As a companion to the Worst town in America thread, I thought I would solicit some opinions on worst place in Canada. Now, maybe I’m sheltered, but I haven’t been anywhere truly horrible in Canada, so I’ll leave it open for nominations …
Oshawa stinks. The people are dirty and a bunch of skids. The downtown is dirty, the businesses are generally garbage (for the few that actually exist), the “beach” has dead fish all over it, and the city councils idea of sprucing the place up is to paint the fire hydrants something ‘fun’.
Huh. I just stepped in to say that Oshawa was the most soul-destroying town that I was ever compelled to spend any time in.
Walking “downtown” to try to find a cup of coffee (or anything to look at this didn’t subtly increase the chances of me posing a threat to myself or others) was a laugh.
What a dump.
Hey! I grew up in Whitby and spent a lot of time in Oshawa.
I don’t disagree.
Oshawa has gone way downhill since the eighties. I went to see the original Star Wars movie in one of the downtown cinemas, when they still had downtown cinemas. The downtown is almost dead, the bus station sucks, the local newspaper closed down, and the old GM plants that were close to downtown (bringing their pedestrian traffic) have been destroyed, leaving huge gaps. The Michael Starr Building, home of the Ministry of Revenue, squats over the downtown like a beached white whale, completely out of scale and destroying the streetscape. Oshawa has some nice 1960’s-style suburbs, and the actual City Hall complex is a not-bad Modernist complex, and the library is pretty nice, but the downtown is culturally and commercially a zombie.
The best thing that happened in Oshawa this past month or so is that the regional train system introduced weekend service, making it easier to leave.
Toss up between St. Thomas, Ontario (God, how can an entire city be populated by morons), and Iqaluit, Nunavut (ugly, horrible weather, everything screwed up, drunks everywhere despite supposedly tight liquor laws).
My hometown: St. George, NB. Don’t let the “quaintness” of it fool you; the locals, while smiling on the outside, are absolute beasts on the inside. Racists, homophobes, bigots who have nothing better to do than drink/drug themselves to insanity and spawn. Usually starting in middleschool.
Few get out. But when they do, they stay out. People who come in have high hopes of turning things around, but often give up, running screaming to higher ground. There was a very nice priest who my mother adored at her local church, who was doing a lot of good work for the town - he left soon after getting the snot beat out of him on Main Street.
The surrounding areas are quite nice, though. Saint John is a good city (mind the potholes on Rothesay Ave!), St, Stephen is a nice town, St. Andrews is pretty and an awesome place to live.
Hmm. Lot of “saints”, come to think of it. Fredericton is nice, too. Moncton, Shediac.
But stay out of St. George. There’s something in the “best drinking water in Canada”.
:eek: Must be a pretty wide-open town if people will beat up a priest. The Selma of the North?
I did not enjoy Winnipeg much when I passed thru in summer 2002. Every third downtown storefront was boarded-up, and the rest of town looked grim and uninviting. Chinatown took up about half a block, though the restaurant* was fairly good.
*The ONLY restaurant. In Chinatown.
My best friend quit his job after they sent him to Fort McMurray, Alberta twice for a week. 300 miles from anywhere, a cold little town with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
I grew up in Whitby as well, and I actually LIVE in Oshawa. This is mostly due to financial considerations and laziness to be completely honest. There still is a weekly free local newspaper, I know because every so often some ugly stupid person knocks on my door and asks me to pay to have it delivered. I will not do this as I never read the POS, it annoys me to get it as ads always fall out, and all I do is recycle it. However no matter how many times I tell this moron that he still delivers it and still asks me to pay for it!
The best thing to happen to Oshawa in recent memory is the opening of the downtown methadone clinic.
Ha. My GF and I briefly considered doing some time in Fort MacMurry to make some mad cash to bring the move date to Montreal faster. (They pay top dollar for crappy jobs there, and insane money for any kind of skilled work.)
That brief plan evaporated instantly after checking out satellite images of the town. 
No shout-outs for Moose Jaw yet? It is officially my birthplace, and a really super place to be from. If you’re a retired farmer (like 90% of its population), I’m sure it’s a very nice, quiet, not ever changing in any way like modernizing or cleaning up place to die. I would say the best thing about Moose Jaw is that it is on the #1 highway, so you don’t have to go out of your way to see it.
I could also argue that Calgary is developing into a real crappy place to live. I’ll give it a couple of years; it could turn into a real hellhole.
I was born in Hamilton. It’s the pits. It has horrendous air pollution from the steel mills and foundries and cars. If you hang your laundry outside, it comes back with black flecks on it. There’s a limited job market. Stores downtown have been boarded up for two decades. It’s a big place with lots of amenities, and the scenery is beautiful from the escarpment. But having lived there for many years, and having lived elsewhere, I can say that I’d never move back.
I’d put in Dryden, Ontario.
It’s a tiny town about halfway between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay. Pretty hopeless place. Not much to do; high unemployment; trains running smack through the middle all day and night. The best part? I’m not sure if the town grew up around the pulp mill or the pulp mill was built after the town grew up; either way, the pulp mill is in the middle of the downtown core at the end of the main street. Nothing I loved more than waking up to the smell of rotting eggs.
Hmm. I hadn’t thought about smell. While the town proper didn’t have much in the way of smells, it is a tiny town, and there were two small communities which surrounded it (which, because of their tiny size, was what we called “St. George” to outsiders, since our communities weren’t on the map). One was Utopia, home of the pulp and paper mill, which, oh yes, smelled like eggs. The causeway into St. George was for years called “Stinky Hollow”, until we cleaned it up a bit. It doesn’t smell as bad now, but on a foggy morning…
Also, the very nearby village of Blacks Harbour, housing the world’s largest sardine factory, tends to smell very fishy. Fishmeal, sardines, shithawks (er… seagulls) flying overhead and painting everything below them in a lovely white speckle… well, it doesn’t smell good.
My mother insists that it all smells much better now, but I haven’t noticed a change. I think she just got used to it. I remember back in middle school, opening up a window in the classroom on a lovely spring day to let some fresh… er… ugh… fish air circulate through the classrooms. Blergh.
What’s Churchill like? 
I think we need weight divisions. It’s impossible to compare a small town to a big city.
In medium sized cities I have to agree with Oshawa.
In large, I’m gonna go with Winnipeg over Hamilton. Hamilton’s not great, but it doesn’t smell bad anymore or have much air pollution because most of the steel mills closed. It’s a close call, but Winnipeg’s litter and amazing number of homeless people “wins” my vote.
we just left Hamilton this summer after 6 years there (my husband and I are originally from Quebec). While I’d never move back, in the 6 years I was there, there was SOME improvement to the downtown, and Centre Mall was about to be renovated, with hopes of reviving the east end.
But yeah, the pollution was pretty bad. Window sills were constantly black and dirty. In the summer, we cleaned our balcony table every day to eat off it - and you couldn’t tell that it had been washed 24 hours earlier!
Hess village was nice, if you liked the same 6 bars over and over and over again… the fact that a 6 bar street is all the nightlife a 500 000 person town has is pretty sad.
On the plus side… Lo presti’s at Maxwell’s. Best Italian restaurant EVER!
So the Hammer is, at least, better than Oshawa (from what I hear…!)
Well, that’s what I’ve heard anyway.
[sub]Note: I’ve actually been to Toronto, and it’s very nice. The natives really do seem to think that their city is on par with NYC though, which is laughable. They have no idea how much they’re NOT NYC. And not just in the good ways. [/sub]
My experience is limited, but I *have * gone on business trips to Renfrew, Ontario in the middle of winter. Never seen a bleaker, more depressing place, but maybe it’s not so bad in the summer. Fly to Ottawa, then drive an hour and a half north into the tundra (across the “Mississippi River”, believe it or not), nothing to stop the bitter winds between you and the North Pole, and nothing around but the roadside hotel. For dinner, call ahead to see if the place is even still in business.
I was there once when a gas pipeline was being laid in the area, giving the town a dose of cash. But did the pipeline go through any of the vast, snowswept tundra around? No, it had to go right under the main street of Renfrew. The only civilization within a hundred kilometres and it had to get torn up.
Come to think of it, I was only in Renfrew because it had the closest hotel to our supplier in Haley Station, which doesn’t even exist enough to be listed so I’ll give it a pass. Some of the people there actually commuted all the way from Ottawa, obviously to avoid becoming alcoholic and suicidal.
Castlegar, BC.
I grew up there. It’s a small town with all the charm and graciousness of any small town…
IN A STEPHEN KING NOVEL.
The people were close-minded and snotty, and they had absolutely nothing to be snotty about. It stunk of the mill at Celgar. There wasn’t much to do but drive around and drink. Ye gods, sometimes I still have nightmares about the place. I never went back after I left, until my mother was dying of cancer there.
She hated it, too.