Simple and flippant answer: Because we’re up to our necks in generic university arts/science graduates, and short of qualified machinists and the like. Most undergraduate degrees don’t train you for a specific job, trade school teaches you a trade. Unfortunately, many trades have few young people going into them. As we’ve failed to produce skilled labourers, we’d like to import them.
Rickjay,
What happened to your assertion that even a very liberal interpretation of the boundaries would only yield 4M?
Ugh…never mind…I apologize. My statement that the population of the GTA is “~5M”, rather than being part of a well-intentioned attempt to provide a summary of cities in Canada, was clearly an egregious exaggeration of diabolical scale.
Now that you have unmasked my plot, my cronies at the City of Toronto, Statistics Canada and I will now hastily set about correcting the huge volume of supporting statistics we have so cleverly and broadly disseminated.
Truly, a “great debate”, RickJay.
Born in Belfast NI , grew up in toronto , moved to barrie about 5 years ago.
I have probably driven by it at least once , oro is only about 15 minutes from where i live ,but bass road does not sound familliar.
Declan
So which parts would those be: Dominion Square and the cathedral? The mountain? Square Saint-Louis? Jean-Drapeau park? The Jacques-Cartier Bridge? Notre-Dame Basilica?
There is one landmark in Oro County which you may wish to visit, as it is a very interesting bit of local history: the African Episcopal Church.
It is just a log cabin, but it represents the actual “end” of the so-called “Underground Railway”.
Many Blacks fleeing slavery settled just across the border, for example in the Niagra region. Others, fearing bounty hunters, travelled further inland. The most wary settled in Oro county - in fact, they were the first non-Aboriginal settlers in that area.
However, the place was too cold and (at the time) too remote for many (imagine running away from Alabama and ending up spending the winter in a log cabin in Oro!), so after the Civil war, they mostly all left. Their chuirch remains.
I was going to post the exact opposite. Much of Montreal is gorgeous- the skyline, Old Montreal, Mt. Royal, little streets in Mile End.
But the winters are hell on Earth, and the snow removal is far from top notch. Even visitors from Toronto and Eastern Canada find it cold.
Of course, if you’ve been there before, you have probably already realized that it’s basically the Gay Capitol of Canada. They, and fag hags, basically run the city (the cool parts, at least).
Gosh, I always thought the snow removal in Montreal was reasonably good. Snow removal in Toronto is dreadful, and getting worse.
I live within the city of Toronto, but I work in the city of Mississauga. My drive in the morning is about twenty minutes and the line between the two cities is almost exactly halfway; I drive straight west on Burnamthorpe Road, a major east-west route. I would guess that at least 10-15 times last winter after snowstorms, when I left to go to work, which is around 7:30-8:00, Burnamthope still had not been plowed. This is a major, four-lane route. Every single time, when I hit the Mississauga border, the road had been cleared.
I would honestly be quite surprised if any major city in Canada had worse snow removal than Toronto.
Kingston. Mind you, wait a minute and it’ll rain (or something) so there’s really no need. 
Spoken like a man who’s never lived in Vancouver. One good snowfall per winter seems to be the norm in Vancouver, but every year when it happens it’s like the white stuff from the sky is a strange new miracle substance never before seen on Earth.
Of course it will go away pretty soon on its own, like Grey said about Kingston. But still.
Moderator’s Note: Gay marriage or not, this doesn’t really seem to have developed into a Great Debate.
I’ve already discussed this, but in a normal winter, Montreal doesn’t get much below -20 (this year was not a normal winter, before someone complains).
If you live within a short distance of a metro station, you’re sitting pretty. (I’ve gone months without going outside any further than a block.)
I greatly prefer Montreal winters to Winnipeg ones, that’s for damn sure.
Yup. At the risk of repeating myself, the frickin’ cathedral is called Mary Queen of the World, for chrissakes. Also look at this.
But that isn’t a fair comparison. Sure, Vancouver has no snow removal service worth mentioning, but neither do Houston, Atlanta, or Havana. You have to balance Vancouver’s relative skill at snow removal against how much snow they have to remove, right? It’s sort of like criticizing Toronto because its animal services department doesn’t have the right gear for wrangling alligators.
Overall, you will be far more inconvenienced by Toronto’s incompetence at snow removal than you will Vancouver’s. It wouldn’t be worth the tax dollars for Vancouver to invest in a large fleet of snow removal vehicles.
Oh, and I am from Kingston and it is merely the finest little city on Earth, with the world’s best university (Queen’s cha geill!), the world’s best chicken wings (Kingston Brewing Co., 33 Clarence St., try the various Dragon brand beers) the world’s best rock and roll band, at least until they became weenies (The Tragically Hip) the world’s best bar and dance joint (The Grizzly Grill) and the world’s fattest and most irritating celebrity (Dan Aykroyd.) It is the only place in the world where an Olympic sports venue is right next to a super-high-maximum security prison (yes, that is literally true - the wall of the Kingston Pen is the eastern limit of Portsmouth Olympic Harbour.) I love it there. But it’s smaller than the city size the OP was aiming for.
Ah the K-town pen and others, its not often you get to go to school in a city with great ties to Hip songs.
In all fairness Kingston is absolutely gorgeous from mid spring to just after the leaves fall. After that, its a dreary limbo world with grey skies, grey buildings (Kingston limestone) and grey ground. Of course that might have been just the way the campus looked.
Rick you forgot the lepord print wall hanging at Stages by the way.
Hurmph. All this talk of Canadian cities and no one has mentioned Charlottetown, PEI.
If you want a true small town feel with cheap real estate, then PEI is the place. Charlottetown has both DSL and cable modem highspeed and a nice house on the water can be had for $150K.
Of course, there is no nightlife to speak of and PEI is largely uni-cultural. Growing up there, the only Asian people I saw were Japanese tourists and there was only 1 black kid in my high school.
Winters are not as cold as other cities, but you get lots of snow. Summers are usually damp and overcast. Not to say that you can’t get nice weather, but extended periods of “hot and dry” are not usually forecasted.
Nod. It’s more of a discussion of the snow-removal capabilities of various cities (which I guess SOME might see as a GD )
I won’t. While I believe Alberta is the best-est place in Canada to live, I would definetly not endorse it as home for someone that is fleeing the right-wing Government of the US. Some of our Provincial policies are so far right GWB would have to think twice about them and the Alberta Government, much to the dismay of many, is very unlikely to drastically change anytime soon.
That said, I was born here but lived in and visited many other Canadian cities and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
But then again, I’m about as right wing as they come nowadays.
Houston, Atlanta, and Havana presumably get snow in the winter once every fifty years, if ever. Vancouver seems to get one good dump every winter. I realize Vancouver doesn’t need a fleet of snowplows to rival Ottawa’s, but it would be nice if they were better prepared for that one snowfall per year. Perhaps they could get some snowplow blades that attach to the front of dump trucks (I’m told that was considered once for Seattle, which is in much the same predicament).
To use your analogy, if May 5 was Alligator Day in Toronto and on that day half a dozen alligators tended to wander down Yonge Street, I wouldn’t expect a full-time alligator-wrangling squad. But a couple of nets stored in a closet in City Hall might be nice.
RickJay, I will also challenge your snow-removal assertions. Calgary’s official policy on snow removal is “wait for a chinook.” We have, I believe, 2 snow plows in Calgary - in one of the most sprawling cities in North America. They plow the major roads, but not the suburbs - ever. Last heavy snow winter we had, people had to shovel their own roads in the 'burbs to get their cars out. Not their driveways, but the ROADS. We don’t get tons of snow, but we do get enough.
As for the OP, Calgary is the home of a lot of transplanted Texans, for some reason. We are also the head office capital of Canada - Calgary is a very thriving business centre. bernse is right about the right-wing politics here, though. Prince Ralph has unilaterally declared that Alberta will not support gay marriage.
As for the weather here, no one has mentioned the chinooks yet. Calgary does have a fairly cold winter, but you can expect chinooks every couple of weeks. They are like a blessing from the Creator - you just went through three weeks of -25, then all of a sudden it’s +5 for a week. Makes the winters much more bearable.
The summers are also great here, if you like mild summers with virtually no bugs. The temperature rarely gets above +30 C.
One more thing you need to know about Canada - our version of the North/South rivalry of the States is our East/West rivalry here. Choose wisely, my friend.
West/Central/East
The West hates being ignored by the East (Ontario/Quebec) but they forget the Eastern provinces. They in turn hate being ignored by the Centre (Ontario/Quebec).