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Why does the rest of Canada hate Toronto?
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| Jayx1 |
Great article:
A bit long but worth the read
| quote: | Why do they hate Toronto?
A few weeks ago, one Larry Walker, a mechanic from the Lake Simcoe town of Keswick, about an hour's drive north of Toronto, made the trek into the city. It was incumbent upon him to present himself in person in order to exchange his winning Lotto 6/49 ticket for a cheque worth $14.5 million. Otherwise, and let's be frank, it is most unlikely he would have headed out on a winter's morning and eased his old GM pickup down the 404 in our direction.
"Do you come to Toronto very often?" a reporter asked him at a press conference at Lotto headquarters, on Bloor Street East.
"As little as possible," he replied tartly.
There were whoops of laughter from the press corps and assorted guests. It seemed natural enough. Folks like to poke fun at Toronto and seldom worry about hurting her feelings. She's a tough old broad, quite insensitive herself, so what does it matter? She's expected to suck in her stomach, stiffen her spine and endure.
(And here I scoff at all those writers Fotheringham et al who portray Toronto as the epitome of the masculine city. HAWG-town. No Paris or bella Roma, but a dull chap, broad-shoulder and full of manly responsibility, obsessed with big towers and a corner office. Once, perhaps, this was true, but no longer. She has a shoe museum and she's getting a new opera house, for heaven's sake.)
Besides, can't a city have feelings too?
Our town is the butt of jokes, the target of abuse and the subject of more myth and misconception among Canadians than any other in this great nation, with the possible exception of Ottawa, so cruelly scorned by the burghers of Hull across the river.
Our city is misunderstood. Canadians show no interest in claiming Toronto as their own, the way, say, Americans proudly take ownership of the Big Apple, or the French (as long as they are outside France) love Paris.
"Americans love to hate New York, but everybody has a New York story to tell. That's the beauty of it," observes Robert Racco, a graduate student at McGill's School of Urban Planning in Montreal, and a proud, if battered, Torontonian. "They visit New York in droves, and they keep talking about New York. It becomes their city, too."
It may be our own fault (and we'll return to this later) that Canadians don't share the same pride of ownership in their biggest city. We're just another city. It took close to $15 million to entice Larry Walker and his parents, Glena and Al, to Toronto. Other Canadians, lacking such incentive, don't bother.
"We're all that way. We're country bumpkins," said Mrs. Walker, by way of explanation, when contacted later by telephone. "We just don't like the traffic. It's too heavy, especially at our age."
But Larry's only 39.
"Well, yes, dear, that's true ... but he likes to do his traveling in our area."
Truth is, most Canadians don't seem to like us much. And I make this observation as a quasi-expert on the subject. Photographer Ken Faught and I, dispatched by our inquisitive editors at the Sunday Star, recently journeyed from sea to sea to find out what Canadians think about Toronto. Or, to put our paranoid perceptions on the table, we set out to discover why they hate us, assuming they do. It's just the sort of project worry-wart Toronto journalists would dream up.
Ours was not a scientific survey. Rather, we meandered as the breeze blew us, by plane, car and heavy-duty SUV with winter tires and chains in the back, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, experiencing the country as it ought to be experienced, in winter. We eschewed politicians, pundits, parade masters and employees of rival cities and their relatives and friends, talking instead to 150 or so of our fellow citizens along the way.
We asked Canadians what they think and they told us.
It would be wrong to suggest everybody hates Toronto. Karen Rumstead, a product manager I met in a skywalk over a frigid Winnipeg street, loves our city. She came on business last spring and has returned four times. "Toronto is alive really alive!" she says. Al Kucherhan, a snow-plow driver on a break in Saskatoon, cradles his coffee and grows wistful. "I got as far as Winnipeg when I was young," he says. "Maybe I didn't have the balls to go all the way to Toronto. I'm just a Saskatchewan farm boy."
Overwhelmingly, though, I must report back that we are not popular.
"Isn't Toronto the centre of the universe? Haven't you always been?" asks ticket agent Jack Wood, feigning indignation, at the Calgary airport. He seems a kind enough man, patiently sorting out our flights. He's joking, right?
Toronto is, to offer a taste of our 3,500-kilometre odyssey, (with enough contradictions to make anyone crazy) rude, snobbish, smug, boastful, pretentious, obnoxious, arrogant, hoity-toity, brash, crass, uptight, workaholic, lazy, self-absorbed, self-centred, self-obsessed, self-satisfied, spiritless, cold, out-of-shape, unfeeling, unsmiling and unfriendly.
We are wannabe New Yorkers. We are the middle manager of cities, irritating to those who must put up with us, invisible to those who can leapfrog right over.
"All the big deals are in New York ... Toronto's irrelevant," says Edmonton lawyer Denny Thomas. "You wouldn't say it's in the same league as New York or London, maybe now Beijing, where so much power and wealth is concentrated. Toronto is just not a world-class city."
Not a world-class city!
A Vancouver hair stylist goes on about the "homogeneity" of Toronto. Montreal pharmacist Malcom Jue pronounces, with an airy wave: "We're more cosmopolitan here. French, Spanish, we've got everybody. In Toronto, it's just English and Chinese."
We're dreary; we don't know how to laugh; we dream in black and white.
Then there's the deepest cut. "But you see, you are just not funny," says Gregory Luneau, as he pushes a baby stroller through Montreal's Gare Centrale on a Saturday afternoon so that his wife can go to the hair salon (because the most beautiful women, of course, live in Montreal).
Now, Montrealers are funny. "We have a quirky sense of life," he says, invoking that old standard, the International Comedy Festival, Just for Laughs.
"Wait, wait, there's one funny guy from Toronto," he shouts, as he walks away. "You have Rick Mercer. I watch Monday Report all the time. Voilΰ, you have your own comedian."
Rick Mercer is from Newfoundland. Does he still count?
("While I am flattered as hell to be called Toronto's only funny person, I categorically deny the charge," said Mercer, when apprised of Monsieur Luneau's opinion. "In terms of funny, the only thing Toronto is lacking that Montreal has is the festival, and all those comedians who wear funny ties and wacky hats.")
Everybody has an opinion. In many ways, how people see us relates intimately to their own sense of identity. Haligonians tell us to slow down and smell the roses. Stop being so obnoxious. Montrealers think they have more fun than we do. It's that, you know, joie de vivre thing. They also think our taste buds are in our feet. Winnipeggers laugh at a city whose mayor called in the army after a spot of snow. Saskatonians recoil at our lack of manners. Calgarians say we're stuck-up. Vancouverites check out their own six-pack abs and perky glutes and snicker at our love handles.
And it's not just the people. Even the city is out of shape.
"Toronto is a concrete city, flat and ugly," says Nancy Nadeau, pausing on her morning walk through Stanley Park with her dogs, Joey and Tao. "I wouldn't live anywhere else. Here, I can breathe!" she says, flinging out her arms. She's madly in love with the West Coast. Naturally, she's from Toronto.
Raza Rossan, a former wrestler with a chewed-off ear, runs along English Bay in a downpour. He arrived from Iran five years ago, passing through Pearson International. "I heard it's a big city, too big," he says. "Here, beautiful. People care about their bodies. There, not so much."
Maybe "here," too much. "Too Pretty To Be Smart? Does Vancouver Have Any Brains?" asks a recent cover blurb for Vancouver magazine. Inside, brainy Vancouverites say yes.
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There are places where the good humour of Montrealers or Winnipeggers gives way to anger, and Kenora is one such place. It's a pulp-and-paper town in northwestern Ontario, just this side of the Manitoba border. To many in beautiful Kenora, a winter wonderland wrapped around the north shore of Lake of the Woods, Toronto sits in navel-gazing solitude, fat and rich, on the other side of an arduous, two-day drive through the Canadian Shield on the other side of the moon.
At a Tim Hortons on a Sunday afternoon, a man literally recoils from the Toronto reporter who so brashly ingratiates herself into conversation at his table to ask, "And what, may I ask, do you folks think of Toronto?"
His disgusted look says it all. He sees my calculated amiability. The question itself is so, well so Toronto. He watches in silence as others express their scathing views. Occasionally, he rolls his eyes and snorts.
"We know more about Toronto than anybody else in the world," says George Laco, a retired union executive, "and they know absolutely nothing about us. We are insulted by their ignorance. I try to just laugh and think about how dumb they sound."
We are smug and live in placid indifference to life outside the GTA. We are like New York Boy in Sex and the City, who's never been off the island of Manhattan. We don't even know where they are. Too often, they hear a secretary's voice crackling down the long-distance lines from Toronto: "Can you drive in now? The doctor's got a cancellation. He can see you this afternoon." Do we think they live in Mississauga?
Kenorans are invisible to us, sort of the way we are to Americans.
It wasn't that long ago this region was part of Manitoba; many would like to have it that way again. The politicians can't see this far from Queen's Park, and that means neglect, bad roads, poor facilities, declining services and long years of insults.
A half dozen people take part in the conversation about Toronto. But the table empties in two seconds flat when the photographer brings out his camera. George Laco zips up his jacket and heads out the door, his wife, Gaileen, and friends in tow. "No photos, please," he says. "We don't want trouble."
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Some of this antipathy towards Toronto fits within the larger framework of urban versus rural and small town versus big city. There is, everywhere in the country, a cri de coeur from the forgotten farmer, rancher, miner, lumberjack and fisherman, especially in these times of an American border closed to Canadian cows, tariffs weighing onerously upon our softwood, an assault on the Wheat Board, restrictions imposed upon fishing fleets by a distant, landlocked capital and mining companies going ever further afield, away from Canada.
"It is the story of the country mouse and the city mouse," says Denny Thomas, from his law office in Edmonton. "It is very much what is going on in Canada, and it has been ever thus."
His own story illustrates that other Canadian truth: regional alienation. He excels within the country's legal establishment, with a C.V. that includes a degree from the London School of Economics, a stint working in New York, the position of managing partner in a large, pan-Canadian firm and, in the last federal election, the job of chief fund-raiser for Deputy Prime Minister Anne McClellan (and quite an accomplished one, considering she managed to hang on to one of only two Liberal seats in Alberta).
And yet, he smarts from the days when the big boys from T.O. treated western lawyers like "rubes from Tennessee." Where's your cowboy hat, Denny? Is that manure on your boots, there? Are we going too fast for you? It's li-ti-gate.
Attitudes are softer now, he says, but "we feel we work harder and are under-appreciated for it." (He may have a point. Edmonton is the only city in Canada and I've lived in a few where a dentist has booked me for a regular checkup at 7 a.m.)
And so, there are larger factors at play when people think about Toronto. Still, beyond the normal ebb and flow of a geographically challenging and politically complex country, there is a special irritation with our city. You can feel the hurt. It is personal, highly personal. Alienation is personal.
Country bumpkins, said Mrs. Walker. But does she really see herself thus? She has raised a son so down-to-earth, so classy, that the bedrock routine of his life remains unchanged by $15 million. Larry Walker wasn't home when I rang recently because it was Tuesday and, like any other heavy equipment mechanic, he was out on a job.
It's more likely Mrs. Walker thinks we think they're country bumpkins, and that's telling.
The gulf between Toronto and small-town Ontario hardly differs from Richard B. Wright's fictional world in Clara Callan. In Depression-era Whitfield, his patriarch Edward Callan buys an overcoat in Toronto and dies with it hanging, unworn, in his closet.
"I look like a Toronto banker in it," he tells his daughter, Clara. "People will think I'm putting on airs."
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To be fair to Toronto, she's often judged by long-ago slights and out-of-date information.
"When I was up there, they didn't seem none too friendly. They didn't want to talk to us at all," says Donald Manuel, a retired fisherman, who lives up the road from Peggy's Cove, N.S., in the house beside the house where he was born 74 years ago.
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Canadians show no interest in claiming Toronto as their own, the way Americans proudly take ownership of
the Big Apple
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I did interviews
in towns whose endless outskirts look no different to me from Raleigh or Rochester. And yet, people would point a finger in the direction of Toronto and proclaim: "Too American. Ugh."
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"When was I last up there? Well, now, I'd have to think," he says, looking skyward for inspiration. "1948."
Elaine Haslund, behind the counter at the Cove's Sou'Wester Gift Shop, hates those Toronto "snobs" who are always demanding service "them and New Yorkers." She tells them, "Wait your turn. All's I've got is two hands and a heartbeat."
That evening, at Maxwell's Plum, a Halifax establishment with beer on tap and ghosts in the attic, barmaid Tracie Macaulay says she knows the feeling. She's 24, a slender Christie Turlington look-alike, with a whispery voice. "The rudest man I ever met in my life was from Toronto," she says. He insulted the entire staff, then left with a jaunty, "No tip for you, missy." That more or less defines Toronto for her.
People complain of hearing too much news about Toronto, but it's not as if they pay attention. On a Sunday afternoon, we're rolling along Highway 17, just west of Kenora, when we spot Ray Hudec on the roadside. He's a local icon, a ruddy, robust man, bundled up in a coonskin hat and buckskin and out selling "the wife's" homemade perogies. Born in Czechoslovakia, he's been calling himself a "a cancelled Czech" for 40 years. He drops it in conversation, then waits for the laugh. He's never visited Toronto. He tells us he "hears good stuff about the place, but I got scared off with that SARS thing. That over yet?"
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During the course of the trip, we heard all the Toronto jokes. It's a comedic sub-culture that may come as a shock to some Torontonians.
From Ted Worthington, a retired master mariner in Peggy's Cove:
Q: How do people in Toronto spend the weekend?
A: They wait for Monday.
"I don't want to be too hard on Toronto," adds Worthington, who is 72, "but it's just not sexy enough for me."
From Montreal pharmacist Malcolm Jue:
Q: What's the best thing about Toronto?"
A: The 401 to Montreal.
And, on a blustery day, with the temperature dipping to -34C., this one from kiter Kent Anthony. He and his pals race across a frozen patch of prairie outside Winnipeg and, for a few sublime seconds, are airborne. Crazy guys. Boy-men.
"Tell her the Pocklington story,'' they shout, when he jumps into our SUV to warm up.
Owner Peter Pocklington wanted to sell the Edmonton Oilers a few years back and reporters asked him what would become of a major city without an NHL team.
"It wouldn't be so bad," he reportedly said. "We'd be Toronto."
I catch a last glimpse of Kent bounding away, as he yells over his shoulder.
"You should all learn to relax. Go fly a kite, Toronto. And I mean that in a good way."
All jokes aside, you can kind of see his point when, day after day, you're being swept away by the country's sheer beauty. One afternoon, I watch volunteers with Trout Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia Salmon Association clearing spawning streams. It's a crisp and wonderful day, blue skies, birds on the wing, an afternoon in paradise. We raise our voices to be heard above a babbling brook.
Biologist Bob Rutherford arrived in this area from Toronto 30 years ago to raise a barn for a friend before winter, and never left. "This is God's county," he says.
"Toronto might be a nice place to visit," adds Lawrence Abraham, originally from Ontario, "but there's no way I'd ever live there. Here, you can have a little personality showing. Not like those city slickers in Toronto."
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So many insults. Enough to make a city pack her bags and head for the woods. But the saving grace is, for the most part, our fellow Canadians do love to talk about us even the ones who say they don't.
"That's a stupid question. I don't have any opinion of Toronto,'' snaps Grace Manuel, in her Peggy's Cove kitchen, where she lives in cat-lady land. Feline table mats, tea towels, clocks, calendars, quilts and cutesy aphorisms fill her house. She has a kitty licence plate on her blue Subaru. All that's missing are the warm, furry bodies. She's between cats at the moment.
She does have an opinion, after all. She feels about Toronto the way her husband, Donald, feels about cats. (He spends a lot of time in the shed, whittling.)
"I just don't like it," she says, twiddling her thumbs. "My brother liked it, but he passed away ... I was there once and I didn't like the 401. I was scared to death ... How do you people manage to survive? " She catches her breath. "I don't like it here either. You're too close to your neighbours. They try to know everything about you."
Toronto lore can take on the appearance of myth. I suppose one should say anti-myth, since ours hardly soars on eagle's wing. We evoke humdrum myths, hoary and moss-covered.
We dress up to go to the corner store; we spend our entire lives in traffic; our airport is a mess, stretching like the twilight zone. "The cop wouldn't tell us where we had to go to get out of the airport," Nova Scotia waitress Peggy Haslund had said, her voice rising. "Oh my God, it was awful."
This is something of a theme. "I go to the airport there and I hate it,'' gasps Const. Ken King, in the Saskatoon cold, leaning in to the driver's side of another rented SUV. He'd just flagged us down, for uh, driving on the wrong side of a (very small, snow-covered) road. "But what can ya do? You're the jumping off point for Jamaica, and that's the only thing that saves the city." He continues talking, icicles forming on his beard. "What a terrrible city ..." He lets us off with a warning. Punishment enough, he says, to have to go home to Toronto.
Our city shuts down at sunset; we walk in fear, on dirty, crime-infested streets. "Wow, we got to see hookers and the homeless. It was kinda scary," says Krista Brignall, 18, a clerk at Luby's Food Store in Kenora, about a school trip four years ago. A night-time ride along Yonge St. led her to conclude: "It's the only Canadian city with American crime."
Aren't there homeless people in Kenora?
"Yeah," she replies. "But mostly it's the native population."
Mention Toronto in a Montreal restaurant on a Saturday morning, and there's a buzz. Jean-Guy Guyot toddles into Restaurant Lafleur for the heart-stopping breakfast special: two eggs, two slices of bacon, one sausage, cretons (tripe sausage fried in lard), baked beans, fried potatoes, toast and coffee. He's never been there "too expensive, too many people," but he's seen the CN Tower on television. He wears a red silk rose in his lapel in memory of his long-dead adoptive mother, Beatrice. "A saint, she was, a saint."
With so much to say about Toronto, patrons linger over cups of coffee, guffawing at the notion Montrealers could ever be told to butt out their cigarettes. Toronto bars close at 2 a.m. and you have to go to a government liquor store to buy a case of beer. Imaginez-vous, Madame.
Only one person doesn't join in. Throughout the morning, a man sits alone, arguing loudly to himself the superiority of Air France over Air Canada. A regular.
Sometimes, myths about Toronto find us wanting spiritually. Around the corner, on Carrι St. Louis, Drew Ferguson, who publishes a McGill academic journal, sits on the steps of his 19th-century home on the square. He exults in his city's state-of-grace. "There's more humanity here than in Toronto, there's more concern for your neighbour," he attests. "If Montreal didn't exist," and he shrugs, "we probably wouldn't live on this continent."
Mostly, though, the myths are more prosaic.
"Brother! Is it really true you've got dozens of porno channels?" Al Kucherhan wants to know in Saskatoon. "I catch one sometimes when the wife's gone to bed."
"Is it true you just have to put out your arm to cross the street and the traffic screeches to a halt?" asks Ludovic Laberge, 23, in Montreal. He waits at a photo booth, with his girlfriend, Izumi Okuyama, 24, from Nagoya, Japan.
"Phew! You do that in Montreal and you'd be mowed down," he says, with pride. Translation: no wimps here.
On the same afternoon, on the steps of St. Joseph's Oratory, Montrealer Alejandra Morales complains about Toronto traffic. "Ay Dios, what a disaster."
Excuse me? Toronto traffic? She's from Mexico City, home of the world's worst traffic. It makes Toronto roads look like country lanes.
"To me," says Ludovic Laberge, "Toronto is like a big American city."
Drew Ferguson made a similar point. "There seems to be much more of a focus on money that I sense here," he'd said. "That's a very American thing."
By far, this is the most common perception about us: We are Canada's most American city. I did interviews in towns whose endless outskirts of fast-food chains and flashing neon look no different to me from Raleigh or Rochester or Des Moines. And yet, people would point a finger in the vague direction of Toronto and proclaim: "Too American. Ugh."
It takes me to the end of my journey, back in Toronto, to understand the full meaning of this comment and it will be a young Albertan who explains it to me. It's about more than looking or acting like an American city.
Evan Thomas, Denny's son, a U of T. law student, with a degree from LSE and a growing fondness for Toronto, describes it as a double-barreled putdown. It lumps the "rude, pushy, and insular Torontonian, possessed of the belief that Toronto is superior to the rest of Canada" not like us with the other favorite Canadian stereotype of the rude and pushy American, assuming natural supremacy and oblivious to the country on his northern border again, not like us. Or, as Evan puts it: "It's two caricatures rolled into one and insulting to both.''
A pity, he says, to see Canadians picking on Toronto. "Petty squabbles are killing us as a country. We have such ignorance of each other. We hold each other in such contempt."
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It's early morning in Stanley Park near the end of our trip, and nanny April Kamensek, 25, wheels her small charge in a stroller. We chat by the magnificent totems sky chief holding moon, thunderbird, lightning snake, grizzly bear holding a human. The grass is wet and sweet-smelling from the rain; we stare at the ocean. "I've never been to Toronto. Our ties are closer to Seattle or L.A.," she tells me. "I know some people in Toronto, but I don't know if I'd ever visit."
It's that sort of thinking which troubles urban planner Robert Racco at McGill. "As a Torontonian having spent some time outside the city, I have come to realize that its attributes often go unnoticed by outsiders," he wrote recently, in a letter to the Star. "The Toronto tourism industry has focused a great deal on how Americans perceive the city, but it tends to ignore how other Canadians view Toronto. Unfortunately, it tends to have a very negative image across the country."
I ask Ellen Flowers, spokesperson for Tourism Toronto, if her agency advertises domestically outside Ontario. "Not really," she replies. "Where we advertise is where the markets are." And, in 2004, those markets were in Ontario, the U.S. border states and Europe.
We don't invite Canadians to visit. It's emblematic of a larger problem of not relating to the rest of the country, just as they don't relate to us. It also hints at a darker underside to Evan Thomas's point. Our constant focus outside our country (as per usual) ignores the unique role we could play within Canada. Do we hold ourselves in contempt? Or are we merely oblivious?
After all, even New York City has to advertise in the USA.
"What about creating new markets? What about advertising at home?" asks Racco, during a phone interview from Montreal. I Toronto?
Nah, sounds too simple. He's evidently too young and imaginative to understand serious marking surveys, sober flow charts and the time-honoured way of doing business in Toronto.
The two of us push around concepts for a Canadian ad blitz. We'd love to give everybody $15 million. But a simpler campaign might work.
"Toronto. Give us a try. We're not what you think."
We're not, are we? |
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| SkyHigh |
You weren't kidding when you said its a long read..Damn!!
Good article tho. |
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| malek |
| hehehe good read :) |
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| DigiNut |
The trouble with inviting tourism from all over Canada is that our city is poorly-equipped to even deal with the residents, let alone tourists.
I'd say the first step toward correcting our image is making Toronto less of a city. A lot of those complaints are legitimate - the traffic, the uptightness, the arrogance, the wussiness... there are so many things we could do to actually fix it, but in typical Toronto fashion we prefer to just take it up the ass and fantasize about it being something better. |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | | "Is it true you just have to put out your arm to cross the street and the traffic screeches to a halt?" asks Ludovic Laberge, 23, in Montreal. He waits at a photo booth, with his girlfriend, Izumi Okuyama, 24, from Nagoya, Japan. |
Not quite, all you have to do is step onto the road and cars will stop. And God forbid you honk at someone crossing the road with no regard to the right of way of cars and they will actually get mad at you.
We need to stick Toronto pedestrians in Montreal (or just about anywhere else) for a day and see how they fare. |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Not quite, all you have to do is step onto the road and cars will stop. And God forbid you honk at someone crossing the road with no regard to the right of way of cars and they will actually get mad at you.
We need to stick Toronto pedestrians in Montreal (or just about anywhere else) for a day and see how they fare. |
Pedestrians are bad everywhere. I saw the same in Kingston. It's the drivers who encourage them that are the problem.
What we need to do is electrify everyone's brake pedal for a week. It's honestly way too much of a crutch here. It sounds like a simple enough concept that brakes should only be used at traffic stops and parking spaces, but apparently that concept is lost on most people here. Ontario drivers need to be more like New York Drivers, who use the horn in place of the brake. |
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| malek |
Toronto drivers respect more pedestrians than over here in Montreal.
The worst I ever saw and experienced was in Damascus, omfg, you need eyes all over your head to see whatever's happening. Many times i was crossing small streets and cars wouldn't slow down, expecting you to run away, which i never did :D So they stopped to a screeching halt. Then I would hit the hood of the car and cuss at the guy hehehehehe |
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| Tunnel Rat |
This is just one journalists' opinion based on the feedback from a few other Canadians (mostly from Montreal it seems). I'm originally from the east coast, and Maritimers for the most part enjoy the "strangeness" of Torontonians. I think most Canadians recognize the differences in people from Toronto - and the rest of the country - but respect everyone else that we share this great country with nonetheless.
Afterall, aren't we all for the most part a well-mannered, and respectful society...eh? |
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| dEsidEL |
there's a rest of Canada .. ?? :eek:
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| arek |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by malek
Toronto drivers respect more pedestrians than over here in Montreal.
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I just wish that Toronto pedestrians would respect Toronto drivers. |
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| RobbyG. |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Not quite, all you have to do is step onto the road and cars will stop. And God forbid you honk at someone crossing the road with no regard to the right of way of cars and they will actually get mad at you.
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Everytime I go to work I have to go along St Clair.When I pass Yonge Street I have to watch for all the J walkers.Its really bad in that area.I really wish that they got heavily fined for this :mad: |
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