Stop using "Northeastern", "Midwestern", "Sunbelt" etc. for Canadian cities?
 

Is our use of the American terms to describe Canadian cities - "Northeastern", "Midwestern", "Sunbelt"(!) etc. reflect colonial mentality at work? Does this terminology really apply to Canadian cities?

^ I never hear anyone saying northeastern or sunbelt to refer to Canada (what would the sunbelt even be here?), although I do hear Midwestern. That one actually seems to apply to some extent although not quite in the same way that the American version does in that country.

We have a poster on SSP who seems to have made it a life mission to convince everyone that Toronto is basically a Sunbelt city.

And people debate whether Toronto and Ontario are "more" Northeastern or Midwestern. "Midwestern" is often used pejoratively though and Northeastern being a sign of cosmopolitanism.

I've never actually heard the three regional names in the title used for parts of Canada, or heard Canadian regions lumped into their American variants.

That said, some American-origin regional names do have cross-border evocations.

The classic example is SW BC lumped in with the Pacific Northwest. This doesn't make sense in the Canadian context.

The Prairies are sometimes lumped in with the Great Plains, and obviously the Rocky Mountain region has cross-border ramifications as well.

Southern Ontario is often lumped in with the Great Lakes states, and the Maritimes are often portrayed as a kind of Extended New England.

of all things ...

I've also heard people refer to extreme SW Ontario as "the banana belt", and this moniker is sometimes used for the milder parts of BC.

But I am pretty sure this is in jest!

How far back do comparisons go? The "Last Best West" references the American West, and lines between the British and American control of the Pacific Northwest were still disputed in the 1800s, but I don't think there's much of a history of eastern Canadians and eastern Americans seeing one another as belonging to "one region" that's cross-border overall. The border between quite a lot of eastern Canada and the US is late 1700s in origin, after the Treaty of Paris.

The only terms I ever hear are West Coast or BC, The Prairies, Northern Ontario, Southern Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada or East Coast.

Of these only East coast and West coast would be ambiguous in a North American context. Even "The Prairies" is much more of a Canadian term vs. the US Plains or Great Plains.

Here it's Quebec and ROC or, le Dominion lol

Meanwhile, Illinois, home to both Chicago and in the heart of the corn belt, is known as the Prairie State (as well as the Land of Lincoln).

"Le Canada anglais"

It sounds like comparisons are being drawn to US regions which is fair ball, even if the comparisons themselves seem like a real stretch.

The southern parts of Canada's Prairies provinces are part of the geographic region known as the Great Plains, which of course is totally unrelated to political borders drawn up by humans.

Parts of Quebec and New Brunswick are part of the geographic region of Appalachia.

And of course there's the Great Lakes.

Also home to Northwestern University.

oui bien vu. il y aussi Ottawa, qui fait figure d'exception, comme si c'était un état à elle seule. en parlant du Fédéral.

C'est quasiment comme si Ottawa n'était pas vraiment une ville à part entière, et que son image se limitait plutôt à l'entité gouvernementale dont on entend parler dans les nouvelles. (Ben, pas pour moi et les Gatinois. Mais pour la plupart des Québécois.)

En tant que "ville", Ottawa c'est bien plus obscur. Genre Hamilton ou Kitchener... :P

ditto, never heard those terms used ever in Canada

I've heard the phrase Bible Belt used for parts of the BC interior, but that's about it. I think most people recognize that American terminology doesn't really fit this country very well.

I'll add my voice to the chorus. I've never heard these terms used for Canada.

I've heard Abbotsford and Mission called the Bible Belt but never here in the interior of BC. Not even sure where that would be. Rural Alberta would make sense that's for sure.

Same here. I've only ever heard "Great Lakes" or "Midwestern" in reference to Southern Ontario (from Toronto west). And that only rarely, when emphasizing commonalities with the U.S. side.

Americans are far more "guilty" of this, which makes sense.

I feel like though its more often that Canadian cities aren't on Americans' radar or are just thought of as their own separate category. Only a few people interested in cross-border city comparisons, such as forums like this, not the general public think that much about fitting or shoehorning Canadian cities into US regions.

For example, I'd imagine if given a list of cities like say, LA, Seattle, Phoenix, Vancouver, Toronto, NYC, Philly, Atlanta, most Americans "on the street" would more likely think:

Eastern cities -- NYC, Philly, Atlanta.
Western cities -- LA, Seattle, Phoenix
Canadian cities, or "non-US" cities -- Vancouver, Toronto

rather than

Eastern cities -- NYC, Philly, Atlanta, Toronto.
Western cities -- LA, Seattle, Phoenix, Vancouver

The national border, even if weak as cultural boundary, as people might argue, still makes a difference in people's minds.

American posters, yes, not Americans in general. For that matter I don't think average people in Buffalo spend their time debating whether their city is "really" Midwestern either.

My experience as a Canadian living in the US, is that when I say I'm from, and grew up in Toronto, I get asked, or assumed to be knowledgeable about other Canadian cities farther away much more than American cities nearby. I get the feeling that Americans think Canadians are expected to "represent" and be familiar with other Canadian cities despite Americans themselves being more mobile cross-country than Canadians.

A Texan asked me about Alberta and if I've been there, and New Englanders have asked me about Montreal/Quebec and my experiences there, even when I've said I'm from a Great Lakes city, and while I have been to those places they've asked about, I'm not lived long term in them.

If regional affiliation overrode national identity, then I'd image the Texan and New Englander would ask me about Buffalo, Rochester, if not Detroit and Chicago and see me as being more like inhabitants of these places and not Quebecois and Albertans.

Plus, Americans can sometimes be uncertain/unfamiliar with the exact locations of Canadian cities other than having heard of them, so I doubt most Americans are heavily invested in thinking about the nearest Canadian city to their region, other than people really close like residents of Seattle, Detroit, Buffalo with lots of firsthand experience of Canadians and Canada in their immediate vicinity.

I'm a weather enthusiast so to me it looks like that

CONUS
Northeast
Northwest
Southeast
Southwest

MidWest, Great Plains, Dixie Alley, Ohio Valley, TX-OK Panhandle, Central US,
etc

http://www.skyscraperpage.com/forum/...=225396&page=7

https://www.skyscraperpage.com/forum...68&postcount=3

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...&postcount=208

You used to know ...

When thinking in terms of the continent, some of these terms are appropriate, but in the context of Canada alone they make little or no sense. The "Sunbelt" Toronto reference makes no sense at all in any context. We do think of Vancouver/Victoria as part of the Northwest region, but you left that one out.

Sunbelt = Maple Creek. :)

what he said.

One sad fact about Canada is that there aren't any really sunny areas. The sunniest parts of the Prairies get around 2300-2400 hours of sunshine a year while here in Vancouver we get around 1900-2000. A place like Phoenix gets around 3800 hours.

The sun also gets lower in the sky the farther north you go, so all of Western Canada receives weak solar irradiance for a large part of the year. In late December on a sunny day in Maple Creek the sun only gets around 16 degrees above the horizon (in Windsor it gets up to 24 degrees). In Phoenix it gets up to 33 degrees, which is the same as Maple Creek in early October.

Canada doesn't really have a sunbelt.

"Banana belts" are just areas that are milder or warmer than the surrounding region. It makes perfect sense to say places in Ontario like Niagara are banana belts. But it has limited significance.

Completely anecdotal but there's a AAA minor hockey association between Windsor and Chatham-Kent that's called Sun County - their teams are even called the Panthers. :tup:

Our "sunbelts" are Florida, Arizona and Palm Springs!

Yes but Creston is a small town and bountiful is a village so way too small to call a belt.

Yep, they're in the banana belt

I wonder how many in Nunavut feel about it being called that.

So in November 2016 you stated that the interior around Creston was part of Canada's bible belt (thread I linked to) but today they're not. Got it! :tup:

A lot of people here will use "bible belt" as a pejorative for the Pentecostal-dominated stretch of Central NL (we've even had politicians in the House of Assembly be reprimanded for dismissing from colleagues from that region with lines like, "Shouldn't you be at church?" or whatever). And you'll hear "Sun country" or "God's country" in reference to areas with west-facing coastlines, such as suburban Conception Bay South.

None of these are considered American terms. Those that are I've never heard used here. For example, we don't say or think of ourselves as part of the northeast. Even ones that easily apply like "Atlantic seaboard" are not the phrasing we use.

We're pretty self-centered. Most geographic references, such as West Coast, refer to our own. Then we use mainland for Canada, "away" for Canada and the rest of the world, or a specific name - such as United States, or the Maritimes.

Canadian cities can be similar to their American counterparts, but American geographical terms should only be used for American cities. You can however say that a certain Canadian city looks midwestern, but you can’t say that they are midwestern!

The closest I can think of might be that the northern parts of the province of Ontario is divided into 'Northeast' and 'Northwest', so that applies at a provincial level.

I've never heard those terms applied to Canada as a whole, though.

The 'sunbelt' one makes me chuckle. So, I guess Helsinki would be in the 'sunbelt' of Finland, huh?

I've never heard those terms applied to Canadian cities. Bizarre.

The only one I've heard outside of a handful of conversations on SSP is coastal BC belonging to the "Pacific Northwest", or Vancouver being one of a trio of major Pacific Northwest cities (the others being Seattle and Portland).

But even if you do a day trip from Vancouver to Bellingham, the differences are noticeable. The accents are different. Buildings from comparable eras are different. The food choices are different. And that's before people open their mouths (which in the US is very quickly). There's no mistaking that you're in a different country.

Southern Ontario being in the "Midwest" doesn't make any sense. Sure, both places were settled around the same time and both places have some vestiges of heavy industry, but the differences end there.

It would be amusing to ask a Torontonian if they're in the "midwest" of Canada. West of what? Even if the answer is a historical riddle that implies that Toronto is "west of Montreal, the formerly dominant city", Ontario itself never entered Confederation as anything but a major player.

Another one that I guess could get used on both sides of the border is to talk of the Great Lakes region, though maybe in Canada people instead just say "Ontario"...? Actually now that I'm pausing to think about it, they probably do, so scratch that. No Albertan would ever say "I'm relocating to the Great Lakes region", they'll say "I'm relocating to Ontario".

The same concept applies to the "west coast": we don't really say that here, or if we do we probably mean the U.S. west coast, because if we mean Canada's west coast we can simply call that "BC". Similarly, I expect that if the state of California included the western halves of WA and OR, Americans wouldn't use the term "west coast" much anymore, simply calling it California. Linguistically, it's usually predictable that the simpler terms will prevail.

"To go out west" means going to Prairies and/or BC.

Say hello to Manitoba's self-proclaimed banana belt!

https://media.winnipegfreepress.com/...a-banana-c.jpg

? Surely you're aware that what is now Ontario used to be named "Canada West"?

It's basically the same trajectory as the American West which became the Midwest - it used to be the West in practice, and then it wasn't anymore.

Canada West is now Canada's Midwest, now that there's a bunch of provinces west of it. But we don't really need those terms as Canada West / Nowadays Canada's Midwest has a single name nowadays, "Ontario".

As I mentioned in the post above, that factor is what makes all the difference: if the U.S. Midwest was a single state, the term "Midwest" would not be relevant.

Yeah. Not to mention, it's almost funny how the Great Lakes themselves are ignored by Ontarians, especially since they're the most prominent natural feature of this otherwise topographically dull part of the world.

There are no big cities on 3 of the 4 Ontario Great Lakes. Most of the population outside of the GTA is concentrated on a narrow spine (the 401) that is as far away from Lake Erie and Huron as possible on the Southwestern Ontario peninsula. Most people never think of Southwestern Ontario as a peninsula (wasn't that a thread?). And, finally, most downtowns of Ontario cities on the Great Lakes - with a few exceptions - is physically removed from the lake, often a few kilometers inland (e.g. Hamilton, Oshawa, St. Catharines, Owen Sound, etc.).

Definitely. The "Great Lakes region" sounds a bit academic, or like something a weather reporter says. Americans say midwest for Great Lakes states, and in Canada it's simply Ontario. To wit:

Yep, turns out Ontario is a dream destination for kids in BC. Heh.

I'm quite certain most people here would assume you meant California if you said you were going to the west coast. Otherwise, BC is BC, and out west means anything from Manitoba to BC.

Though it would produce an amusing chuckle to clarify that you meant "Ontario's west coast." Which nobody actually says, as it's a fanciful term concocted by the tourism-minded Huron county government. We just say Lake Huron. Or maybe "the lake," as it's pretty clear which one you mean when you're around here.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.31516...7i13312!8i6656
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.56506...7i13312!8i6656