“Interestingly, the real outliers — the one group whose sense of what defines Canada diverged most from that of the general public — were the 300 or so members of the Order of Canada who took part in our survey.
“The recipients of Canada’s highest civil honour ranked the discovery of insulin as the country’s defining feature, an achievement that ranked 15th overall on the general public list. Their #2 choice was the founding of the city of Quebec [????], an event that barely makes the general public’s top 20.
“To put it mildly, there is a cultural chasm between what the country’s elites think defines Canada vs. the general population and newcomers.
(…)
“The other sacred cow gored by our definitive study is official multiculturalism.
“Contrary to the theory that Canada is a county made up of ethnic minorities who define themselves as different and who wish to remain so, newcomers on average ranked official multiculturalism as Canada’s 19th defining attribute, only three places ahead of the 16th-place status assigned to it by the general population, and well behind such all-Canadian symbols as Wayne Gretzky, Niagara Falls and the Mounties.”
