There's a national stereotype and then there's the Canadian insurance office version of it. Canadians are famously the people who apologize to a chair after walking into it, who end a firm "no" with "eh?" to soften it into a suggestion, and who will sit through an entire underwriting call nodding along to a plan they privately think is a mistake rather than say so out loud. Insurance, an industry built on committees, sign-offs, and keeping brokers and clients onside, arguably does all of this a little harder than most. We don't just avoid conflict. We apologize in advance for the conflict we're about to avoid.
New workplace data suggests this habit has a real cost. And Canada doesn't even have to take anyone else's word for the "too polite" part. It's basically international consensus. A 2026 global survey by financial services firm Remitly asked more than 4,600 people across 26 countries who they thought the politest people in the world were.
Canada came second, behind only Japan, largely on the strength of a reputation for over-apologizing, genuine warmth toward newcomers, and manners so consistent they've become a punchline. And then, when Canadians were asked to rate their own country's politeness? We ranked ourselves 14th out of 26. Respectable, but a long way from the "world's second-politest nation" the rest of the planet has already decided we are. Modest, even about being modest.
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Here's a fun fact for anyone in claims or liability: Ontario has a law, the Apology Act, 2009, that exists specifically so Canadians can keep saying sorry without it blowing up in court. Under the Act, an apology "does not, in law, constitute an express or implied admission of fault or liability," can't be used as evidence of fault in a civil proceeding, and can't be used by an insurer to deny coverage. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and several other provinces have similar legislation.
The law was originally championed by the healthcare sector, on the logic that a doctor who could say "I'm sorry this happened" without fear of a lawsuit would actually build more trust, not less. But the effect on liability insurance was immediate and direct, since apologies previously could be used as evidence against an insured.
It's a nice piece of legislative self-awareness: we're apparently such prolific apologizers that the country had to pass a law clarifying that saying sorry isn't a confession.
Politeness score out of 26 countries surveyed (higher = ranked more polite)
Canada's gap (25 versus 13) isn't even the biggest in the data. Japan's is bigger, and the UK's isn't far behind. But it's still a wide enough spread to notice: the world is more convinced of Canadian manners than Canadians are.
There's decent research behind why the underlying pattern actually matters at work, beyond making a good dinner-party fact. Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety after a 1999 study of hospital teams found something counterintuitive: the best-performing teams reported more errors, not fewer, because they felt safe enough to admit when something had gone wrong rather than quietly hoping nobody would notice.
Economist Albert Hirschman made a related point back in 1970's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: faced with something going wrong, people either leave, stay and go quiet, or speak up, and organizations only survive long-term if they make room for that third, distinctly un-Canadian option.
This isn't just a vibe. Canadian workplace data backs it up. Telus Health's mental-health index, based on a survey of more than 3,000 employees, found that Canadian employees experiencing workplace conflict lose an average of 55 workdays of productivity a year. Separately, LifeWorks' mental-health index found that a third of Canadians say their employer provides no training or support for dealing with workplace conflict at all.
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Even more telling: a 2024 study from Toronto-based employee experience company Achievers surveyed 1,500 U.S. and Canadian workers and found that two-thirds of employees actually want to have tough conversations at work. They're not avoiding hard conversations out of preference. They're avoiding them because a third feel unsafe raising difficult topics with their managers, and because only a quarter of managers say they've had any real training in how to have those conversations well.
The appetite for honesty is there. The skills and the safety to act on it, less so.
For an industry built on underwriting panels, claims escalation, and broker-insurer negotiation, that gap isn't abstract. It shows up as risk appetite that never gets properly stress-tested because nobody fancied being the one to challenge the room, and as underperformance that limps along for months because a manager kept dressing feedback up in so much diplomatic padding that the actual message never survived the trip.
Priya Parker, a New York-based conflict resolution facilitator with 25 years' experience inside organizations, has a term for what's often happening beneath all that calm: toxic politeness. Speaking recently to sister HR title Human Resources Director, she said the tell isn't how much conflict a workplace has, but what's underneath the quiet.
"My clients will be the first ones to tell me that they suffer from unhealthy peace… and that they're unpracticed at even small disagreements," she said. The pattern, in her experience, is an oscillation between saying nothing at all and sudden blow-ups: "quiet, quiet, quiet, and then there's an explosion," which will sound uncomfortably familiar to anyone who's sat through a "no issues from me, all good" team meeting, only for someone to hand in their notice three weeks later.
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None of this is a case for turning insurance offices into shouting matches. Parker is explicit that the goal isn't conflict for its own sake, but what she calls "healthy heat": disagreeing with real care, rather than not disagreeing at all. Her framework comes down to three shifts.
Treat constructive disagreement as a core team skill rather than one manager's personality quirk. Train the whole team in it rather than just whoever happens to run the meeting. And deliberately build small rituals that make disagreement normal before a crisis, or a resignation letter, forces the issue.
For an industry, and a country, that has spent decades quietly, politely, proudly being unflappable, that might take some getting used to. But as Parker put it, conflict handled well isn't a sign something has broken. It's usually what stops something from breaking later. Sorry to be so direct about it. We'll see ourselves out. Eh.
