Yes, I’m not following the assumption that there should be a city on the shoreline.
Why?
There are several cities on the shoreline. But they’re all on the American side of the lake. This demonstrates that there’s no geographical reason why cities wouldn’t develop on Lake Erie’s shoreline. So I’m wondering what the other reasons were which led to the non-development of cities on the Canadian side of the lake.
I guess a lot of the resources that might have gone to that made Toronto bigger instead? Windsor-Detroit happens to be on a different lake. London is between Detroit and Toronto, on an important river rather than a lake. The answers to some of these questions probably come down to accidents of history and geography, but better options sums it up. Good places may not only navigable, but also closer to other established places or with there own strategic or scenic advantages. Maybe if Canada reaches its goal of adding tens of millions of people there will be more and bigger cities.
I didn’t realize this. Thank you.
Actually, there are three sizeable NY cities that aren’t physically on the Lake but have a “presence” there. Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse have ecomonic holdings on the shores of Lake Ontario (Rochester’s corporate boundaryu actually does extend up to the Lake, but ythe trafic flows up abd down the Genessee, and there’s the Falls of the Genessee in the way). But that doesn’t invalidate your point – the highways that carry trade traffic are much fartherr south than the Lake, and don’t extend all the way uo to the water.
Well, in this case, Thunder Bay is just about at the western-most point of the Great Lakes on the Canadian side of the border. If you were shipping things from the West out East, that would be the logical place to put them on a ship. Lake Erie is just a stretch along the waterways at that point. A port there would only serve a small slice along the coast of Lake Erie itself. Anything else would have to actually pass other ports in the East, like Toronto, to get to a port on Lake Erie.
Not necessarily cities, but there’s not even a continuous row of beach houses. Many farm fields just go right up to the lake and that’s that. I would posit, on top of the already mentioned reasons of being separated from major transportation routes, that there’s just not a ton of value to being on a big lakefront in this region. Partly that’s because Canada has plenty of smaller lakes for those who want to live near water, and once you’re out of sight of the shoreline it doesn’t matter how big the lake is across, it might as well not be there anymore. That is, unless you live somewhere that you’re desperate for warmth rather than cooling, and Canada is generally the former. So living on a big lake is a detriment for much of the year, when it’s cold, gray, and windy.
It’s probably slightly inconvenient for a farmer in Saskatchewan to drive to Lake Erie to go shopping.
That’s the question. Why did that farmer’s great-grandparents decide to start a farm in Saskatchewan rather than southern Ontario? Southern Ontario was much closer to eastern markets and had access to water for shipping goods to those markets. And they had to go past southern Ontario on their way to Saskatchewan.
For the same reason that my great-grandparents started a farm in Kansas rather than Ohio or Pennsylvania. Those lands were already settled and had been tilled for over a hundred years. There was still virgin soil in the Great Plains, which stretch up into Saskatchewan.
Canada (at the time, British North America) had it’s own Manifest Destiny just like the US. There was political motivation to expand westward, primarily as a buffer against America’s own expansionism. That meant incentivizing settlement in the western territories by offering land and monetary support.
Yes, one of the things that drove Canada’s western expansion was that the farmland in Ontario was pretty much all in use. When my great-grandparents came to Canada, they would have had to be already pretty well off to buy a farm in Ontario.
Farmland on the prairies was open for homesteading: quarter section for free, provided you improved it for farming, and adjoining quarters available at a low government price, once you homesteaded your first quarter. If you’re an immigrant without much money but prepared to put in sweat equity to homestead, you go to the prairies.
Remember, these areas were settled more than half a century apart. Upper Canada opened for settlement in the late 1700s, and I think the Ontario peninsula was the last part settled, maybe by the 1830s? The prairies didn’t open for settlement until the railway was built, starting operations in the early 1880s.
Yes. People settled in western New York and Pennsylvania and started farms and eventually cities like Buffalo and Pittsburgh. And then they settled in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and started farms and eventually build cities like Cleveland and Indianapolis and Chicago. And then they settled in places like Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska and started farms and eventually build cities like Des Moines and Kansas City and Omaha. The pattern here is people settling in the closer areas, starting farms, and then developing cities.
So why did Canadians decide to skip past southern Ontario? It’s the equivalent of your great-grandparents deciding to settle in Kansas before anyone had settled in Pennsylvania.
It can happen. The Mormons, for example, decided to head off to Utah, which was well past existing settlements. But they were looking for isolation. And California was settled before regions to the east. But that was due to gold mining opportunities.
Nope. The railway ran from Montreal, through the Lake Nippissing area, and then over Lake Superior. Immigrants to the west on the railway didn’t go through Toronto, let alone the Ontario peninsula.
They didn’t skip southern Ontario. The farmland was all taken by the time of western settlement.
You don’t think that also happened in Canada? In 1834, Toronto was incorporated, with a population of 9,000 folks. Not huge by today’s standards, but pretty damn big 200 years ago.
Winnipeg, 1200 miles to the west, in Manitoba in central Canada, was founded 40 years later, with a population of 1800 people. But it wasn’t until the railroad came through 10 years later that the entire region grew and prospered.
Seems to me that this follows the same pattern.
@Exapno_Mapcase made a good point that helps to explain why there aren’t major cities in the Ontario peninsula. Canada’s geography is different from the US.
In the US, you have a series of ports along the Eastern seaboard, and then as @Little_Nemo says, people expanded west from the seaboard and each wave of settlement west resulted in the towns settled by the previous generation turning into cities. Because of your geography, you had a network of settlement developing, and the older settlements turned into cities because they provided goods and services to the newer areas of settlement to the west.
That wasn’t Canada’s pattern. We only had one major transport route, along the Great Lakes and then the St Lawrence. Instead of a network, it was a single system. And, once the Ontario peninsula was settled, there were no Canadian settlements to the west that would rely on the Ontario peninsula settlements for goods and services. Canada stopped at Windsor, and there were tariff barriers between Canada and the US, so the settlements in the Ontario peninsula couldn’t serve as trade sources for American settlements west of Windsor. Those American settlements would rely on American towns, like Cleveland, as their sources of supplies, and that would make Cleveland grow.
So for the Ontario peninsula, you have the fact that it’s a dead-end for Canadian settlement, and the single transport route, with the settlements on the peninsula at the extreme western end of it. Their trade would go east on the Lakes and then the St Lawrence, and they wouldn’t have much trade coming from the west, so it’s a different economic pattern than places like Cleveland
Nitpick: “central Canada” means southern Ontario and Quebec. (Although true westerners always look at bit sideways at Winnipeg’s claim to be the gateway to the west.)
So noted! Kinda like the ‘Midwest’ in the States.
The number of times the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have been in the eastern division of the CFL really makes one question their claim to be westerners.
Why, in 2007, the Bombers represented the East division in the Grey Cup. Lost to Saskatchewan, the true representatives of the West division. Need I say more?