“Why did the Canadian cross the road?”/“To get to the middle.”

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is a joke cited in print since at least 1847. “Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle,” a Toronto entrepreneur said in 1986. The joke illustrates a middle-of-the-road Canadian attitude.
 
“Why did the WASP cross the road?”/“To get to the middle” and “There’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos” are other sayings about the middle of the road. “Why did the Canadian cross the road?”/“He saw some American do it on TV” is similar Canadian riddle.
   
 
24 December 1986, Brandon (Manitoba) Sun, “What people laughed at in ‘86” by Trish Worron (The Canadian Press), pg. C7, col. 2:
Why did the chicken cross the road To get to the other side.
 
Arid why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to the middle. (A comment, overheard in 1986, by a Toronto entrepreneur fresh from tangling with some unyielding civil servant.)
 
Google Books
In Search of Canada
Edited by Stephen Richards Graubard
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers
1989
Pg. 3:
Question: Why does a Canadian cross the road? Answer: To get to the middle. (One of several Canadian jokes circulating in New York City in the winter of 1988.)
 
Twitter
David Redekop
‏@DRtheNerd
Why did the Canadian cross the road?  To get to the middle.
10:36 AM - 5 May 2007
 
Google Books
The Mammoth Book of One-Liners
By Geoff Tibballs
London: Constable & Robinson Ltd.
2012
Pg. ?:
Why did the Canadian cross the road?
To get to the middle.
 
Twitter
Paula Span
‏@paula_span
Joke all Canadians apparently know, as told by Ken Rockwood at #CAG2013. Q: Why did the Canadian cross the road? A: To get to the middle.
10:33 PM - 18 Oct 2013
   
The Squamish Chief (Squamish, BC)
LIBERAL: ‘The politics of division have to end’
Liberal Pam Goldsmith-Jones hopes local voters are looking for a change
Christine Endicott / Squamish Chief
October 15, 2015 10:06 AM
(...)
“There’s an old joke, Why did the Canadian cross the road?” she says over coffee in Squamish. “To get to the middle.”