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Seven ways to make Toronto a world-class city again

doady said:
Yeah, and Calgary is bigger than San Francisco, and Winnipeg is bigger than Boston and Atlanta and Washington DC. So even Calgary and Winnipeg are obviously more important than most US cities, let alone Toronto.
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And London, England is smaller than Yellowknife! Funny, it seemed like such a big city when I was there, I guess it was all my imagination :D

Obviously you have to include suburbs to get an accurate metric of how big a city is. Even then, different countries measure their metro areas in different ways, and American metros are more generously defined than Canadian ones. So a metro area like Houston is bigger than Toronto on paper but not in reality. Probably the best measure is to go by urban areas, which don't tend to include disconnected satellite cities and are arguably more consistent between nations. The list of world's biggest urban areas on Wikipedia puts Toronto at 5th in North America, well behind Chicago and slightly ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth. And it actually puts New York City ahead of Mexico City, but both are in the 20 million range.

animatronic said:
Canada, the U.S. and China are actually almost identical in size. Canada squeaks in at #2 for total area but the U.S. and China have more land. Blame Mercator for making it seem like a bigger difference.
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I was all ready to correct you but it turns out you're right. With all of Canada's inland water, it actually has less land than the US and China. I'm genuinely surprised.

howl said:
A few weeks ago I saw a RWD car with Florida plates driving down the road with snow tires on. If it had Ontario plate I would have figured someone was just too cheap to get summer tires, but with Florida plates they would have had to buy them special for the trip . . . in August.
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Well it was just snowing in southern Alberta the other day...
 
salsa....no, that was not a real person! I swear, it's not possible.....my word I'm getting a headache. ;)
 
On the whole I don't think it's true that Americans are more ignorant than any other group on Earth. The way the global and American media works though, the baseline ignorance that is present everywhere actually makes news in America. Put another way, a Canadian will hear it when an American is being ignorant since we're inundated with American opinions, but odds are an American will never be exposed to your typical Toronto Sun letter-to-the-editor author.

And, really, what do I know about Dallas? That's the closest sized American city to Toronto. In my head it's all Dallas Cowboys, the Alamo, King of the Hill and steakhouses. Is the Alamo even near Dallas? My point being I don't think we're necessarily that much less ignorant.
 
Also, fresh evidence from The Star that even people in Ontario are super ignorant about Toronto!

In Elliot Lake, people told him welfare officials in Toronto give low-income residents bus tickets to the community, thinking housing is cheap. (Anna McGrath of Toronto Employment and Social Services flatly denied this. “It is not our practice. We’re not aware of any cases where this has happened.”)
  • In Kirkland Lake, residents complained that investors from Toronto bought their apartment buildings, jacked up the rent and evicted tenants who couldn’t afford to pay. These absentee landords could never be reached when repairs were needed. One tenant said she had to wear her outdoor winter clothes in her apartment and keep the oven door open for heat. Another said his landlord stopped paying the hydro bill in the middle of winter when the temperature ranged between -30 and -40 degrees.
  • In Virginiatown, close to the Ontario-Quebec border, workers at the health-care clinic told him people with life-threatening conditions were reluctant to go to the nearest hospital (in Kirkland Lake) because it cost $50 to get there by cab. “Toronto is getting a fancy transit system and we can’t even get a bus,” they said.
  • In Hearst, a logging community, people live in fear that bureaucrats based in Toronto who know nothing about their area will proceed with plans to declare the Abitibi River Forest a caribou conservation area, destroying their livelihood. There are no woodland caribou here, they told Balkwill. Why not move it 100 miles north, where the caribou are?
  • Wawa wasn’t originally on the tour, but the head of the town’s economic development corporation urged him to stop for an hour. When he arrived, a dozen people including the mayor were waiting. They told him the Eagle River mine operated by Toronto-based Wesdome Gold Mines, brought in workers who drove up housing prices and rents, did not patronize local businesses and left on the weekends. The company paid royalties to the Ontario government but provided no income or benefits to the municipality. The same issue — with different names and details — came up in Kirkland Lake and Kapuskasing.
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This list is just straight up idiotic. Each one of these 'observations,' often made by municipal elites, is transparently ignorant and idiotic. No, Toronto is not busing people to Elliot Lake.

This is what people in Ontario think about their Provincial capital. It's pretty excusable that people would have some ignorance about a city in a foreign country compared to this.
 
diminutive said:
On the whole I don't think it's true that Americans are more ignorant than any other group on Earth. The way the global and American media works though, the baseline ignorance that is present everywhere actually makes news in America. Put another way, a Canadian will hear it when an American is being ignorant since we're inundated with American opinions, but odds are an American will never be exposed to your typical Toronto Sun letter-to-the-editor author.

And, really, what do I know about Dallas? That's the closest sized American city to Toronto. In my head it's all Dallas Cowboys, the Alamo, King of the Hill and steakhouses. Is the Alamo even near Dallas? My point being I don't think we're necessarily that much less ignorant.
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They aren't more or less ignorant, they just care about different things.
 
diminutive said:
And, really, what do I know about Dallas? That's the closest sized American city to Toronto. In my head it's all Dallas Cowboys, the Alamo, King of the Hill and steakhouses. Is the Alamo even near Dallas? My point being I don't think we're necessarily that much less ignorant.
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In superficial metro stats they might be comparable depending on how much of the golden horseshoe one decides to include. The city core of Dallas itself is typically southern US- vast suburbs and smallish urban core. It's more more akin to Calgary than Toronto imo-really no similarity there.
 
MisterF said:
And London, England is smaller than Yellowknife! Funny, it seemed like such a big city when I was there, I guess it was all my imagination :D
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At least it's still a city instead of a town; unlike Aurora, Newmarket, Ajax, Richmond Hill, Whitby, Oakville, or Milton.
 
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AlvinofDiaspar said:
Time to crack open Google Maps and spend some time there kiddo.

AoD
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Ehh... I'm not particularly motivated to learn the names of dozens of nondescript squares on the map. I'll study it if there's ever a time where I need to know the geographic difference between Utah, Colorado and Kansas. For the time being, knowing their general area is good enough for me :)
 
I could label them all, but why would I want to? Those Brits had way funnier answers than correctly labelling them would be. That was an awesome read.
 
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