Memo to Americans: Canadians exist, Bigfoot doesn’t

A shocking and horrible poll published by Angus Reid declares, “Americans more likely to believe in Bigfoot than Canadians”.

I know you folks might never see us very often — we haven’t had a war with you in a very long time, and I can understand why you might be inclined to forget about us given our cultural contributions have included Celine Dion and Justin Bieber. But I’m telling you, we exist. We don’t even have flip-top heads, like your Sunday night educational programming “South Park” might lead you to believe. Hockey was invented here. We make good beer.

Wait, what? That’s not what the survey says? Hang on. Knew I shoulda read it before starting this post. *grumble grumble*

Okay. So. Instead of saying that Americans don’t believe Canadians exist, it’s actually saying that Canadians are less likely than Americans to believe in Bigfoot. this is another case of a ridiculously bad title on a post that actually makes a decent case, with good evidence.

In the online survey of representative national samples, three-in-ten Americans (29%) and one-in-five Canadians (21%) think Bigfoot is “definitely” or “probably” real.

The Bigfoot phenomenon is definitely bigger in the United States, where 77 per cent of respondents claim to have heard “a great deal” or a “moderate amount” about Bigfoot (compared to 61% of Canadians).

In Canada, Albertans (29%) are more likely to think that Bigfoot is real than Quebecers (19%), British Columbians (18%) and Ontarians (17%). In the United States, respondents in the West (32%) are more likely to believe that Bigfoot is real.

The full pdf is worth a read. This is a hell of an uphill climb we have, telling people that they believe in ridiculous bullshit.

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Memo to Americans: Canadians exist, Bigfoot doesn’t
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27 thoughts on “Memo to Americans: Canadians exist, Bigfoot doesn’t

  1. 1

    Your opening statements weren’t far off. I met an American who thought Canada was a territory of the US like Peurto Rico and US Virgin Islands. I had to show him my passport with the statement about Her Majesty from the inside front cover enforce he would accept I wasn’t an American citizen.

  2. 2

    But … but, they have to be American. Their accent sounds just like American. And they speak English (except for those frenchies). They don’t sound foreign at all!

  3. 3

    You just need to follow the stories about how the pipeline the President vetoed would help diminish the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil to notice this assumption.

  4. 4

    I saw that article and thought what you first thought. It wouldn’t have surprised me either

    My American friend asked me to pop up and meet her when she visited Vancouver since she would be in Canada. I live in Ontario…

  5. 5

    My American friend asked me to pop up and meet her when she visited Vancouver since she would be in Canada. I live in Ontario…

    I think we can rest this on “Canada is really big” more than “Americans are stupid.” An English friend of mine suggested a day trip to Vancouver during a visit to Nova Scotia. That’s entirely understandable for a person used to driving for a few hours and ending up in an entirely different country.

    It is a bit worse for Americans, though, isn’t it? Would she have been willing to “pop up” and visit you in Seattle from her home in Miami (for example?)

  6. 6

    given our cultural contributions have included Celine Dion and Justin Bieber.

    Hey, how about Glenn Ford, Lorne Greene, William Shatner, Eugene Levy, John Candy, and Walter Pidgeon?

    They ain’t chopped liver.

  7. 8

    Wait, Keifer Sutherland is Canadian? I guess I just tend to assume that talentless right-wing drunkards come from down here in the Home of the Brave. Also, am I the only one who finds it odd that he’s named after a yogurt?

  8. 10

    I met an American who thought Canada was a territory of the US like Peurto Rico and US Virgin Islands.

    That’s balanced by the Americans who think New Mexico is not a part of the US. Including, it seems, some of those protecting the US border in the north against illegal immigrants.

    Now I’m wondering how many people over here believe in the joke about Mallorca being the 17th German state (on account of the number of German tourists) …

  9. 12

    I don’t know anything about Keifer Sutherland’s politics but not only is he Canadian, he is the grandson of Tommy Douglas – the father of Canadian socialism in general and public healthcare in particular.

    Keifer may be right-wing in the States but up here he marches for healthcare.

  10. 13

    “My American friend asked me to pop up and meet her when she visited Vancouver since she would be in Canada. I live in Ontario…”

    It’s not much better here. I had a friend who couldn’t understand why I didn’t drop in on my son who lives in Sacramento while I was at a weekend conference in Los Angeles (after all, I was in California, he was in California….). This from someone who lives in Nebraska, where it’s at least an 8 hour drive from one corner to the other, so they should understand that living in the same state doesn’t make you close.

    I teach a geography class to college freshmen; it’s painful.

  11. 15

    #2 katkinkate: If you think that Canadian and USian accents sound alike, then either you are being ironic or you live west of–about Manitoba. The accent sounds nice to US ears, but it has several distinguishing features (not just the “oot-and-aboot”) vis-a-vis “general American” that most USians who live in states contiguous to central and eastern Canada can easily spot. Wikipedia has details.

    BTW, it was very diplomatic of our host not to point out that while the Canadians haven’t had a war with us in a long time, they occupied part of Michigan–after that 1812 unpleasantness–until 1820.

  12. 17

    iknklast wrote:

    I had a friend who couldn’t understand why I didn’t drop in on my son who lives in Sacramento while I was at a weekend conference in Los Angeles (after all, I was in California, he was in California….). This from someone who lives in Nebraska, where it’s at least an 8 hour drive from one corner to the other, so they should understand that living in the same state doesn’t make you close.

    OTOH, if you’re driving from Los Angeles to Sacramento you’re driving from the largest city in California to the sixth-largest city in California. If you were in Nebraska, driving from the largest city in the state (Omaha) to the sixth-largest city in the state (Fremont) would only take about 40 minutes. 🙂

  13. 18

    This showed up some time last night just long enough for me to start writing up a reply to it and then it went away.

    So a short recap:
    Sarcasm, joking assholery, condescension of photography skills of cryptozoologists, pictographic evidence of a different mythological creature (notably clear and sharp), faux-sincere insistence of it’s existence.

    Know what? I’ll go ahead and link again to the images of not one, but two (!!!) majestic jackalopes.

  14. 19

    You’re just going to have to a big advertising blitz so that Americans know Canadians really exist, in a separate country, up north. Although I bet Fox News wo’n’t cooperate, and all the people who think Honolulu is in Kenya will either disbelieve it totally or want to annex it once and for all.

  15. F
    21

    katkinkate

    But … but, they have to be American. […]

    I’ve always had the crazy notion that anyone living on a continent called “America” would be an “American”. I find it odd that people in the States should co-opt the term just because the national name didn’t make for easy adjectification.

  16. 26

    This, by the way, is why I think that even in the absence of religion we shouldn’t expect to be able to push the evolution denialist numbers lower than about 20% or so. It’s not like people believe in Bigfoot because of Jesus! People just believe a whole lot of stupid shit. Religion makes it worse, of course (that’s why our Creationist numbers are around 40-45% instead of a more respectable 20-25%) and religion is particularly nasty in that it tends to make people dig in against social progress (whereas less dogma-oriented dumbshit beliefs tend to evolve along with the cultural zeitgeist very rapidly). But people can be plenty silly without Jeebus’ help, too.

  17. 27

    Of course Canada exists. After Disney’s EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) project failed to attract a whole town’s worth of permanent residents, the Imagineering crew retooled the concept, and came up with EPCOT II: the Experimental Prototype Country Of Tomorrow. Working through an extensive network of middlemen and realtors, Disney bought all the non-USA land north of the 54-40th parallel, and they’ve reworked all the pre-existing structures to support the overarching narrative of a land dedicated to communitarian lifestyle. There are still a few unsolved issues they have to address, however, and until they’ve worked all the bugs out, EPCOT II will continue to be known by its former name — Canada.

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