I love visiting Toronto. Montreal is more foreign, more beautiful, more sophisticated, and has better food. And i didn’t have as many friends there and enjoy Toronto more.
I’ve been to Toronto twice. While that hardly makes me an expert, I enjoyed both visits. Went up the CN Tower twice—try to top that!
Also, the day we visited the Hockey HoF, it was Flyers day! If you wore Flyers stuff (which we did) you got some kind of discount. Turns out there are lots of Canadians inducted in the Hall. Who knew?
And @Spoons.
Next to my son-in-law and the father of my grandchildren, my nearest and dearest Canadian friend. Plus he is a cat person, creme de la creme of bipeds.
About zee v. zed: Of course the latter is official. But when I first came here, I always said zee and my students zed. But by the time I retired I was saying zed and my sesame st. generation students were mostly saying zee.
Another thing you should know. Canadians will not understand the phrase “a quarter of one” and will ask if you mean “a quarter to one” or “a quarter after one”. Then there is the question of American or British spelling. I systematically use “cheque” if it is in C$ and “check” if US$. But most Canadians either don’t know or don’t care much how you spell things. They don’t use horrors like tyre, gaol, or kerb, eh?
Hi @Eva_Luna ,
Try this thread:
Didn’t Terence Stamp play Zed in that old Superman movie???
The difficulty is seeing it as a war between two countries, the UK and the US, with opposite war goals, so only one country could “win” by achieving their war goals.
It was a bit more complicated. One view is that there were four different groups involved: the British government, the Canadian colonists, the First Nations allied with Britain, and the US, and they had different war goals, with some overlap between the war goals of UK and the Canadian colonists.
Britain wanted to keep its British North American colonies, and didn’t really want a war. It was still fighting the Napoleonic Wars, and had already repealed the Orders-in-Council that related to shipping and pressing Britons on US ships.
The Canadian colonists wanted to stay independent from the US. That wasn’t a “minor” goal for them. That was crucial.
The US wanted to end the restrictions Britain was placing on shipping, and reassert their independence, and conquer Canada. Tom Jefferson said that capturing Canada would be a “mere matter of marching.” Conquering Canada would also push the British out of North America once and for all.
The First Nations wanted to keep their semi-autonomy within North America.
So who achieved their war goals?
Well, Canada won their war goal 100%, the only one of the four to do so. The US did not conquer Canada, and Upper Canada and Lower Canada retained their preferred positions under British protection.
The US achieved their war goal of reducing British influence in North America. Britain was clearly not the dominant power on the continent; the US now was. That was a US win. However, the US failed in their war goal of annexing Canada. (Sorry, Tom.)
Britain kept its North American colonies, which had been an important goal, so that was a partial win against the US. However, Britain suffered a loss of prestige and power in North America. To that extent, the US gain was a UK loss.
The First Nations lost. Their value to the British had been as allies in the fight with the US. Once the British accepted that the US was now the dominant power, their need for First Nations allies dropped dramatically.
One analogy I’ve used is the Vietnam War. For the North Vietnamese, a win was not being overrun by the US. Once the US troops left, North Vietnam had won its war goals. That’s pretty much the same as the Canadian colonists: once the US pulled its troops from the battle, the Canadians had won.
Here’s a SD Staff Report from 18 years ago, in which I’m quoted. (Gaack! 18 years!)
JJ McCullough is a Canadian YouTuber I like who makes a lot of entertaining videos about Canada-related stuff. His videos aren’t normally this long but if you can spare 53 minutes, this crash course in Canadian politics makes the topic as accessible as you’ll find:
YMMV, I’m not really a fan of his. Too snide and snarky, and other vids of his that I’ve seen, he got stuff wrong.
Eva, if you’re interested in a text instead of a vid, there’s this booklet, originally drafted by the late, lamented, Eugene Forsey, an expert on the Canadian constitutional structure. It’s now in its 10th edition, having been regularly updated since his death.
Then start listening to the Hip
Followed by this not-a-beer-commercial:
I am not Canadian
eta: Also listen to the “Because News” podcast.
I grew up in Ontario, have been back in the U.S. for almost 38 years. I still trip over the occasional Canadianism, like when I went to buy some bourbon for a recipe and told the clerk I needed “a mickey of bourbon”. Blank look. Turns out “mickey” for “pint bottle” is Canadian!
Followed by Great Big Sea.
At the risk of continuing the stereotype, the fact that this thread quickly became about Toronto and how the rest of the country compares to Toronto is kind of why everyone hates Toronto (and the Leafs…).
When someone says “a boot” they are not talking footwear. They are talking “about” something, they just can’t make the right noises.
I’d like to add that one of my all-time favorite bands is The Guess Who. I see Burton whenever he’s touring. If that doesn’t increase my Canada-cred, I don’t know what would.
‘a boot’ and ‘about’ are not homophones in the Canadian dialect, despite the apparent inability of Americans to hear the difference.
I did once take a 30-hour train ride across Siberia. A small portion of Siberia. There were some Brits in our car who had been on the train since Vladivostok and had intended to take the train all the way back to London, but they were so stir-crazy that they got off with us in Novosibirsk and flew the rest of the way back.
Québécois swearing is fun, and my prefered way of expressing frustration. I get very, very francophone when angry (or driving…the two may be related), tabarnak!
I believe you work in the aircraft industry which is a significant part of the Montreal economy.* I hope you realize that some of us Toronto denizens are among the first to defend Montreal as a more beautiful, more cultural, and more sophisticated city, and certainly one offering far better food in general than Toronto (with the exception of my favourite and basically unaffordable sushi restaurant here)!
* My overlap with the aircraft industry was in the days when “Ethernet” meant 10 Mbps. I once visited CAE in Montreal as a computer consultant. It was a fun place with all of their fantastic simulators. One they were were working on at the time was a fighter jet simulator. Instead of screens representing views out the windows, this thing had a whole dome around it representing practically 360-degree views. To support the high bandwidth needed between the computers and the display and actuator devices, CAE used bundles of Ethernet cables! These were the world’s best computer games, if you had a few million dollars to throw around!
Swearing in Québécois is fun. But in the first ten years of French learned in Ontario, the only official words we learned were “Zut!’” (which is very weak beer) and “Mozusse!” (which gets a laugh, but also says something a bit sad, and a bit dated.)
Before responding to this thread, I had never heard of The Canada Guide, a free website which really does go over, in some detail, everything Canadian.
Including Canadian basics, politics and government, culture, geography, symbols and trivia. It has almost everything an interested tourist would want to know about Canada written at a secondary school level. Like the hundred pages in a random Lonely Planet guide but quite a bit better. Including gestures to avoid, “weird rituals around sneezing”, bureaucracy, Crown corporations, the parts and sections of the Constitution, the best of the NFB… and much more. A find! So good I’m linking it again. This is the definitive answer to the thread.