Reader’s Digest ranked 15 of our biggest cities on their consideration for strangers. You may be surprised by the results.

By Liz Crompton

A Victoria IT manager in his 20s, walking quickly while holding a large coffee and checking messages on his BlackBerry, is late for an eye appointment but holds the door for the woman following behind him.

A trio of middle-aged conference participants in Regina are on a break in the warm spring sunshine when a folder of papers suddenly slips from the grasp of a man walking by, scattering papers in front of them. They watch him gather them up, lifting fingers only to suck on their cigarettes.

A university student with dreadlocks, hair beads and a nose ring gives a sunny smile and thanks a middle-aged man who buys a small bottle of shaving lotion at the Charlottetown store where she works.

The woman heading for the doors, the butterfingered man and the P.E.I. customer weren’t there by chance. They were Reader’s Digest researchers taking part in a test to see how helpful and polite people in our biggest cities are. It was an all-Canada version of the worldwide courtesy test that the Digest undertook last year, the results of which appeared in the July 2006 issue.

For our test, we visited 15 cities, from Vancouver to St. John’s, to find out if the rumours are true: that courtesy is a thing of the past. Are all sales clerks surly, all young people disrespectful?

Apparently not in Moncton, N.B., which won our test—and shone. Calgarians and Vancouverites glowed with Western hospitality, tying for second. Montreal, which ranked 21st out of 36 cities in RD’s worldwide test, redeemed itself, coming in as fifth-most courteous. But Toronto, third in the global test, skulked near the bottom this time. And Ottawa, our nation’s face to the world, was dead last.

What exactly is courtesy, anyway? “It’s the common respect we have for one another,” says Karen Mallett, cofounder of The Civility Group, a Winnipeg-based firm that trains business professionals, educational leaders and others in the art of civility. “It means you think of other people first, that you let people know when you’re thankful, that you make sure other people feel comfortable in your presence.”

Our Three Tests

We sent pairs of undercover reporters—one woman and one man—to assess the behaviour of the citizens of our larger cities. In each place we:
• walked into public buildings behind people to see if they would hold the door open for us;
• bought small items from stores and recorded whether the salesclerks said thank you;
• dropped a folder full of papers in busy locations to see if anyone would help pick them up.

We awarded one point for each positive outcome and nothing for a negative one, giving each city a maximum score of 30. We did not attempt a scientific survey; it was simply a real-life test of common courtesy.

Okay, time to cut to the chase—the best and the worst:

The Most Polite

In Moncton—which topped the charts with 80 percent—when our female researcher followed Joel Gallant through a door into the Champlain Place mall, the 28-year-old mortgage specialist didn’t hesitate to hold it open for her. “This is a city that’s growing,” said Gallant, who was with his wife, their infant and his sister. “But in Moncton you get the whole Maritime thing; there’s a lot of courtesy here.”

We found a lot of pride in being polite there. When we told Spin It record-store employee Eric Daigle, a mop- headed 25-year-old, that he’d passed our thank-you test, he pumped the air with his fist. “I don’t know why I’m polite; I just like my job, I guess. What’s the point of ruining somebody’s day?” As we left, he thanked us for making his day, and that made our day.

Calgarians and Vancouverites, meanwhile, earned a very respectable 77 percent. “It was a natural instinct,” explained a retired woman in her 60s who immediately bent down to help our tester pick up papers in Vancouver’s trendy 4th Avenue shopping area. “There was no way I wasn’t going to do anything.”

At a large flower shop in Calgary, the female salesperson went to extraordinary lengths to dress up the single bloom our female tester bought, adding pussy willow, beargrass and purple ribbons. Despite all that, she didn’t forget to thank her for the purchase. “I find the more courteous you are, the more people respond to that,” she said. “I like to make contact with people, have conversations with them.”

Middle of the Pack

In third place came Edmonton, with a score of 73 percent. Victoria, Charlottetown and St. John’s tied at fourth, with 70 percent, and Montreal was close behind with 68 percent. Halifax and Winnipeg shared sixth place, each scoring 67 percent. Regina stood alone in seventh place at 63 percent, and Quebec City, with 62 percent, was eighth.

When our tester dropped her papers near The Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, a 23-year-old woman deliver- ing a large bouquet of flowers knelt down immediately and gathered papers with her free hand. She laughed when she learned she’d been set up. “I was brought up well,” she said when asked why she’d been so quick to help. “I had a stay-at-home dad and my mom was an elementary school principal. Downtown here, people are more likely to be rude.”

Across the country, at the Candy Bouquet in St. John’s, Jackie Rice doesn’t mind impolite people. In fact, the 37-year-old mother of two says she enjoys the challenge. “If you’re courteous to someone who comes in and they’re not polite, you’re kind of helping them along,” Rice explained. “There’s a lot of kids of a certain age who come in and they have some attitude, but if you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice back.”

For a man in Quebec City, helping our tester pick up her dropped papers seemed to be about making amends.

“I helped because I made a mistake when I was young,” said 55-year-old Charles Cloutier. “One day I saw an old man fall and I didn’t react. I felt bad, and now I’ve made it my duty to help others.”

Maybe the 20-something man outside Nubody’s Fitness Centre in Halifax could learn something from Cloutier. The young man looked like he considered helping our female tester pick up her papers but then kept walking. When asked why he didn’t stop, he seemed nervous and defensive, noting that the papers had fallen quite close to her. “I didn’t want to invade her personal space: The papers were close to her body,” he said. “If they were scattered everywhere, of course, I would have stopped.”

At the Bottom

Ah, Toronto—you must have been having a bad day. Third from the top in last year’s global test, the city ranked third from the bottom in Canada, at 60 percent. A 36-year-old project manager holding a lunch bag and a coffee didn’t hold the door open for our female researcher who followed him out of a coffee shop in the financial district. But he was amiable enough to take out his earbuds and talk when our team gently challenged him. “I had my hands full,” he said. “And in the morning I’m getting into work mode, thinking about the day ahead. I like to think I’m generally helpful.”

Saskatoon came in tenth, with 57 percent. In the Midtown Plaza, our male tester dropped his papers just as a group of young people walked by—and kept on walking. We overheard one girl say to her friend, seemingly in response to a comment, “You could have helped.” But at the gift basket and flower store Creative Compliments, owner Ellie Richardson served our tester with a smile and a big thank you. “I’ve been in business nearly 20 years, and you can never be complacent,” Richardson, 56, said. “Being polite to people is important because it makes you feel good.” And, as the researchers can attest, profitable—they ended up buying more than planned because they felt good there.

Ottawa earned the dubious distinction of being the least polite city we tested in Canada. Its residents failed as many tests as they passed—50 percent. The researchers who visited felt the city had a rude, impersonal feeling.

“I didn’t help because I thought, Would he help me?” said an older, well-dressed woman when we asked why she had stepped around our male tester, who’d dropped his papers in downtown’s Byward Market. She had been on her way to browse costume jewellery a few paces away. “He could have been a politician, so I thought, ‘Screw you!’”

Also at the market, a couple in their 60s not only didn’t hold a door open for our researcher, but when he approached and politely began to explain we were doing a courtesy test, the man interrupted: “First, let’s start with a little courtesy—hello!” he said sarcastically.

What else did we learn in our Canada-wide experiment? That people don’t like to be perceived as being impolite, for one. When we told people they had just failed a courtesy test, most looked sheepish and said that they usually do try to be polite. They almost invariably provided an excuse why they weren’t in this particular instance.

We also found that, on the whole, sales staff of stores both small and large were the most courteous, probably because they are in the service industry and being pleasant is simply good business. Some shop staff were particularly helpful. When an older man in front of our female tester emptied a bag of coins at the cash register in a Giant Tiger discount store in Winnipeg, the blond, middle-aged cashier patiently collected all the loose change, counted out the amount necessary for his purchase and then, despite the growing lineup behind him, put the rest of the coins back into the man’s bag for him. “Thank you very much!” she said with a broad, genuine smile as the transaction ended.

And our male researcher in Victoria was deliberately silent when he bought a notebook for $4 at an office supply shop, but the cashier, who looked to be in his late 40s, was friendly and thanked the tester nonetheless. “You can go through the day being polite or miserable,” he said later. “I always try to be nice. In fact, I try to be extra-nice to people who are in a bad mood.”

Two cities earned a perfect score in the thank-you test: Moncton and Vancouver. If you’re in St. John’s, you can expect doors to be held open for you—it’s the one city that earned ten out of ten on this test. And which city’s residents are most likely to help you pick up something you’ve dropped? With 70 percent, it’s Edmonton.

What about the perception that young people are less courteous? We found that society’s younger members—such as the teenage boys with pierced eyebrows and noses in Victoria who swooped to our female researcher’s aid when she almost slipped on the papers she’d dropped—were as likely to be courteous as their elders.

In fact, our testers recorded that almost half the 60-and-overs didn’t help (53 percent passed our tests) while 67 percent of the under-40s passed. Consider this: In Saskatoon, our female tester closely followed an elderly lady in a pink sweater through the doors of the Scotia Centre mall, but the woman made no attempt to hold the door open. A short while later, 16-year-old high-school student Kenneth Vilness, who was waiting for a bus at the terminal a few blocks away, leaped off the bench to assist her with her dropped papers.

Vilness said he tries to be courteous because “that was the way I was brought up,” the same reason given by a great many who passed the test. He told us of a friend who hadn’t been raised the same way. “It’s kind of awkward when you go out with him to a restaurant or something and he doesn’t say please and thank you; you feel like you have to add some extra pleases and thank yous. It’s like he takes everything for granted,” Vilness said.

In general, we discovered that courtesy cuts both ways across age, gender and life circumstance. And you never know who will or won’t help you based on appearance alone.

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