cultural
A Canadian Will Apologize to You Before You Apologize to Them.
Field research.
We ran a small experiment. We bumped into 50 Canadians on a sidewalk. Forty-seven of them said sorry before we did. Two of them said sorry simultaneously with us. One was American.
This is not politeness. This is a culturally inherited reflex that exists somewhere between throat-clearing and a punctuation mark.
The Ontario Apology Act of 2009 makes apologies legally non-binding. The Act exists because Canadians were apologizing so reflexively that lawyers were using it against them. We are not making this up.