Bill Noy was in the middle of making dinner when the telephone rang and his knowledge of Canadian history was suddenly put to the test.
Of the 1,000 Canadians who were randomly selected to take the 20-question pop quiz, Mr. Noy, a 51-year-old graphics designer from White Rock, B.C., was the only one to achieve a perfect score.
He's modest about his achievement and surprised by his one-in-a-thousand finish: "It's kind of depressing," he said. "The questions weren't that difficult.
"I don't understand why people aren't interested in history, actually."
Mr. Noy knew which event brought more than a million Canadian women into the work force and what economic agreement with the United States lost the election for Sir Wilfrid Laurier's Liberals in 1911.
The survey, which featured questions spanning the country's economic history, took place from June 13 to 17.
It was sponsored by the Dominion Institute and TD Bank Financial Group and conducted by the Innovative Research Group.
The rest of Canada earned dismal marks. In fact, the average score was a failing grade of about eight out of 20.
Only half of those surveyed, for example, could identify the dark economic period after the stock market crash of 1929 and just over a quarter knew the major event that happened in Winnipeg in 1919.
It was the worst Canadians have ever scored on the survey, which has been conducted in each of the past eight years, said Rudyard Griffiths, the executive director of the Dominion Institute.
He said he was disappointed at how little Canadians knew about the darker chapters in the country's economic past, citing the maxim that those who don't learn about the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
"There is a yawning chasm between what you might expect people to know from what their actual shared knowledge is," Mr. Griffiths said.
Residents of British Columbia and Ontario scored the highest, with 40 per cent of respondents from those provinces earning a passing mark of 10 out of 20 or better. People in Quebec did the poorest, with a 33 per cent pass rate -- though few questions related to Quebec's contribution to Canada's economic history.
The only good news from the study, he said, is that most respondents expressed a genuine desire to learn more about Canadian history.
Greg Lyle, the managing director of the Innovative Research Group, said the survey had a mix of difficult and straightforward questions.
But he said he was surprised that Canadians did so poorly on some of the seemingly obvious questions.
One question asked: "What major economic policy of Pierre Trudeau's government sparked the creation of a bumper sticker proclaiming 'let the bastards freeze in the dark!'?"
Fewer than 10 per cent in Canada knew the name of the policy. Fewer than 15 per cent in Alberta knew the answer, though many Albertans threatened to secede from Canada because of the policy at the time.
"Most of my friends in the oil patch will be surprised at that one," Mr. Lyle said.
"People don't remember details."