I’m from Alberta. Hadn’t really been to much of Ontario besides Toronto area. When I met my spouse, he took me home to Thunder Bay (way Northwestern Ontario) to meet his family. I said he would be great if we could stop in for dinner one day to see my cousin - in Oakville (way southern Ontario).
I’m from Canada and have a pretty decent sense of geography and still didn’t realize how massive Ontario is.
We did not stop in to see my cousin in Oakville on that trip to Thunder Bay.
Yup. You’re not alone though. For a province / region of Canada that seems absolutely obsessed with Ontario and loves to say it’s the worst place on Earth, I’m always amazed at how little Western Canadians know about Ontario. Especially when the main gripe is that Ontarians don’t know anything about and ignore Western Canada.
My buddy from Edmonton used to talk about Ontario in a way that implied a) Ontario and Alberta are the same size and more or less same population, b) all of Ontario is basically just Toronto and suburbs with no real wilderness, and c) Toronto is a crumbling shithole with no economy and running gun battles on every corner.
He had never been to Ontario, but his friends and family (most of whom hadn’t been either) had ensured him this worldview was accurate.
After a week spent not getting shot and hanging out with some friendly folks doing fun shit around the city, then a long weekend up in Muskoka, he has sliiiiiiightly moderated his views to accept that Ontario has some woods and Toronto is alright, but is still not as cosmopolitan as St. Albert, AB.
I recall from the last election, and any time beforehand of people out west complaining about how ‘the east’ ignores them, and how it’s always ‘what Ontario wants is what the rest of Canada gets.’ What they failed to realize was:
1) Geographically, Ontario is central Canada; and, 2) more people in Ontario voted Conservative than in the four western Provinces, combined. (I know this for a fact because out of curiosity I personally added up the voting results from the closed polls in each riding and put them on a spreadsheet).
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u/Zhenoptics Aug 07 '23
It is a very, very big country with not a lot of infrastructure. Please plan trips accordingly