In this thread a slight hijack occured regarding Western alienation and a what is called an Eastern Bias of the Federal polititians. Instead of continuing the side debate there I though we should bring it here into its own thread. I’d like to see what other Candians think about this debate. Nothing klike a healthy debate on what this country is and what it should be.
So, we’re going to sit here and watch the Canuck Dopers choose up sides? Neat! Count me in on the side of the Western Aliens. I always wanted to live in a place called “Moose Jaw”.
Looks like you can debate either, “the East gets the money, and Saskatchewan gets persecuted”, or, “The Liberals/Conservatives are flaming idjits who couldn’t run a junior high Student Council”, or, “Whither the Canadian military in the post-Soviet era?”
Okay, I’m in. I choose the West because, well, I was born and raised here (Saskatchewan, mostly, but Calgary for the last 12 years). I’ve heard the gripes from my parents all my life, and now I’ve developed a few of my own as well.
Let’s start with something obvious, like how Torontonians consider Toronto the centre of the Universe, and can’t begin to fathom that there are millions of people living in the western provinces who wouldn’t move to Toronto if they were paid large sums of money. This is not because we’re jealous of you, or because we couldn’t handle it if we did move there; we just don’t want to. I have some friends from the Toronto area, and let me tell you, the Saskatchewan bashing gets old. Toronto is a valid place to live; so is Saskatoon. And not every prairie person is a bone-headed redneck, thank you very much. We may be polite and good-natured, but please don’t mistake that for stupid.
And just for the record, DDG, I’ve lived in Moose Jaw, and it’s not as glamourous as it may seem.
Oh yeah, I wanted to say thanks to king pengvin for opening this thread; it gives us a great chance to communicate person-to-person without the filter of the media colouring everything.
Its one of the great weird regional anger things going in the world today. It’s not quite as bad as Scotland being angry at England for nothing, but it’s right up there.
IMHO, Canadians have this thing for regional insecurity that defies any sort of logical explanation. Westerners are upset that the Earth rotates towards the east. Torontonians are upset because they think the government’s ripping them off. Ontarians outside Toronto are upset because they think Toronto is ripping them off. Quebecers are upset that not everyone speaks French. Newfoundlanders are upset they joined Canada and that Canada won’t send them more money. Manitoba’s upset that it’s not quite east OR west. Alberta’s upset over the NEP even though it’s cancelled. PEI’s upset that they built the brdge, after years of being upset that they wouldn’t build the bridge. BC is upset that everyone thinks of them lumped together with the rest of the West. Nova Scotia’s upset because they think they got ripped off in 1867.
This even happens within provinces. Here in Ontario, Toronto is split between the city core, which thinks it’s supporting everyone on its back, and the megacity municipalities, who think they’re supporting Toronto, and Mississauga, which thinks it should separate from everyone, and Durham Region, which is convinced Toronto is trying to take it over, and down the road Hamilton is upset nobody cares about it. Eastern Ontario around Kingston, Brockville and Cornwall is upset because they think they’re ignored in favour of Ottawa and Toronto, but Ottawa-Carleton’s angry because THEY think they don’t get enough from the province because that’s where the feds are, and everyone in Eastern Ontario outside Kingston hates Kingston, too, because it won’t shut up about being the capital of Canada way back in 1837. Northern Ontario, of course, hates Southern Ontario, and in southwestern Ontario you have the border cities angry because their needs aren’t being met, cottage country is angry because people keep coming up and staying in cottages rather than just mailing their money up, and Kitchener-Waterloo is angry because they’re two different cities but everyone calls them Kitchener-Waterloo. And, of course, everyone hates Sarnia, including the people who live there.
Rick Jay, I don’t think you can call the Scottish disturbance with England “over nothing” – there has been for centuries a consistent tendency by the English to regard the English mindset, history, etc., as the only thing worth considering about the British Isles and the government of the majority of them (and the exact same phenomenon is the principal reason why I had to add “of the majority of them”). There are a number of histories that incorporate the attitudes through history espoused by the Scots, the Kernovians, the Welsh, the various Irish, and so on, in contradistinction to the English viewpoint, and demonstrate a recurrent ignorance of the needs, wants, and opinions of a major fraction of that nation.
I liken it to the provinciality of the New York Metro Area, Southern California, etc., which establishes stereotypical regional views of the rest of the country, so that anybody from Alabama is ipso facto a redneck, anybody from Iowa a hick, etc.
That said, I think the rest of your post was on target, and was simply the identification of an ongoing tendency to particularize that is a part of human nature. I know that for over 100 years in the city of Watertown, NY (pop. ~27,000), there was an ongoing conflict between the North Side, smaller and almost exclusively lower-middle-class, and the South Side, where each felt the other was inappropriately dominant over the other, with the North Side consuming an inordinate share of municipal resources in the view of South Siders, and the South Side using its majority to deny the reasonable expectations of the North Side in the view of its inhabitants.
I would hazard the guess that this could be extended throughout history and scaled up and down to cover almost any contiguous group of people you care to name. No doubt Ur and Erech had the same sort of conflict in Sumerian times, and la plus ce change, la plus c’est le meme chose.
You know featherlou you are the second person from the Western view who posted that “Torontonians believe they are the centre of the Universe”
I find that interesting as I am from Toronto and my family is from Newfoundland so I get that perspective from the Newfs as well.
Believe me I don’t think it is a conscious thought. I believe each region has its own concerns and biases that seem to be self centred to outsiders. Yet from where I sit I see debates on national issues not from a point of view as to how will that benifit Toronto or Ontario but more on the personal level of how will it effect me. For example here we tend to suspiciously eye any provence that starts talking of private clinics. The immediate reaction is the “Two teir Health system” battle cry.
Judging from the past I can not recall any instance (aside from the Quebec referendum issue) where the Ontario Government went out of its way to change policy elswhere in the country.
Still there seems to be a huge anti Toronto feeling out there
that I think is based on an emotional cause and not rooted in any real issues.
Well, we’ve got a teeny version of the Regional Hatred Thing going on here in Illinois, being the perennial squabble between Chicago and Downstate. Downstate resents the fact that Chicago gets (or seems to get) most of the state-funding pork barrel projects, while Downstate gets the nominations for state prison sites.
Chicago thinks Downstate should just get over it, and besides, “Springfield is Downstate, take it up with the Lege.”
[stands shoulder to shoulder with Featherlou out on the wide ignored-by-the-Powers-That-Be prairies, mumbling along with the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce’s new provincial anthem]
http://www.wideopenfuture.ca/ofiwo.html
Scroll down to “anthem”.
Well, it’s catchy, but that Thrash Metal git-tar has got to go, I can’t hear the words.
Its been over 22 years since I left Ontario for good. When I was raised in southern Ontario, the prevailing view of my neighbours was that we were Canadian period. We never referred to ourselves as Ontarians. I’ve also lived in Manitoba and British Columbia, and spent considerable time in Alberta among Manitobans, British Columbians and Albertans. My neighbours in the west identify with their province before their country. I’ve always found this difference interesting.
And the Territories are upset because everybody ignores them unless they wanta strip-mine the place. 
Well, strip-mine it or turn it into the world’s largest park.
I feel we Canadians have elevated regional wrangling to an art form. When in times of national crisis (or national boredom, they are exceedingly similar), we pick on each other. Unlike, say, other, somewhat less civilized societies where the immediate response is to pick on somebody else. At least we keep it in the family, as it were.
However, like family, nobody else is allowed to pick on us. Try it and we immediately close ranks and turn on the interloper.
And you Southern Green Freaks have no concept of what your asnine policies, that we have NO VOICE IN, are doing to the North. There’s fifty thousand acres (give or take a few thou) of wilderness up here, I don’t think it ALL needs to be a frickin’ park…
We’re proud to be Canadian -
It isn’t that we’re better, it’s just that we’re less worse…
–The Arrogant Worms, Proud To Be Canadian
It has not been my experience that Albertans identify with their region first and the country second. That’s why the idiotic notion of western sovereignty only comes up when the lunatic fringe really have their shorts in a knot, such as a few weeks ago when PM Chrétien, at a dinner in Alberta, all but threatened to create a new NEP to get a bigger piece of the petro pie. I consider myself a Canadian first and foremost and am very proud of my country. What continues to bother me is the feeling that there is no voice for my interests in Ottawa.
As to kingpengvin’s comment:
It has been my experience, both living in Alberta and Ontario (as I did for 9 years), that the Toronto slant is more subtle than an outright set of policies. Rather, it is a case of the media generally placing a priority on southern Ontario events and issues. As a case in point, I offer the example of sports coverage (because I’m a sports junkie, so it really stands out to me). While living in Kitchener in the 80s, I was subjected to week after week of the embarrassingly bad Toronto Make Me Laffs on Hockey Night in Canada and saw nothing of the other Canadian teams who actually could play until playoff time once the Laffs were eliminated. As a hockey fan I actually had no idea how good the Oilers and Wayne were until I moved back to Calgary in '86 and got to hear about them pounding on team after team in the regional sports news. Canadian teams–the Oilers, Flames, and Canadiens–won more Stanley Cups in the 80s than did American teams. It was Canada’s last great heyday of NHL domination. But the only coverage I got of them was when Toronto happened to play them.
Meanwhile, in baseball, the same thing was happening. The Blue Jays got the vast majority of the coverage, while the Expos (who were often times every bit as good as the Jays, right up to the present) could only manage to be seen on the CBC french channel.
Recently, our two NBA teams suffered the same fate. The Raptors are on CTV a lot and the Vancouver Grizzlies were neglected to the point of moving to Memphis.
Again, the same thing holds for the CFL. Everybody in Canada gets coverage of the Argos, but not so much for the rest of the league (in the 2001 season, the Argos were featured in national game coverage for 14 of their 18 games, while Calgary–the eventual Grey Cup winners–got six).
Pro sports teams are very strongly bolstered by TV revenues and earnings from merchandise sales, which go hand-in-hand with name recognition and media visibility. With as strong a bias as there is in Canadian media towards Toronto, is it any wonder that the other markets struggle to remain competitive when they actually manage to remain in business and in Canada?
That’s a little long-winded, I know, but hopefully I’ve illustrated my point.
I don’t know why but this line had me chuckling trying to suppress it (since I’m at work).
Living in Minnesota, could you Canadians do me a favor?
When you have your big civil war, please refrain from shooting over the border. Could you also not shoot during bedtime? Also, please, no random lost armies crossing over the border.
OK?
So sorry for the disturbance. We’ll do our best to keep it down for you.
Not to point out the obvious here, but Kitchener is one hour from Toronto. ANY large city’s media will concentrate on its sports teams. Why would Toronto-area media not cover the Blue Jays as opposed to the Expos? I assure you that within 50 miles of Cleveland, you’ll hear a lot about the Indians, Browns, and Cavs, way disproportionate to their accomplishments.
I hate the Maple Leafs and I wish I could watch other teams more, but it wouldn’t be any different in Boston, Dallas, or St. Louis. It sucks that HNIC sometimes subjects people elsewhere in Canada to the horrors of Make Beleaf hockey, but it’s silly to complain about it in Kitchener. Calgary, that’s different.
I think the people of Vancouver got seriously ripped off there, but the fate of the Grizzlies was largely due to their ownership group, which wasn’t prepared, really, to run an NBA team. The Raptors were what the NBA wanted all along; they had three ownership groups bidding for a team in the same city, which has never happened before. The Vancouver franchise was an add-on the NBA thought would be cool to have, which was a neat idea but not a very stable base for a pro sports team, and so the Vancouver franchise was given more leeway in terms of their financials. They started on much shakier ground, and it showed, and the horrible team decisions didn’t help. They were bleeding money pretty much from Day 1, whereas the Raptors turned out to be a license to print money. That’s not the fault of Vancouver sports fans, and it’s really not the fault of the media - it’s the business owners who failed this business.
It’s unfortunate, but if you get a bum owner in pro sports you’re screwed - just ask Expos fans, who got two in a row. The media gave the Grizz a fair shot, but they were terrible and boring and ran out of money, while the Raptors started getting interesting and ran their business very well. I honestly believe the two teams’ fates would have been the same if they switched cities. Put Glen Grunwald and Vince Carter in Vancouver, and the Grizz would still be around today; put Bryant Reeves in Toronto, and the Raptors would be the Memphis Raptors today.
There you go this is why I have to wonder why the anger directed to Toronto.
I mean seriously are we bad and arrogant becaue in Ontario we play the Toronto teams on our sports coverage?
The Federal government does tend to make some boneheaded moves. The poor way they handled the drought in Saskatchewan is a prime example. But that policy is not influenced by any pressure from the East. I have not heard a single person here saying those farmers don’t deserve any aid or they are getting too much. Just the opposite. Mosty of us here believe that the farmwers got royally screwed. Saskatchewan is suffering and the Feds should do something about it.
Now ehn it comes to other issues like say Kyoto that is a different story. Most here believe we should try to follow the protocol. When Ralph Kline stands up and makes stupid Dinosaur Fart comments he comes off as an arrogant jerk. (By the way Ralph maybe thats what killed them off) These busisness alliance groups calling for a Made in Canada plan seem to be backed by the Alberta Government. They sound like idiots because they offer no plan.
To be honest in that issue it seems like Alberta is saying we don’t care what the rest of Canada says or how it affects them we need to continue our ways.
By the way andymurph64, this is as violent as the civil war would be.
Dread Pirate Jimbo was using the sports as an example of a larger trend, king pengvin. My experience growing up in Saskatchewan was virtually the same, except we noticed the Toronto/Ontario bias in the national news every night. This was really brought home to me when Saskatchewan had some very newsworthy crisis (a large town burnt to the ground, or some such), and all we saw on the national news that night was some tedious, mundane filler Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal stories. This is just an example of a trend Westerners notice; not that the East (or maybe I should say Eastern Media) consciously tries to make us feel marginalized, just that we are so far beneath notice that they don’t even realize they’re marginalizing us.
RJ, we could debate the sundry reasons a franchise fails all day. However, I stand by my main point: I have observed, wherever I have lived, that the “national” media attention is focussed on Toronto to the exclusion of all else. I’ve been back in Calgary for 16 years and I’m still having to watch the freakin’ Leafs on HNIC every Saturday. When we had the Grizzlies, I saw them four times per season on TV while the Raptors were on most Sundays. In 1994, when the Expos were the best team in baseball, I couldn’t find one of their games on TV amid all the Jays coverage. We don’t call TSN the “Toronto Sports Network” for nothing.
And to you, kingpengvin, in Canada we play the Toronto teams in our sports coverage.
As for “real” news, the only way Premier Ralph Klein (who, incidentally, I also think is a muttonhead) gets national news attention is to shoot off his big, stupid mouth and say something outrageous and inflammatory, which the CBC then uses to mock and belittle our position. BTW, all the premiers, including Ontario’s, support a Made In Canada solution. And, BTW, the feds have said even less about how they plan to implement Kyoto as the MIC planners.
I would love to see national coverage of regional issues, but instead I have to settle for reports on the state of things in BC and the Maritimes once or twice a year. And, as tisiphone pointed out, the last time I heard anything about the Territories was when Nunavut was created. And the prevailing attitude we get from the east, that smug, “well, most of the population is here, so that’s what we cover,” is crap: national media must, by definition, cover the nation, not simply the part which suits their agenda.
I don’t hate Ontario and I don’t hate Toronto. I do, however, resent the marginalization that the rest of our nation receives from there.
I don’t doubt that there’s a strong bias towards Ontario and Quqbec, Jimbo. I just wanted to point out that there’s nothing wrong with having such a bias in Kitchener, ON. In Calgary, it’s tiresome and silly. Why they’d have an endless string of Maple Leaf games in Alberta defies understanding (I can see why they’d have more Jay games lined up than Expos in 1994, though. Think about it for a second; they set the schedule before the season, and which team was the defending champion?)
I don’t think this is just a Canadian thing, of course; look at how much the U.S. media obsesses over New York and California, and how little you hear about North Dakota and Kansas. But an incessant concentation on Toronto would irritate anyone. Hell, I live in Toronto and it irritates ME; I find Toronto news boring. “Mayor Lastman blah blah blah waterfront blah blah blah shootings in Rexdale again blah blah blah the feds hate us.” Some media are worse than others - if you read the Toronto Star you get the impression that Canada is comprised entirely of Toronto, the Parliament Buildings, and aboriginal reservations.
That is understandable. I honestly never saw the news in that light before. I mean they did cover what seemed to be the major stories.(the drought, the anguish of the community when we found out about our four lost soldiers, the debates over Kyoto) Now I have Satellite I’ll have to watch some of the Western Channels to get their perspective. (Been watching mostly the Eastern Channels)
By the way any solution we come up with for Kyoto will be Made in Canada, the protocol calls for the reduction but does not determine how. From what I have seen Most of the Premiers are for Kyoto, though don’t have a cite so I could be proven wrong.
As for HNIC are Oilers, Flames or Canuck games replaced by Leaf games? If so you have my sympathies especialy this year. Mind you I’m a Habs fan and have to watch the French cahnnel to catch many of their games so your point is well taken.
All that being said it still seems that this marginalization we are discussing is relegated so far to the CBC and National newspapers. I’m trying to understand this feeling that politically the West is being neglected, and I’m not saying they aren’t, I just need examples.
Thanks for a very interesting discussion, folks. Just a quick comment, though: You won’t get much sympathy over being force-fed a steady diet of Toronto Makebelief games from those of us who get a steady diet of New York Knicks games on every weekly NBA national telecast. It doesn’t matter that both teams suck and bore; they’re simply in the largest media markets and the networks have to maximize their ratings. But Knicks broadcasts are not a symptom of New York cultural hegemonism, or even a superiority complex.
Carry on.