How TORONTO explains Canada

this video is brought to you by surf shark Hello friends my name is JJ and this week I am coming to you live from Toronto the biggest and grandest city in all of Canada as you may know I am not from Toronto myself but rather from Vancouver a much smaller City way on the other side of the country and yet as my life progresses I am finding I have to come to Toronto more and more just because so much important Canadian stuff is concentrated here and so many important Canadian things happen here and the more time I spend here the more I come to realize the unique hold that this city has on this country's economy and politics as well as the degree that it actively shapes so many of the cliches and stereotypes that Define the modern Canadian sense of self-identity as well as the image of Canada to The Wider world and so today I thought I would take advantage of the fact that I am in Toronto to do a video on this very topic how Toronto explains Canada but before we get to any of that let us just hear a quick word from today's video sponsor surf shark Hello friends so as I mentioned I'm traveling AR Canada at the moment and you know what that means using the internet in a lot of weird dodgy places coffee shops hotel lobbies basement Suites of weird friends of friends and as we all know whenever you connect your computer or phone to a Wi-Fi network that you are not familiar with with you are taking a risk hacker type people love to take advantage of morons like me who just blindly connect to any Wi-Fi network without the little lock beside it and then use this unprotected connection to do all sorts of sinister things like spy on me take my personal information or even upload malware onto my machine without me even noticing but surely there is no way to prevent such a horrible fate you say well that is where you are wrong for you see with the surf shark VPN SL inter Internet Security app you can rest easy knowing your machines will always be secure no matter whose crazy 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has a population of AED 3 million people which makes it Canada's largest city by a significant margin an additional 3 million people live in the cities directly surrounding Toronto which you could argue put them in the city's orbit to one degree or another since Canada's population is about 40 million this means around 15% of all Canadians either live in Toronto or its ing suburbs and this fact makes Canada significantly different from the US where their largest metropolitan area New York City only comprises about 7% of the national population so you can think of it that way what would America be like if New York City was twice as big that's Toronto Toronto's position via V the rest of Canada gets even more intense when you consider that it is located in the province of onario which unto itself contains about 40% of the total Canadian population and given the settlement patterns of the province the majority of ontarians live within just a few hours drive of Toronto so this means that Toronto is basically the city for four out of 10 Canadians and this cannot help but give the city an outsized role in the Canadian imagination just given how many Canadians will have spent at least some time in the place all right and now the second way that Toronto helps Define Canada is just due to the fact that everything is in Toronto because Toronto is so big and so accessible to so much of the country it has long been the place where so many of the big important things in Canada are located a partial list would include the headquarters of Canada's national newspapers and television stations the headquarters of the CBC the headquarters of Canada's five major Banks the headquarters of five of Canada's 10 largest corporations the main Canadian Stock Exchange Canada's two biggest univers I ities and Canada's only NBA team and only MLB team a lot of Canada's most iconic Brands likewise have names that refer to Toronto in some way like the Toronto Dominion Bank the Toronto Film Festival and the Toronto bluejs even Canada's most beloved fast food chain Tim Horton is named after a hockey player from the Toronto Maple Leafs due to its size which is large even by us standards Toronto also enjoys a status as a must visit City for touring Comedians and bands and musicals or podcasters doing a live taping or public intellectuals having a spirited debate about the future of the West I would argue that this is in turn responsible for another significant part of the Canadian self-conception namely the belief that Canada is one of the most important countries in the entire world Canadians tend to think of Canada as one of the world's major countries that other nations should know about and respect and I would say that part of this is just a sort of extrapolation of the fact that Toronto gets a lot of attention from internationally famous people all right now let us get into how Toronto helped establish the legend of Canadian progressivism so people often talk about the liberalism of Canada as if it is something that is just inherent to the character of Canadians like we are just fundamentally a progressiv minded people or whatever but I would argue that a lot of the tropes of Canadian progressivism are actually rooted in particularly Toronto experiences that grew out of Toronto's unique history and then due to Toronto's unique influence over the rest of the country have been subsequently generalized into Universal Canadian values so for much of Canadian history Toronto was actually known for being one of the most conservative modest and quite puritanically Protestant places in North America beginning in the 19th century Toronto was understood as Canada's main English City in contrast to Montreal and Quebec City which were more French and accordingly throughout the 1800s Toronto established an identity that was very much boned up in the sort of upright wasp Victorian sensibilities that were very popular among English Canadian Elites of the time so it became a place where you know the sale of liquor was very tightly controlled and people dressed in a very auster way and there were these extremely strict laws Banning you from doing basically anything fun on a Sunday like buying ice cream or playing tennis shopkeepers would hang big black curtains in their Windows because it was seen as sinful to even look at products on the Lord's day there is a line I have always liked to boot how Toronto in those days was seen as the Methodist Rome in the sense of being defined by one of the most stridden for Ms of a particular sort of protestant ethos that was very colorless and judgmental there was a dark side to this too of course with the stridently waspy character of Toronto often making it a very uninviting place for minorities especially Catholics and Jews who were sometimes even on the receiving end of Street violence and all this lasted well into the 20th century with catchphrases like Toronto the good or New York run by the Swiss reflecting this idea that Toronto was this very upright place that was very boring and polite but orderly the legacy of this reputation probably has something to do with the fact that Canadians continue to be considered these very polite people to this day even though I would argue that there is less and less obvious evidence for that anymore and that is in part because Toronto culture underwent an enormous revolution in the latter half of the 20th century in the aftermath of World War II Canada's immigration law were greatly liberalized in the 1960s and this led to a tremendous inflow of immigrants into Toronto including an unprecedentedly high number of people of color and non-christians and this has been the case ever since and Toronto Is Now by far the single most diverse City in all of Canada the big social Revolutions of the post-war era like feminism anti-racism and gay rights came to Toronto or ruin the same time and were eagerly embraced by a population that was by then more than ready for them and that is a critical point Toronto had been such an uptight City for so long that when the Winds of social change started to blow they had a lot of lost time to make up for and this led to the emergence of the progressive Toronto culture that we see today which is proud but maybe also a little insecure in the sense of really feeling the need to prove that it's reactionary exclusionary past is now firmly behind it I think that this is actually very often the case with places we think of his having a very Progressive identity in the present if you look at their history it becomes easy to see their contemporary progressivism as very much a correction or even overcorrection to a past that was very much the other way I think that the modern Progressive identity of formerly conservative countries like Holland Ireland and Spain can be very much interpreted this way and like Canada I think that a lot of the progressivism to come out of those places was very much driven by their largest cities as well but much like those countries it is of course always worth noting that Canada did not universally transform into a Bastion of progressivism just because Toronto did different parts of Canada have their own histories with western Canada in particular having a persistently conservative culture that is a byproduct of very different variables than that which made up the old conservative wasp culture of Toronto but again because Toronto is so big and important it has become very easy to just generalize that Toronto style progressivism must surely be you know the default Canadian experience and for people not that well-versed in other parts of the country it is easy to assume that Toronto is more representative than it may actually be okay so the last highly significant Toronto thing is its geographic location so Toronto is located here and what do we immediately notice about this particular spot well for one thing it is very close to the United States particularly Detroit Philadelphia and New York City this has always made it easy to think of Toronto as existing within a certain Club of large American cities located on this part of the continent but since Toronto is also located in a different country this has also invited a certain obsession with trying to Define Toronto as being uniquely Canadian in some way travel from the nearby big American cities are often very curious about this and of course the torontonians are themselves as well in some ways it adds a kind of Novel nationalistic Dimension to the sort of traditional competitiveness that large American cities often have amongst themselves you know is La better than Chicago and all of that but in Toronto's case the things that make it distinctive as a city are often taken to be reflective of Canada as a whole both because the city really leans into its Canadian as something that makes it distinctive from its sister cities in the region as well as the fact that Toronto is very often the only Canadian city that many Americans want or need to visit anti-americanism is a huge part of Canada's national identity and is often taken to be an outgrowth of a certain sort of Canadian insecurity and inferiority and I think it's possible to understand this psychology as an extrapolation of a certain particularly Toronto Centric exper experience wherein no matter how good you get well you're never New York the other important Geographic variable to consider is Toronto's proximity to Ottawa and Quebec Ottawa is of course Canada's capital also located in Ontario and having Canada's largest city located within a 4-Hour Drive of the capital has helped consolidate a belief that most of what matters in this country occurs in this small corner of it given parliamentary Pol iCal power in Canada correlates with population a lot of Canada's most important politicians come from Toronto and their perspectives on the fundamental nature of the country are unlikely to be all that challenged by a capital city that is so close to where they're from the antics of these politicians are all covered by journalists working for Canada's major national news outlets which like I said are all concentrated in Toronto and the journalists probably went to school in Toronto as well this is a fact that people in other parts of the country particularly western Canada tend to resent a lot because it means that everything is supposedly infected with a liberal Toronto bias but on some level it's also just kind of an unavoidable reality given how Canada is set up and not really a product of malicious doing on anyone's part Toronto's proximity to the Quebec border which Ottawa is located on also matters a lot because it helps reinforce this idea that Canada should be primarily under tood as a union of French speakers and English speakers where I live over in Vancouver that can come off as a rather strange theory of the country just given the fact that there are hardly any french-speaking communities in western Canada other Canadians often get quite offended at the indifference I show to French Canada but that is because other Canadians often come from Toronto which is located Just 4 hours away from a french-speaking province of 8 million people this reality also makes political issues like French Canadian nationalism and separatism seem much more pressing in Toronto than they do where I come from and it's why some of the symbolic policies designed to appease French Canadian concerns like bilingual signage and French schools are much more visible in Toronto than in Vancouver even though Toronto doesn't have a particularly large french-speaking community itself they still give these issues a lot more oxygen than might be the case if Canada's largest city was located in say Calgary so yes that is my theory of how Toronto explains Canada does my analysis of Toronto perhaps remind you of the sway that any other large city has on its surrounding country let me know in the comments below and I will see you next [Music] week hello friend

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 214,461

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Id: El0UbVSeqe8

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023