Canadian City/Regional Personalities and Attitudes

[ciudad_del_norte]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I lived in Edmonton for barely 4 months for a summer job many years ago, so I'm not an expert on the Alberta cities, but two observations I made were:

1. Edmonton is topographically/geographically fractured. Downtown is on one side of a deep river valley, but the university and much of the urban life in Strathcona is on the other side. You can't go from one side to the other on foot very easily, so the city is sort of split into two.

2. During the Ralph Klein years - when I was there - most Edmontonians felt kind of united by their inferiority complex. They imagined that the Province basically fucked them over because a former mayor of Calgary was in charge. They attributed the lack of transit expansion or the fact that hospitals were closing with Calgary-favourtism. Whether this was true or not is debatable, but it gave Edmonton a "resigned underdog" feel.

While I think a lot of that has changed, there is definitely some truth to these things, or at the very least there was. Edmonton was a much less cynical place before the last big crash, and between that and Klein years there was a good 20-30 year period where the city struggled with its own identity and confidence. While the Arena district etc. is probably the most shiny example of change from the outside, I think the City overall is finally beginning to find itself and care much less about what is happening in Calgary, or what the rest of the country thinks. While Edmontonians still might not hesitiate to be quite (sometimes overly) critical of their city, it has morphed into something that is rooted more in a desire to make the place better than to wallow in self pity. Tried the self pity thing for a while...wasn't that helfpul.

The north-south divide remains, but North of the river seems to be making much greater strides, and I would argue that people are increasingly considering north of the river to be more cool/interesting. There is also more potential north of the river in terms of neighbourhood design and urban development and I see that tide shifting a bit away from Whyte, with most of the beneficiaries being north of the river.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I thought to myself: Could you see this happening in, say, Brockville, Ontario? Naaaaaaaaah.

Someone from Arkansas or Louisiana on their way to, for example, visit North America's only fortified/walled city could conceivably stop to pee next to you in Brockville, as the most direct route from that area involves the 401 through Ontario.

[osmo]

Toronto is overly PC (politically correct) then needed. It breeds this strange cloak of the way people act here and make folks very passive aggressive.

Coming from the Prairies this was much different as I am used to folks just being polite, but will tell you (nicely) when you piss them off.

"Hey now, you drank my last beer.. not nice bud.. you buying me one at the bar now or what?"

vs

"I hate when people drink other peoples drinks..so dumb"

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

Canadians can be a bit 1912 about this, as if life in our largest cities is some sort of spectacular, cut-throat, Blade Runner-esque dread-marathon that is totally different from what one might experience in a secondary city or a large town.

Pictured: The dizzying complexity and near-incomprehensible scale of life in CENTRAL TORONTO, the very heart of the GOLDEN HORSEHOE whose population is a terrifying EIGHT MILLION SOULS.

I get what you're saying, but Toronto is changing rapidly. Because unlike in London or St. Catharines, those houses in your photo cost $3 million. Up until the 1990s your average middle class family from somewhere like Kitchener could have easily transitioned to a relatively car-friendly inner-ring section of the old of city of Toronto like in this photo without too much financial strain, and for someone from say, Albania, a snapshot of their lives in Toronto wouldn't have looked all that appreciably different from a snapshot of their previous lives in Kitchener.

It's different now. Those families don't live in neighbourhoods like that anymore. And the closer you get to downtown, the row houses housing one family in 1980 are now duplexes, and prices are going through the roof for everything. Critically, whole swaths of the city that used to be nondescript and filled with parking lots are turning into highrise districts. A huge chunk of the city bounded by a staggered border drawn clockwise from the lake going along Spadina, Queen, University, Bloor, Yonge, Gerrard, Church, Queen and Parliament really does, apologies for the perceived overreach of the term, feel somewhat Manhattanesque, and nowhere else in the entire country approaches it, much less does anything in Kitchener approximate the lived and visited experience of it (Montreal's different, as you yourself have pointed out: downtown doesn't really match up, but the Plateau is an X-factor that Toronto doesn't have).

So that's the thing: thirty years ago you could have plausibly held up a photo of a four-person family unit beside the photo in your post and asked: Toronto or Kitchener? Not these days, as either the parents still live there but are now grandparents, or they recently cashed out and immediately became as wealthy as the wealthy family who bought it from them. Meanwhile, the hypothetical Kitchener transplant family is shelling out $2,000 for a cramped apartment that affords Dad and Mom a short commute to work by transit, or have managed to find a townhouse in suburban Oakville for under $400,000 and thus don't see their kids for more than a couple hours a day during the work week.

Toronto is now pricey and forbidding to young families, while the urbanity downtown has reached a point where it is a satisfyingly quirky environment for twenty and thirty somethings without kids who value walking, biking or streetcarring to experiences that you can't get in Kitchener or anywhere else. Though probably more and more young families in Toronto are willing to live in apartments anyway.

But there is more of a perceived barrier to entry than there was before. Sure, it's not like moving from Ohio to New York in 1978, but it's no longer like moving from Kitchener to Toronto in 1978 either, Son of Sam or no Son of Sam.

[Docere]

That looks like Briar Hill Ave. or something, not exactly on the edge of downtown.

[Bluenote]

Originally Posted by Beedok

One thing I've found for both Hamilton and Thunder Bay is there seem to be two main groups of people: folks who hate the city and want to leave, or folks who will yap your ear off about the weirdest subjects if you don't run away fast enough. The Thunder Bay ones do sometimes have you on edge about whether or not they might do something really weird though...

Also I know that Winnipeggers like to jaywalk.

But we will apologize when we do it 😜

[someone123]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Toronto is now pricey and forbidding to young families, while the urbanity downtown has reached a point where it is a satisfyingly quirky environment for twenty and thirty somethings without kids who value walking, biking or streetcarring to experiences that you can't get in Kitchener or anywhere else. Though probably more and more young families in Toronto are willing to live in apartments anyway.

Another change is that people travel and move around a lot more now. The number of people who have only ever lived in small towns is dwindling. If you pick out a random stranger in Kitchener there's a pretty good chance they will have lived in a much larger city at some point during their life, in Canada or in another country (and many other countries have bigger and busier cities in them than Canada).

Things like living in an apartment and living in a car aren't limited to Toronto-sized cities. From what I can tell, in terms of urban life, few Canadian cities are really constrained by the number of people living in them. A town with 5,000 people is in that there literally are not enough people to make a significant area very busy. A city of 1,000,000 or even 500,000 people is not like this. The real story is that there are a large number of people living suburban rather than urban lifestyles in Canada. Some cities are basically all suburb. Adding more people doesn't change this much.

If the norm in Canada were for 90% of people to live the apartment-and-bicycle experience then city population would make a big difference. But instead we have cities where 0% or 5% do, and cities where 50% do. Some other countries have cities where 90% of people do. That is the real dominating factor for the most part.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by Docere

That looks like Briar Hill Ave. or something, not exactly on the edge of downtown.

Kool's point is that 5 km from downtown in Toronto looks like that photo, while 5 km from a place like downtown Philadelphia, say, looks like this:



My point is that Toronto may not have this or a neighbourhood like the Plateau once you get away from downtown, but the increasing density of downtown and the associated price of entry are creating a greater economic and socio-cultural gulf between Toronto and the rest of Canada than there used to be (whereas, by contrast, it's always been there for major world cities).

[someone123]

Originally Posted by rousseau

but the increasing density of downtown and the associated price of entry are creating a greater economic and socio-cultural gulf between Toronto and the rest of Canada than there used to be (whereas, by contrast, it's always been there for major world cities).

This is dubious when you compare Toronto to different cities around the country.

I would argue that Vancouver and Calgary have both changed more during the past 30 years than Toronto has. To use one concrete example of how this has played out, Vancouver didn't have any rapid transit in 1985, and now people have arguments about whether or not it has the most expansive rapid transit system in Canada. Today, Vancouver's real estate is also more expensive than Toronto's. I think housing pressure is actually much worse here than it is in metro Toronto. I wouldn't be surprised if more people are forced into multi-unit buildings and smaller spaces here.

The big stories in Canada lately have been the economic shift from rural to urban areas and immigration (the proportion of immigrants heading to Toronto has actually declined a bit as more and more head to other cities), not so much centralization of economic activity in Toronto at the expense of the rest of Canada.

[softee]

Originally Posted by rousseau

Kool's point is that 5 km from downtown in Toronto looks like that photo, while 5 km from a place like downtown Philadelphia, say, looks like this:



My point is that Toronto may not have this or a neighbourhood like the Plateau once you get away from downtown, but the increasing density of downtown and the associated price of entry are creating a greater economic and socio-cultural gulf between Toronto and the rest of Canada than there used to be (whereas, by contrast, it's always been there for major world cities).

Sure, but there are places in Toronto 5 km from downtown that look a LOT more urban than the pic Kool posted. Residential streets in Parkdale, for example.

[osmo]

Kensington Market is one of the few areas with density that reminded me of Montreal's Plateau.

Cabbagetown/Allens Garden's has the tight streets also but does not have the same mass of people and activity. Plateau has people spilling of the sidewalks.

[Drybrain]

Originally Posted by softee

Sure, but there are places in Toronto 5 km from downtown that look a LOT more urban than the pic Kool posted. Residential streets in Parkdale, for example.

True, but even Parkdale could psss for a well-built small town, except for Jameson Avenue.

I flew from NY to Halifax this summer, with a six-hour layover in Toronto. I hadn't been to Toronto in about 12 months at that point, and I subway-d to Queen Station and then meandered around the city before catching my next flight. At some point in Little Italy, I think on Crawford Street, I passed a row of detached houses fronted by 15-foot deep lawns, right off of College Street. I'd been there a hundred times, but I suddenly got a very suburban vibe, probably by contrast with where I'd just been (New York). And I thought how odd Toronto is for a growing world city, in that outside of that Jarvis to University mini-Manhattan, it really doesn't look, block-by-block, very metropolitan. Cumulatively, it DOES have a big-city feel, but not at a micro scale. Block by block, it'a much more like where I was going to (Halifax) than where I was coming from (NYC). Which is not at all a criticism, just an observation.

Toronto occupies a sort of urban limbo in its built form, and I think that will persist for many years to come.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by someone123

This is dubious when you compare Toronto to different cities around the country.

I would argue that Vancouver and Calgary have both changed more during the past 30 years than Toronto has. To use one concrete example of how this has played out, Vancouver didn't have any rapid transit in 1985, and now people have arguments about whether or not it has the most expansive rapid transit system in Canada. Today, Vancouver's real estate is also more expensive than Toronto's. I think housing pressure is actually much worse here than it is in metro Toronto. I wouldn't be surprised if more people are forced into multi-unit buildings and smaller spaces here.

The big stories in Canada lately have been the economic shift from rural to urban areas and immigration (the proportion of immigrants heading to Toronto has actually declined a bit as more and more head to other cities), not so much centralization of economic activity in Toronto at the expense of the rest of Canada.

Oh, I'm sure that the housing pressure is somewhat worse in Vancouver. But while Vancouver and Calgary may have changed more than Toronto over the past few decades, however you define or quantify that (I'm not convinced this is true, but never mind), they're far from the cities that Toronto is. My point was that Kool's point, that it wasn't such a big deal to move to Toronto from neighbouring cities, was true in 1978, but not so much today. The buzz, the heft, the urban critical mass that Toronto has today makes the downtown an entirely different class of thing from neighbouring smaller cities. Or other cities in Canada. It has reached a certain urban level, for lack of a better term, that's hard to quantify, but you feel it when you're there.

You experience differences in order of magnitude when moving between places like Calgary, Regina and Winnipeg (yay population counts!), but you don't feel like you're moving to an entirely different class of thing. Vancouver's larger and doesn't fit into the prairie subset, but my impression is that any daunting aspect of moving there is mostly to do with the economic penalty of the housing costs. You can't really dive in and lose yourself in Vancouver the way you can in Toronto (and Montreal).

That's what I'm getting at. It didn't used to be this way for Toronto (always was for Montreal), but now it is. The difference between then and now is astonishing.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lio45

Someone from Arkansas or Louisiana on their way to, for example, visit North America's only fortified/walled city could conceivably stop to pee next to you in Brockville, as the most direct route from that area involves the 401 through Ontario.

I suppose...

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by someone123

This is dubious when you compare Toronto to different cities around the country.

I would argue that Vancouver and Calgary have both changed more during the past 30 years than Toronto has. To use one concrete example of how this has played out, Vancouver didn't have any rapid transit in 1985, and now people have arguments about whether or not it has the most expansive rapid transit system in Canada. Today, Vancouver's real estate is also more expensive than Toronto's. I think housing pressure is actually much worse here than it is in metro Toronto. I wouldn't be surprised if more people are forced into multi-unit buildings and smaller spaces here.

The big stories in Canada lately have been the economic shift from rural to urban areas and immigration (the proportion of immigrants heading to Toronto has actually declined a bit as more and more head to other cities), not so much centralization of economic activity in Toronto at the expense of the rest of Canada.

I think you've captured the essence of kool's post really well.

In spite of its massive size relative to most other Canadian cities, Toronto can still be pretty "comfy'' for Canadians from much smaller cities (in spite of what those people might think). In a way that NYC isn't really for most Americans.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I think you've captured the essence of kool's post really well.

In spite of its massive size relative to most other Canadian cities, Toronto can still be pretty "comfy'' for Canadians from much smaller cities (in spite of what those people might think). In a way that NYC isn't really for most Americans.

No. The point I was making was that that's not true anymore. Kool's point is several decades out of date.

[rousseau]

Originally Posted by mistercorporate

The Toronto-Hamilton area (this dynamic changes as soon as you get to Pickering in the East or Guelph in the West) is as polite and respectful as the rest of Canada but people tend to have a shell/wall with strangers. This has a lot to do with the fact it's a go-getter, ambitious and large immigrant gateway (parts of New York and certainly Miami [a more extreme case than Toronto] have the same dynamic). Cities like this attract a small group of very aggressive and smart/ambitious people who force everyone else to have their guard up to a certain extent. You don't know who someone is until you have a conversation but after you initiate a conversation GTA people open up, smile more and show that on average the vast majority of people are warm and open hearted inside, though still not to the same extent as the rest of Ontario. That being said, if you're socially well adjusted, confident and secure, the GTA is a social playground with tons of opportunities for human interaction. Certain niches and subcommunities are super friendly and turn that dynamic on its head, its all about social circles here. There's a gradient between the two different Ontario cultures that begins in downtown Toronto and ends in the borders of the GTA. Outer Mississauga, Brantford, Whitby/Oshawa and outer Newmarket are in between those two cultures.

Hamilton is not part of the GTA when it comes to personality. It's not the same as Toronto at all. Stereotypically Hamilton is gruff and unpretentious. It's a no-nonsense kind of place that doesn't worry too much about stepping on your toes. You can elide Pickering, Mississauga, Oakville and Burlington together into an amorphous mass of indistinguishable Toronto suburbia, but Hamilton sticks out like a sore thumb.

I don't know where you're getting this stuff. I've spent a fair amount of time in small-town Ontario in the last decade, and all of the stereotypes are true: it's polite and reserved to a fault. People will respond to gregariousness in a shopping line, sure, but you don't continue the conversation once you leave the supermarket, and you'll never hear anyone say something like "hey, you should come to our barbecue tomorrow!" like you would in Iowa.

Though I am starting to notice that the people populating the lower income levels or working in more blue collar-type jobs in Canada do in fact more closely match up with their counterparts in the U.S. when it comes to this sort of thing. It seems to me that the Alice Munro reserve that would have characterized all of English Canada back in the 1930s is now more restricted to the more educated and higher income classes. Or maybe the Alice Munro people are a dying breed?

Today I went to the low-cost supermarket in town. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was morbidly obese and graceless of movement and social interaction. You can protest all you want to someone from outside of North America that Canada is different from the U.S., but when you're in these parts of towns and cities, what you say is belied by the evidence in front of you.

For instance, the fat father with the fat son at the checkout I went to were packing their junk food into their bags, and when he spied that I had just a bunch of bananas and nothing else, the father said "Wanna trade bills?"

He thought he was being witty, and grinned happily at what he thought was an amusing thing to say. "Sure," I said, playing along. He then continued his humorous dad routine. "That's the diet I should be on," he said, nodding to my bananas. All I could say was "Yep." I was stymied by the low-grade antics and the fact that he expected me to be amused and/or grateful that he'd tried to inject some humour or human warmth into my day. Americans do this all the time, assuming that everyone around them wants to buck pretense and connect to them on a more intimate level, when all you want to do is just get some bananas and go home.

I think this makes me a snob, actually. Because to me, if you're going to strike up a conversation with a stranger stuck in your vicinity for a few moments, what you say has to be amusing and/or intelligent and/or clever, and actually worth the effort to engage. Otherwise it's just a waste of time and makes your life worse.

[Docere]

Toronto kind of resembles Queens NY in a lot of ways: the urban form (SFHs and big apartment buildings spread out all over), largely built up around the same time, fairly similar ethnic composition where nobody really dominates etc.

Even the opening credits to All in the Family reminded me of Toronto growing up.

[kool maudit]

My point was more that, in the age of the internet and post-industrial life, "moving to the big city" is not the shocking displacement it once was, particularly if you are coming from a mid-sized city and not a rural area.

This is particularly true in Canada, where our largest cities are generally clean, orderly places. They are neither outrageously large and complex nor are they terrifically imposing to navigate.

(Regarding Philadelphia, rowhouses aside it's the same thing. There has been a "flattening" of the differences between various types of lives in recent decades. Even Philly's crime and decay, to use an example of a classically intimidating "big city" issue – is no worse than that of neighbouring Camden or Chester.)

It's not like some Egyptian kid from a village on the Southern Nile going to Cairo and it's not even like a sharecropper's son from Alabama moving to Chicago in 1921. These are the sorts of experiences that I think phrases like "so how's life in the BIG CITY" tend to conjure, not just sort of getting fewer square metres for your money because Leslieville is trending these days.

Remember that this came from Someone123's comment. Housing prices aside, just how much of a step up in general... difficulty is Vancouver from Halifax? How much trouble would your ordinary Haligonian have in adjusting to Vancouver? I know both of those cities, can imagine what it might be like to go from one to the other and... nobody is shivering in their cold-water flat dreaming of the farm back home.

It's not that the buildings aren't that different, it's that the lives aren't.

[Hali87]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

My point was more that, in the age of the internet and post-industrial life, "moving to the big city" is not the shocking displacement it once was, particularly if you are coming from a mid-sized city and not a rural area.

This is particularly true in Canada, where our largest cities are generally clean, orderly places. They are neither outrageously large and complex nor are they terrifically imposing to navigate.

(Regarding Philadelphia, rowhouses aside it's the same thing. There has been a "flattening" of the differences between various types of lives in recent decades. Even Philly's crime and decay, to use an example of a classically intimidating "big city" issue – is no worse than that of neighbouring Camden or Chester.)

It's not like some Egyptian kid from a village on the Southern Nile going to Cairo and it's not even like a sharecropper's son from Alabama moving to Chicago in 1921. These are the sorts of experiences that I think phrases like "so how's life in the BIG CITY" tend to conjure, not just sort of getting fewer square metres for your money because Leslieville is trending these days.

Remember that this came from Someone123's comment. Housing prices aside, just how much of a step up in general... difficulty is Vancouver from Halifax? How much trouble would your ordinary Haligonian have in adjusting to Vancouver? I know both of those cities, can imagine what it might be like to go from one to the other and... nobody is shivering in their cold-water flat dreaming of the farm back home.

It's not that the buildings aren't that different, it's that the lives aren't.

It would be hard to get used to transit being on time

From a student perspective, I guess UBC and SFU would be very different environments/experiences from Dal or SMU.

And from what I understand, the social scenes in the two cities are quite different, although I know enough people in Vancouver already that I don't think I'd have a hard time meeting people.

I think I could live anywhere in metro Vancouver and feel reasonably "at home". I'm not sure I could say the same about clusterfuck of new-condo-DT Toronto, or even St. James Town. But most of Toronto isn't really like either of these neighbourhoods either, which was probably the original point.