It's probably not accurate to say that Canonical hasn't had a significant impact on the Linux community. I'm not sure that things would be much improved over the barbaric state desktop Linux was in ~7 years ago.
True. In the past they had very significant impact on Linux, especially in adopting Linux for "normal users" like excellent PPA system or automatic "user friendly" installation of closed source (graphic drivers, flash plugin) or patented software (mp3 and other codecs, etc.).