Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
Of the people I was thinking of specifically, only one (out of three) was both Anglo and Canadian. I honestly only have a vague sense of what makes a city "provincial" - I can't think of any examples really.
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The idea that some places are inherently more provincial than others is becoming an anachronism in the wealthier, more connected parts of the world (and more and more parts are becoming wealthy and well-connected). In smaller cities there used to be severe limitations on what you could get, how much you could participate in global or even national culture, and how easy it was to travel. These are mostly gone now so the limiting factor when it comes to worldliness is how much people are interested in learning about and travelling to other parts of the world. There's a cultural component to those preferences but they depend more on the preferences of individuals than what city they happen to live in, so you can find comparatively provincial people in big cities and worldly people in small towns. Some of the most worldly people I know live in tiny hamlets.
I do agree that in the Anglosphere there is a strange pecking order. It is strange because, in Canada, we have mostly retained the order despite changes to the underlying realities. In Halifax for example people tend like the idea that they're in a horrible backwater. What's interesting is that the yardstick for the past 50 years or so has been Toronto, but Toronto itself has been a moving target. People used to think they lived in a backwater because they were in a town that was much smaller and less connected than another third-rate town. Now the same comparisons are against a fairly prominent global city.
I bet a significant portion of the pecking order dates to the era when Canada was governed by six week old mail delivered by ship from London. Meanwhile many of the people who operate under these assumptions are convinced that we made a clean break and that history is irrelevant.
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