Canadians get great pleasure from mocking Americans for their perceived ignorance about the Great White North, but a new survey suggests our own lack of knowledge about Canada's northern extremes is equally laughable.

For instance, a mind-numbing 74 per cent of Canadians believe penguins might live in the Arctic, according to the survey by Up Here, a Yellowknife-based magazine that focuses on northern issues.

They don't. In fact, penguins live at the exact opposite end of the planet, in the Antarctic and other parts of the Southern Hemisphere, but only 25 per cent of those surveyed knew that.

Another 69 per cent of those surveyed thought northerners still lived in igloos, and 50 per cent believe Canada has several military bases protecting the Northwest Passage.

Katharine Sandiford, editor of Up Here magazine, called the results "shameful."

"We suspected that southern Canadians were out of touch with the North but the statistics revealed they were far more out to lunch than we thought," she told CTV.ca.

The goal of the survey was to take the temperature of southern Canadians and get a clear idea about how much, or how little, they know about the culture and geography of the territories.

Sandiford said staff at the magazine came up with the idea because they were fed up with correcting friends and relatives in the south about common misconceptions and stereotypes about the north.

The results showed the misconceptions were more widespread than they had suspected, she said.

"A few key questions were embarrassing and disturbing because the North is part of Canada, it's undergoing rapid development and it affects the rest of Canada quite a lot," she said.

"It's important that people in the rest of Canada understand what life is all about up here."

Here are some key results from the so-called North Poll, which comprised 28 multiple-choice questions:

  • 69 per cent of southern Canadians think Northerners still live in igloos.

Not true, the poll says. While igloos are still sometimes used by hunters, and elders teach the technique to children, all 40,000 Inuit in the North live in modern houses in permanent towns.

  • 38 per cent of southern Canadians were unaware that the term Inuit has replaced the term Eskimo.

The term, believed to be derived from a Cree or Ojibwa word, went out of favour in the 1970s and was replaced by the Inuktitut word meaning "the people."

  • 91 per cent of southern Canadians agreed with a statement saying that in December, Yellowknife receives only between zero and one hour of sunlight per day.

In reality, the capital of the Northwest Territories gets roughly five hours of daylight on Dec. 21, the darkest day of the year.

  • 66 per cent of Canadians surveyed thought that northerners still get supplies from Hudson's Bay trading posts.

Though the news is certain to crush a romantic view of the north, the HBC closed its last Yukon trading post in Fort Selkirk, in 1951. However, it wasn't until 1991 that branches in the Northwest Territories closed their doors when the company officially stopped dealing in animal pelts.

Some of the responses to the survey bordered on the hilarious, Sandiford said. Only 40 per cent of those surveyed could correctly name the capital city of the Yukon, only 27 per cent knew that Canada's highest peak was in the Yukon, and 62 per cent thought there is a university in the north. There isn't.

But the news wasn't all bad. In total, 81 per cent of knew that Canada's tallest waterfall wasn't in the north, 73 per cent knew that the town of North Pole didn't exist in Canada, and 71 per cent knew northern Canadians have cell service.

Up Here magazine's North Poll will be published in the May issue.

Methodology

Up Here worked with DataPath Systems based out of the Yukon, a "small-town northern pollster.' They surveyed 303 Canadians in February 2011 and results were demographically balanced with a margin of error of plus-minus 5.6 at 96% confidence levels.