I realized it was Canadian by the way she pronounced Steve Sanders.
And was that some sort of inside joke?

You did just fine, Clarence. Now go git yo'self some hot cornbread!

To American ears, the Canadian pronunciation of about often sounds like aboot, but this is only an illusion. Because the more familiar pronunciation of /aw/ is articulated with the tongue in a low position, and because it raises to a mid position in Canadian English when the vowel precedes the voiceless obstruents listed above, speakers of other varieties of English will immediately detect the vowel raising, but will sometimes think that the vowel has raised farther than it actually does, all the way to /u/, which is a high vowelhence the mishearing (and not-quite-right imitation) of this pronunciation as aboot.

Actually, most Canadians don't pronounce it that way, at least not in some words. They pronounce their a's like as if they were saying the word 'ant'. Whether it's words like 'pasta' or 'Mazda', most people here do NOT say a soft a like the Italians do. I'm an American and grew up on the border of Canada, have lived in Toronto for 5 years, and now Montreal for 2 years, and I hear it all the time.
The reason that this really sticks out for me is that I used to work with an Italian family back in New York. One of the sons names was Antonio. I used say his name with the hard a, until one day, an friend of theirs (another Italian who I couldn't stand) was there and he corrected me, telling me that in Italian, the a is said softly. As I said, I couldn't stand the guy, so I wanted to tell him to "f#@k off buddy, this is American, not Italy", but since he was a friend of theirs, I bit my tongue.

No. We pronounce it correctly, the "a" is soft. It's the same way in Italian.