Canadians show their love for toothy rodents, ketchup chips & the national anthem

TORONTO – June 26, 2017 – With Canada 150 on everyone’s mind, enthusiasm for all things Canadian shone through in a new Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of Historica Canada. Canadians overwhelming refused to poke fun at some of our national symbols, with only 15% agreeing that it’s embarrassing a toothy rodent like the beaver is a national symbol. Only two in ten (18%) believe the Canada goose is a revolting bird and are ashamed it shares our country’s name. They’d probably apologize for saying so – more than half of Canadians (56%) admit they say sorry too much.

On the food front, a majority of Canadians (63%) proclaimed ketchup chips are delicious while nearly three quarters (72%) say Canadian beer is the world’s best. Only two in ten (22%) counted Hawaiian pizza among the Canadian inventions they most appreciate – it was topped by the electric oven (44%), IMAX (32%) and the snowmobile (25%).

When it comes to sharing a table, 8% say the Canadian they’d most like to have a meal with is Justin Trudeau. Rounding out the top five choices were Celine Dion (5%), Sir John A. Macdonald (4%) Pierre Elliott Trudeau (4%), and Wayne Gretzky (3%).

“While Canadians band together behind national symbols, this poll also shows a wide variety of perspectives and interests,” said Anthony Wilson-Smith, President and CEO of Historica Canada. “Regardless of your preferred dinner guest, we hope everyone across the country has a happy Canada Day, perhaps with some ketchup chips.”

The online survey of more than 1,000 respondents also found that the most common word Canadians would use to describe Canada is “freedom” (25%) followed closely by “home” (20%). We’re also a traditional bunch – more than half (54%) wrote that O Canada is their must play song on Canada Day.

Other findings include:

• Eight in ten Canadians (81%) are planning to celebrate Canada Day, up ten points from 2015.
• A third of Canadians (34%) say they loathe hearing about or watching hockey. That’s more common among Canadians aged 18-34 (40%) than Canadians aged 55+ (25%).
• Québec is most likely to invite Céline Dion to dinner (10%) while 8% of Saskatchewan and Manitoba say they’d like to eat with Shania Twain.
• One in ten (11%) British Columbians would use the word “Beautiful” to describe Canada, compared to just 3% of Canadians overall.

Historica Canada is the country’s largest organization dedicated to enhancing awareness of Canadian history and citizenship.

These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between June 7 and June 8, 2017, on behalf of Historica Canada. For this survey, a sample of 1,003 Canadians aged 18+ from Ipsos' online panel was interviewed online. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics to ensure that the sample's composition reflects that of the adult population according to Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ±3.4 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.