misspelling words like "doughnut" or "colour"), but at the same time, most people I know are just as comfortable with some imperial units as they are metric. Personally, I can use inches, feet and pounds effortlessly (and convert them to metric pretty well). On the other hand, Fahrenheit is basically nonsense to me, miles just seem like overly long kilometres, and more complicated units are beyond me. The strange thing is, I know my height and weight in imperial units, but couldn't tell you the metric without doing a conversion first.
There's a stereotype that Canadians are very polite. I think there is some truth to this, but I have a theory as to why that is. Essentially, the population density here is very low. The majority of the population lives within a few hundred kilometres of the Southern border- big cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary are all pretty far South. My theory is that people raised in smaller towns will talk more to people they pass on the street, whereas people in larger cities will often pass by one another without making eye contact. Since so much of Canada is sparsely populated, there are a good chunk of people who are adapted to smiling and greeting people they pass, and when traveling abroad, people notice this. I'm not saying Canadians are inherently nicer, of course, but I do find it reasonable to believe that we're trained to appear that way.
As for the cold weather, living in igloos, riding polar bears, etc.- maybe in the North, but definitely not here. Okay, maybe not the polar bear riding, but the cold weather definitely. The West coast can have weather very much like Great Britain- in some places, the weather only varies by 20ish degrees Celsius throughout the year, with lots of rain and little snow or excessive sun. In the interior, it varies a lot more- in the prairies, it can get around 30 in the summer, and around -20 in the winter. There are places in Canada far enough North that the length of days and nights are stretched out considerably (possibly for multiple weeks/months, I'm not certain).
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this post! If you've got any other stereotypes you'd like addressed, feel free to leave them below, and maybe I can do another post like this.
