Comments from Torontonians/Vancouverites or ROCers in general à la "Montreal isn't diverse very all and has very few immigrants! I mean, where are all the dudes with turbans?" remind me of Americans who say Toronto and Vancouver aren't diverse because they don't have a ton of Hispanics or Black people, respectively.

I understand that cocky may be deemed un-Canadian, but there are plenty of other self-absorbed (possibily a bit insecure?) towns on the map. See epic, scrolling photo threads ;-)

As for 'it's unfair to put this down to newcomers/immigrants', it might be unfair to characterize my "it's hard to keep up" joke (that didn't land) this way.

Like my Calcutta-born Bengali Canadian father-in-law, who named his daughters Nova and Scotia, there are lots of Canadian realities with legit creds.

Still don’t see it. Auckland wears its British heritage, demographics aside, much more so than any other largish commonwealth city: the terrace housing, formal gardens, prevalence of high tea. It is far sleepier than Toronto, never had a large industrial base and is poorly integrated into other regions due to remoteness. The terrain is very PNW and the layout Northern California like, snaking through valleys and up hillsides in what is likely the world’s most sprawling city. It does look to the UK and Australia, but so does most of NZ.

My grandfather grew up on a dairy farm in what is now the southern suburbs of Auckland.

We're in agreement when it comes to this stuff! :tup:

I have never been to Auckland so I had to take a look - comparisons can be fun. CBD looks more Vancouver-esque to me than Toronto for sure. Lots of Victorian housing but most is 1 storey wood panel detached cottages which are extremely rare here. But this view is quite similar: https://goo.gl/maps/GpNyh7z6cdZJpcXz5

You are the king of the strawman - there is no reasoning with a comment like that.

Mine is admittedly a brief impression, so I'm not going to argue it as if it were gospel.

Well, jhikka said this and this yesterday, which is basically the same thing as my comment (minus the caricatural flair), but with different words. Which is to say that Montreal does not correspond or live up to the image of Canada's cities as immigration hubs.

Your so-called caricatural flair is the straw man. jhikka's post has heaps of nuance that you conveniently ignore.

It's plainly obvious that I am referring to people who think that if a city doesn't have the same kind of diversity as theirs, that it doesn't have "diversity".

Excuse me for assuming that most people here are educated enough to follow both "first degree" and "second degree" language.

Canada is to a degree a bunch of city states. I don't think it's an accident that most provinces have a primate city with roughly half the total population. Toronto's size is predicted by this model based on the size of Ontario.

To add a bit more nuance to this there are some winner-takes-all economic effects within Canada. Toronto is now the beneficiary of most of those.

I think these two phenomena come much closer to explaining how Canada works than a concept based around a country like Mexico or Russia where the capital dominates (and of course Toronto isn't the capital of Canada; I'm not even sure Ontario has as much influence on federal politics as Quebec).

When looking at the influence of a city I believe you also need to account for attenuation of influence over long distances. If you have a much bigger city 2 hours away, it will have a major impact on the economy and can turn another city into a bedroom community. If it's 3,000 km away the relationship is different.

Yes. Definitely agree with this.

I think it was wave46 who said that the larger provinces especially were almost like self-contained small European countries. Think of Sweden with Stockholm or Prague in the Czech Republic.

In terms of places to study, live and build a career, if you're an Ontarian, a Quebecer, an Alberta or a BCer, you don't really have much impetus to leave your province. They basically offer everything you need in terms of opportunities, lifestyles, living environments. Or at least, you usually won't gain that much by changing provinces.

Yeah, well the regulatory environment in Canada favours the creation of a very small club of corporate megaweights. Likely a legacy of when we had Crown corporations for everything under the sun - or at least it seemed so.

These big boys tend to congregate in a country's largest city. Canada generally speaking doesn't have major banks headquartered in cities on the level of Charlotte NC.

Thankfully you have the Québec Inc. crowd which can't fathom having its HQs anywhere but Quebec (generally Montreal) to counter-balance a bit, but even so corporate Canada is massively concentrated in the GTA.

Halifax is awful at preserving its historic buildings but it has more historical stuff than most Canadian cities, particularly pre-Victorian.

One thing I notice about Halifax is that it is for Atlantic Canada what people complain Toronto is not for Canada. This may be changing now but it used to have a lot of live music venues and was a popular destination for bands from around the region (who locally were as popular as the wider pop culture stuff, either Canadian content or international). Then the food scene had a distinct Atlantic component, etc. But when I lived there you were more likely to encounter a Newfoundland, New Brunswick, or Cape Breton transplant than an immigrant (though immigrants were not really that rare). These days that may not be so true, and newcomers to Canada may not feel the same connections to other parts of the region they live in.

Also, the notion of Halifax being the "big city" or cultural/business capital of Atlantic Canada upsets some in NL and to a lesser extent NB. I think a lot of people would resent Toronto even more if it were a stronger national cultural hub.

Yes but we do not have our own Canadian semiconductor manufacturing capacity, smartphone, operating systems, Google, or even Twitter or Facebook. We had one small piece of that at one point with Nortel, RIP.

(To those who always respond by listing off a bunch of Shopify type companies, I know these exist, but they are comparatively unimportant and they are not examples of regulated national monopolies or oligopolies.)

There is a clear trend of newer industries being globalized while it's old industries that are more regulated. In principle Canada could regulate the new ones too but that doesn't seem likely in the current political environment.

It's difficult, that's for sure.

I don't disagree but how many countries have their own Google, Twitter or Facebook these days?

Corporate Canada is rather depressing in its lack of ambition and innovation (and its obsession with selling out early to Americans in order to retire at 38), it is true.

You could start by telling us why Toronto and Vancouver embody the "Canada as an immigration nation" imagery more than Montreal does.

Since that seems to be what you were getting at.

Montreal's immigrant cohort is inherently sole-sourced from Francophone countries (generally-speaking), thereby providing a less diverse field of immigrants on the whole compared to other Canadian cities. It's not l'science du rocket.

Feel free to twist more of my words in five consecutive posts, though. Nobody else is allowed to have an opinion on Quebec on this forum anyway without going through the Quebecois Ninja Warrior gauntlet of fifteen pages of humming and hawing.

Almost none, and no countries the size of Canada. But I'm not making an argument about what we should have. I'm just pointing out that Canadians rely more and more on global-scale and imported products rather than national monopolies or oligopolies. Hence there are fewer winner-takes-all-in-Canada markets and a weakening sense that all of the best and brightest will move to the biggest Canadian city while other Canadian cities get the leftovers (Toronto post-1970's, Montreal before that).

It's also getting easier and easier to start up companies or open branch offices in more remote areas. In the past, there was often a sense that these areas were limited to resource extraction or at best secondary industries.