Quote:
Originally Posted by wave46
Fantasyland? My take on Ontario sans Canada seems quite plausible IMO.
If you exclude Ottawa (about a million people there) - as there'd be no reason to have a national capital without a nation - I'd still argue that Ontario would still be a much smaller place.
Without the national railways (remember: the CPR was funded by land grants from the national government) a lot of the basis of Ontario industry never gets started. The few colonial railways would provide some work, but not on the same scale.
Looking at the skyscrapers that dominate the Toronto skyline, I see national banks and media companies - all protected by our banking and media ownership laws. If Ontario was an independent nation, it might have some local banks, but nothing of the same scale as our national ones. If it was part of the United States, what would have prevented TD Bank or CIBC from being gobbled up by Citibank or Wells Fargo in the decades past?
Finally, why would the auto industry expand to anything near its current size if not to gain access to the protected total Canadian market of the time? I doubt GM/Ford/Chrysler would build anything in the same scale if they only had the local Ontario market. They might do some assembly work (like foreign automakers used to do in New Zealand), but nothing to the scale they do today.
Why would you ship western grain via Thunder Bay if you could ship it via rail via the US? Or via Duluth? Why would you build a railway west across awful northern muskeg when you could build it across the fairly moderate graded midwest United States?
Would Ontario still be here? Yeah. Would it be a province of 14 million people as the economic centre of this area? Doubtful.
I'm not saying it to be insulting - I live in Ontario. But had the Charlottetown Conference failed and the colonies blundered along separately, I doubt it would be the place it is today. Such is the funny twists and turns of history and I'm quite glad the whole Confederation thing worked out.
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That's all well and good but it ignores real, actual history in favour of hypotheticals. As I've said before, Upper Canada was the dominant British colony long before Canada existed and long before grain shipments or automotive plants. If those colonies were today a bunch of independent countries, Ontario would absolutely be the dominant one just as it always was. Even in the modern world geography counts for a lot, and being right next to the most populated parts of the richest country in the world without actually being a part of it is a huge geographic advantage, with or without the rest of Canada.
Those companies that you and someone123 dismiss as protected domestic oligopolies are internationally competitive businesses. They do much, if not most, of their business outside Canada. Our banks got as big as they are not by staying in a protected domestic bubble, but by investing aggressively around the world. Loads of the world's biggest companies are protected by their home governments, whether it's through protection from foreign takeover, government subsidies, etc. There's nothing unique about our banks in that respect, let alone companies like Magna or Onex. Besides, nobody's forcing these companies to locate in Ontario. They can move to other provinces if they want (and have in the past).
Again, I do agree that Ontario benefits from being part of Canada (I'd like to think that's true of most of the country), but the whole province having 3 million people? Toronto having less than a million? Come on. Fantasyland.
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