I wonder where that comes from: outside Canada, a perception I'm aware of is a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities: clubbing seals for fur, biggest exporter of asbestos to third world countries, shamelessly, sponsor of trophy hunts on Canadian soil, and so on. Very confusing set of seemingly contradictory facts? I don't know how to think of it.

Canada is a country of contradictions found by two different very different groups of people. Canada is a compromise and only exists because of will and tolerance and compromise.

Everything makes logical sense with details. Native populations through treaties have the right to hunt. Canada wanting to manage populations sets limits. This creates a lotto system. Winners sell them to big game US hunters and the tribe gets the profit.

The asbesto mines are in the French part of Canada which makes shutting them down politically difficult.

Canada is a collectiom of different people who figured out how to get along.

Big game US hunters? Or Canadian? 93% are Canadian, 7% are not, according to data in the article below.

That said, I imagine neither country has a monopoly on such.

https://www.thestar.com/calgary/2019/07/19/a-canadian-couple...

As an aside - shooting bears,elk and deer is hardly an issue, now is it? animal lovers aside, shooting deer is hardly the same as shooting big cats/elephants.

I do not see the harm in controlling the population via hunting instead of letting the populations teether wildly between the carnivores and herbivores as one of them gain dominance in the biosphere...

Also banning something outright just drives the people who want to do it underground where they can't be controlled.

Politeness and bloodlust often go hand in hand, cf the Brits and the Japanese

That's unfair.

Everyone is polite, and "bloodthirsty" at different times.

The Swiss, the French, the Kenyans, the Mauritians, the Indonesians, the Chileans, literally everyone on earth. Every nation and every human is faced with that dichotomous state of being.

British are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Americans. Japanese are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Canadians or Koreans. What you allude to is a very human failure, and is present in every society on earth.

Why the downvotes? This seems like a reasonable question.

Canadians will apologize to inanimate objects they bump into.

That’s not polite. That’s an internalized response to avoid interacting with others.

It's a response to not provoking an assault in my experience. Most Commonwealth countries are like this in the anecdotes I've witnessed, where brawling is common and laws lax on manslaughter. If you don't say anything you will find yourself getting beat up in broad daylight whereas other countries you can be as rude as you want without physical repercussions. Try walking into some guy in Winnipeg and brush his response off it's a provocation you want to fight where in other cultures this would be absurd.

Spot on

> Is the ‘polite Canadian’ (“Sorry!”) trope

Canadians are polite. But they're not apologetic. Your comment misses the mark.

> a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities

Add up all the clubbed seals and exported asbestos, and a single ICE automobile is worse.

It seems like anybody can have an extreme opinion with no supporting logic.

I think the "sorry" thing comes from the the fact that many Canadians pronounce the first vowel of "sorry" differently from the rest of North America. So it becomes a default "quaint Canadianism" joke.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.