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It is the ultimate urban myth.

And this newspaper is as guilty as any when it comes to spreading that myth.

But there it was again late last week, published as if fact: "Eighty per cent of us live in cities." It is a claim that - in various forms - appears regularly in newspapers and in broadcast commentary across the country, an absurdity as hard to kill as the notion that porcupines shoot quills or that astronaut Neil Armstrong took his legendary "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" in Sudbury.

It is not even remotely true that four out of five Canadians live in what any of us would actually consider a "city," yet so strong is the belief in this that it has marginalized even more so those who consider themselves "rural." If they amount to only one in five, they can be virtually dismissed so far as national debate on public policy goes. This particular reference was to last week's vote in the House of Commons to approve in principle a private member's bill to shut down the controversial long-gun registry.

But that is hardly the only time the bogus "80 per cent of us live in cities" comes up and has an innuendo effect that is usually unfair.

If "rural" Canadians - the so-called one in five who live in the boonies - are against gun control, then they must be knuckle-dragging rednecks who like to ride around with their .303s hanging in the back window of the pickup.

If they are against, say, wind turbines, then they must be a bunch of NIMBY reactionaries who think a carbon footprint isn't worth leaving unless you stomp your feet.

If they are against the closing down of local television outlets and signals they might pick up, then they are simply techno-dinosaurs who think TV hockey is a game played in driving snowstorms with 10 men a side.

This idea that 80 per cent of Canadians live in cities - the other 20 per cent being yokels - comes courtesy of Statistics Canada and a non-thinking media.

StatsCan, which for reasons even many of its employees puzzle over, considers an "urban" centre a defined area with 1,000 or more population. That has the effect of deeming little places like Arnold's Cove, Nfld., and Barry's Bay, Ont., "urban." The media, then, substitutes "city" for "urban" (why not?) and we end up with this continuing misread of the country.

"I've heckled and berated Statistics Canada on this," says Tony Clement, the member for "rural" Parry Sound-Muskoka and one who voted for last week's bill.

"They don't like to change their definitions because it makes it difficult to make comparisons with past statistics. But this has a big impact on our public-policy debate when all urban areas are based on some 1903 definition." Actually, it's worse than that. Though StatsCan often tweaks the density requirements, the notion of 1,000 people being an "urban" centre goes all the way back to Confederation - when it was fair to say a town of 1,000 people was substantial.

If the cutoff were 100,000, then Canada would be considered roughly half urban and half rural. The population is clearly more in cities, and it can be fairly argued that city voters get shortchanged when it comes to the value of their vote, but that is another point, not this one.

This one is merely that a wrong-headed "fact" - four out of five Canadians are city dwellers - has the effect of stereotyping, usually unfairly, those who do not live in large centres.

Keith Martin is the member of Parliament for Esquimalt - Juan de Fuca, as well as a Liberal. He is such a "redneck" that this spring he introduced his own private member's bill in the House of Commons to decriminalize simple possession of marijuana. He is also a physician and has a long track record of humanitarian work in the Third World. Yet he, too, voted for the bill that suspended the long-gun registry.

"I had one woman say to me, 'You should be ashamed of yourself - you're a physician!'" says Martin. "Well, I've seen people shot. I've been helpless to save them. I have a vested interested in making sure people don't get shot and killed by guns.

"I know this is one of those issues where the attitude is 'If you're not with us, you're against us' and the presumption is that I'm against any gun control. Well, that just isn't so. I voted to send it to committee to see if there might be more effective ways of spending this money." Martin, like Clement, thinks the simple-minded media interpretation of urban/rural needs to be addressed.

"It's an artificial divide," he says, "and it preys on old mythologies of people in rural areas being hewers of wood and drawers of water, whereas 'urban' people are more sophisticated and higher educated.

"Those stereotypes are long gone. But the problem in Canada is that we focus more on the things that divide us than those things that bring us together." Is anyone at Statistics Canada listening?