Yep. I think they deemphasize that syllable, making it a schwa.
I had a high school teacher who taught us phonetics. He happened to announce at a lot of our games and when visiting teams came in, he rewrote their names in phonetics so he’d pronounce them correctly. He said the tricky part was usually vowels. Some people say Laura as it would rhyme with aura; some say it like it rhymes with aria (minus the i).
I’ve found people who can’t hear a difference between pull and pool, bet and bat, tire and torr. My SIL makes fun of my bro (her hubs) because he says egg like it rhymes with plague instead of peg. And then there was the one in “More Jokes” about why the Irish stop at 239 beans in their soup…one more would be “too farty.”
The term “about” comes up in this video around 1:30.
IIRC that sound comes from combining ah and oo. They sound less well blended when the Canadian says them.