I would argue that Canada has traditionally been more conservative than the United States, in that tradition and hierarchy have been more traditionally praised. I'd be willing to argue that Canada's social liberalization over the past half-century was as much aided by the switch of the hierarchy to social liberalism as by reaction against this hierarchy.
Yeah, I think you're onto something there.
In both the US and Canada, the public is more conservative on, for example, capital punishment, than are the media, academic, and bureacratic elites. So, insofar as the abolition of the death penalty in Canada reflects the opinions of any one social strata, it is those of the elites.
Same for a lot of the Charter issues. To the extent that there were any significant setbacks on the road to marriage equality in Canada, it was a result of politicians kow-towing to the social conservative whims of the general public(though I still think the campaign that convinced Ralph Klein to promise a veto on gay-marriage was not quite the spontaneous uprising he made it out to be. I mean, hundreds of unorchestrated phone calls specifically demanding that he invoke Section 33?)
Ofg course, sometimes the people push the other way, as happened with marijuana legalization in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, and DC. Though that's arguably not really a social-liberalism issue, so much as a "Yeah, man, I wanna get stoned!!" issue.