I wouldn’t recommend Montreal. It’s a great place to visit, and English is spoken by everyone, but if you’re showing up without a job I think the fact that you speak about as much French as I do will limit your employment opportunities. I can’t imagine any retail place hiring you without fluent French, but I’m willing to be proven wrong if anyone can dispute this. The winter might kill you, being from Ireland.
Vancouver would probably be your best bet for weather you’re used to, but it can be expensive.
Southern Ontario, as elbows mentions is nice. The winters aren’t too cold, but there can be plenty of snow in the London area. I just had a look at some apartment prices in Toronto: $700 a month for a one bedroom apartment? Is that correct? Because it seems awfully cheap to me. If that’s the case then Toronto would be a great deal for you. Tonnes to do and see, relatively mild weather, lower costs than Vancouver, and great transportation.
I’m just posting to put in a plug for Vancouver. We have palm trees, too! At least six. It’s a bit more difficult to get back and forth to Europe, but a great place to live. Much more Chinese influence than Toronto, and more rain than snow. (Okay, more rain than sun, more rain than anything, but you’re from Ireland: you can handle it.)
For transit, check out mapnificent.net; nice graphics of how far you can get on public transit in 1–180 minutes. I think they presume a bicycle, but it’s useful anyway.
Actually OCAD might not be suitable more due to it’s size (only about 7k students total) than it’s direction. They actually have a pretty decent technology setup for staff and students and are looking for additonal innovations to allow them to maximize the usage of their very limited space. Being right downtown is great in some ways but bad for expansion.
Also OP, if you decide on Toronto let us know - I think in my old folder of job hunting information I have a contact who does some staffing for Centennial.
If you want more opportunities to practice your French, Ottawa might be an option, but the transit system isn’t great from what I hear (at least, I’ve never used it, since my friends choose to live in suburbia).
I don’t know what the employment situation is out there, but for IT the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge-Guelph (Missisauga/Oakville/Hamilton) area is pretty good - there are lots of companies out there. Guelph is a beautiful city with pretty good transit, given it’s size and layout.
You can always try Montreal though I recommend getting a job lined up before coming here due to the language issues. It might be tough on whatever visa you can get - Québec might have some weird requirements attached to it. There’s a fair bit of IT and aviation technology out here, so those might be places to look for one-year contract work.
Ottawa’s transit system isn’t too bad. It’s all buses though, although there’s some light rail starting to be built. You pretty much need to be fluently bilingual to land a retail job in Ottawa too, since the city has adopted an official bilingual policy. It’s not as much of a showstopper as it would be in Montreal, but nonetheless it exists.
Like Montreal though, the winter months can really wear you down. We’ve had so much freezing rain this winter that my front step in encased in an inch of impenetrable ice. It’s slightly above freezing today, so maybe I can chip away at it tonight.
Outside the big three, mentioned upthread, there are a handful of medium cities that don’t have as great transit, but are small enough to get around on bike or the bus.
Ottawa, Halifax and Victoria are all vibrant, fun cities with decent weather. Ottawa probably has the harshest winters, but it doesn’t get crazy cold like the prairies or the north.
There’s also smaller towns like Kingston, Quebec City, St. Johns, Saskatoon, Banff, Canmore, Revelstoke and Comox that have a ton of natural beauty, but would be harder find a job. (Saskatoon has a booming economy, but the harshest winters of the above).
Actually the more that I think about it the more it makes sense to select a few suitable cities and do preliminary job hunting remotely to determine where you’ll end up. You’re looking for an IT job so most hiring managers will be capable of handling the technology to support that kind of an interview process although of course not all will be willing.
That should at least narrow down for you what will be possible.
With the economy stalled a bit in some places, a place like Calgary or Saskatoon might be best suited to you from an employability standpoint, although transportation can be tricky if you’re not right on the main lines.
But there’s also the snow and cold. Although we’ve gotten off very easily so far this winter, with something like 20 or 21 days with highs below freezing, which is remarkably mild. Of course, if you want the true Canada experience, as Cat Whisperer notes, you have to get through all that. Plus, it makes you tougher.
In my experience, Edmonton’s bus service is sorta crummy, but the LRT (light rail) is okay. The LRT line runs right under the University of Alberta campus, with one station near the middle and another near the edge.
If he gets there before the snow flies,
And if things are going good,
You could meet him if he sends you down the fare.
But if you wait until it’s winter,
It will be no good
'Cause that wind sure can blow way out there
Southern California’s climate is considered Mediterranean (Csa under Köppen classification), rather than (Csb/Cfb classification for the Pacific Northwest) Vancouver Island.
Very much like the southwestern tip of England, from the way it sounds. I remember a tour guide for Buchart Gardens (about 15 miles north of Victoria) boasted of a growing season very comparable to southwestern England, and how rose bushes thrived the best in that type of climate.
And if you spend a winter in Winnipeg, that counts for double!
