Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
I'm surprised Atlantic Canada being perceived as north seems to be so common.
Only one I've heard about Vancouver is surprise that it's not on Vancouver Island, which, fair enough.
Within Vancouver though, there seem to be lots of misconceptions about the rest of Canada. One is the assumption that southern Prairie cities (i.e. not Edmonton) are further north than they really are. Since coming to Winnipeg, lots of my friends have commented on me being all the way "up there," when really it's south of Whistler. People also underestimate how far south Eastern Canada is.
As far as people's confusion with populations and things like that, I've learned to let it go. The average person doesn't give a flying fuck what the population of different cities is, and when you don't have something as a reference point, it's easy to not even have a general understanding of these things, leading to interview answers including the population of Canada as 50,000. Aside from feeling better about yourself on internet forums, the populations of different cities really don't matter to most people, so you can't blame them for not knowing anything about them. Think about how much the average person struggles with knowing how our elections work. We have bigger fish to fry.
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^ These are common misconceptions I've encountered as well, also it's common to find people in Vancouver who don't know anything about Atlantic Canada, or even that it exists at all. I encountered someone last week who didn't know that Newfoundland is an island. I've often had people tell me that they'd been to Newfoundland, only to learn that they were actually in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.
However, people do actually care about populations more than you might think. It is almost an obsession if you live in, or are involved in any way, in a small town, that you are watching your population decline, inevitably towards zero.