The thankless task of being the first one to take a hit, from the practice of coal miners of bringing down a caged canary to see if there's dangerous gas below
I don't know if this alleyway's safe, and I ain't no canary in a coal mine.
A Canary Day is a colloquial expression for a day of immense slothfulness, rest, or otherwise inhibition to perform the daily duties and routine of ones life. Often it is associated with drug use, abnormal sleeping schedules, and containment in a closed space for the entirety or majority of the day.
"I just had a 'CanaryDay' week. I was so stressed from last week's work that I just couldn't focus on anything this week!"
a method for exposing an informationleak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked.
The government needed to find their employee leaking information to the media so they setup a canary trap by giving each suspected employee a slightly different story.