The Myth of the Everyday Canadian

How journalism and public opinion surveys are falling short in telling our whole story

We’ve all been reading or hearing about this for quite some time. Maybe we even imagine it captures who we ourselves believe to be.

• “The difficult economic reality is impacting everyday Canadians. We hear it from our customers every day,” says Reitman’s CEO Andrea Limbardi. (Canadian Press, June 16, 2026)

• “The focus on industry and competitiveness means the government has failed to connect everyday Canadians with climate action” says Rachel Doran from Clean Energy Canada. (CBC News, November 4, 2025)

• Host Caryn Ceolin speaks to NDP Leader Avi Lewis to discuss how the Carney government could crunch the numbers to allow for publicly-funded grocers, and why a ban on algorithmic-based pricing will help everyday Canadians. (CityNews Toronto, April 22, 2026)

The well-worn label of “everyday Canadian” or “average citizen” echoes from the pronouncements of our elected officials, policy experts and journalists who tell us about who we all are, what we happen to believe, or how we spend our time on this pursuit or that. This concept is baked into our media stories and political narratives, and often how we have come to implicitly define and understand our society. And it gets expressed in more subtle ways in the public opinion polls that tell us who we are, by zeroing in on where the majority opinion can be found.

How is it that the public – an entire population – can be summed into a single typical type of person or group, an exemplar that is intended to represent everyone? Upon scrutiny it doesn’t hold up, and yet has come to be an unquestioned social fact.

The idea of the average or everyday citizen accompanied the emergence of mass public opinion in the 19th century, the notion that the population of a nation or subnational group possessed some form of collective sentiment directed toward political ideas or movements. The concept in essence transformed the notion of one person’s character to that of a collection of people, as a single thing. It has become a persistent metaphor, in large part because of the power of a single story that can help make sense of our world and how it is changing. A nation becomes a nation when it speaks with one voice. This makes it a potent political tool to define the electorate in a way that is vague enough to sound credible, and allow citizens to identify as part of it. It sounds democratic and normative, as if everyone and anyone might be – or should be – that everyday citizen.

But, of course, there is no everyday Canadian. Upon inspection it is conceptually meaningless. How can any one individual, or type of individual, encompass a population, whether in its demographic composition (e.g., age, region, ethnicity) or in its opinions? In numerical terms, someone might credibly represent a mid-point, average or part of a majority on some dimension such as household income (as measured in dollars) or life satisfaction (on a scale from “1” to “10”). But all too often these numerical concepts get conflated into the “everyday” citizen, and in doing so define what is or should be the normative standard against which everyone may be judged. This idea is picked up and amplified in the media and seeps into the broader public discourse.

Apart from being an inaccurate descriptor, pronouncements of the everyday citizen are socially divisive because they convey the idea of what is normatively desirable and expected of everyone. This then implicitly or explicitly excludes those who may not fit this particular version of “everyday”, a way of communicating who doesn’t fit. This is especially pernicious when the everyday Canadian is either intended or interpreted to stand for those who are middle class, white and native-born.

Canada’s diverse society is well understood by those who conduct proprietary public opinion and market research that serves consumer product marketing and political parties. This type of research focuses squarely on dissecting relevant target populations into any number of meaningful groups to identify who best to reach to market products, services and political candidates.

But most surveys conducted for public consumption are designed to report on the majority view, and thereby promote the myth of the everyday Canadian. Media headlines trumpet that Canadians believe X or Y, regardless of whether this is based on the view of 85 percent or 53 percent of those surveyed, as if announcing a sports score that determines the winner. This approach borrows from political polling aimed at predicting election outcomes based on small margin victories and majority-minority outcomes.

But outside of political polling, this approach does not contribute to understanding and representing Canadian opinions, values and experiences across their broader spectrum. A majority view may be what matters in deciding the outcome of an election, but not when it is about perspectives on social policy or personal experiences with discrimination in the workplace. All too often public opinion surveys convey a story that covers only a portion of society, and ignores other distinct voices that also deserve to be heard.

Every media headline announcing a polling result that exceeds 50 percent reinforces the distorted idea that any majority passes an essential threshold signalling an implicit consensus of public sentiment. Canadians who make up the larger group, by definition, confer legitimacy by their numbers; anyone else falls into the losing category, and by extension are out of step with the “everyday” crowd.

The limitation is not with the methodology of public opinion research itself, which is well-suited to representing and articulating a diverse range of opinions and experiences. What is missing is the intention and priority on using research models that better represent the country’s population, and a commitment to the resources required to make this happen.

It is with this goal in mind that Michael Adams created the non-profit Environics Institute for Survey Research in 2006, to survey people and groups not often heard from in public surveys. This included the first survey research in Canada to amplify the voices and experiences of poorly represented and often marginalized groups such as the country’s Muslim community, urban Indigenous Peoples, and the Black community in the Greater Toronto Area. Over time, the Institute’s focus evolved to addressing topics relevant to all Canadians while expanding the scope of sampling to represent a broader range of relevant subgroups that go beyond the typical typology of region and standard demographics. This work now includes ongoing national research programs employing expansive survey samples:

• On race relations that effectively capture the attitudes and experiences of Canadians across the country’s major ethnic and racial communities;

• On the country’s federal system and issues of regional importance, incorporating the views of residents in each of the 13 provinces and territories; and

• On employment and skills training, with representation across the country’s diverse labour force by such characteristics as education, occupation, age, and generation in Canada.

This research places an emphasis on extending both the sampling coverage to better represent the population and the interpretation of results across a broader range of perspectives than would be evident from identifying only majority views. Survey research conducted in this way expands our understanding of who we are as a country and a people.

On race relations, for example, the data documents clearly how discrimination and prejudice is experienced in different ways depending on one’s particular ethnic-racial background, age, gender and other characteristics, and how this is changing or not over time. At the same time, the research also reveals where there is a broader consensus among Canadians, as in the enduring belief that people from different racial groups in this country generally get along; this view is equally strong across ethnic-racial groups including those most apt to themselves experience racism. Sometimes the results show us something we might not expect: In looking toward the future, it is racialized Canadians who express the most optimism about seeing progress toward racial equality in their lifetime.

As a society we need something to share in common – whether as a nation or a neighbourhood – in order to live together, to be governed, and to address collective problems. At the same time, we should resist the instinct to uncritically accept a portrayal of the majority, average or everyday person as the norm that defines us all. This is by no means an issue only in this country, as many nations have prevailing cultural identities that define citizenship and belonging. Canada’s unique history of pluralism and accommodation gives us the opportunity to embrace both what we share and how we are different. The task of social research is to provide the evidence and insight to appreciate this balance.

Keith Neuman was the founding Executive Director of the Environics Institute, and now serves in the capacity as a Fellow of the organization.