Okay, so there are a lot of stereotypes about Canada floating around in Europe, and I thought I'd comment on the ones I know. Please take note though that I am writing these answers from the perspective of somebody living in downtown Toronto. Also the list is incomplete, but if I wait until I finish this entire thing, it will both be too long and people will start complaining that I never update. Again, yes, I know.
1: There are maple trees everywhere.
True. The things are all over the place downtown. The city has at least a dozen of every common member of the Aceraceae family in every district, and at least one or two of the more obscure ones from Asia, heavily interspersed with Platanus trees. This leads to the parks currently being covered in every expected and some very unexpected (violet?) colour of the fall. This also leads me to comment that Toronto has no parks. They have green lots, true, and some nice public gardens, but no parks. Why? My personal definition of a proper park is “standing on one edge of the park, one cannot make out the other edge, be it for distance, terrain or vegetation.” Queen's Park is one of the biggest in the city, and even though it's north-south size is pretty impressive, it's so criss-crossed by major streets it's not really one park. But anyway, maple trees, lots of em, woo! Go Leafs! Oh, right, Leafs, this leads us to -
2: Everybody is all about Hockey.
This is true for Canada by far and large, but I feel the Torontonians have it hard. Their home team is one of the oldest, the best paid and one of the winningest (that is SO a word) teams in North American hockey...or at least it was. The Maple Leafs are currently suffering the longest victory drought of any major hockey team in Canada. The poor dears. But otherwise, yes, Canadians get worked up about hockey, far more than the average Austrian about football (yes, it is that impressive) which leads me to-
3: Canadians are really friendly.
This is both true and false. Let me explain. Being used to the general low-level non-personal animosity the average Viennese has for the world at large and everyone in it, I was taken aback by how helpful and friendly everyone is here. At first I was deeply suspicious of people because of that until, after meeting the sixth or seventh Canadian outside of a service setting, I realized that they really are THAT friendly, which is almost creepy at times. It's not even that superficial “American Friendliness©” that makes some salespeople in the US seem like somebody laminated that smile onto their unblinking visages, it feels at least partially sincere. After living here for three months, I'm actually starting to genuinely like the lunatics I'm billeted with.
So Canadians are very friendly. Until they aren't anymore. I'm casually going to point over my shoulder at the Vancouver “hockey riots” for a second. Trust me, Toronto had a field day because of that. But now on to my point. Toronto Canadians, when angry, get incredibly verbally aggressive incredibly fast. It's like an American swear-word vocabulary, backed by a British temper. I've seen two immaculately dressed businessmen in the financial district getting in a face-to-face shouting match (apparently because they bumped into each other while busy texting on their Blackberries) that used words I would not even throw at my worst enemies. The F-word is only the start, accusations of deviant sexual behaviour in either parent a small stepping stone. The volume was pretty impressive too, because I overheard every word across a four-lane road, while wearing headphones.
But at the same time, random strangers jumped in and tried to calm them both down. Canada.
4: Canadians are paragons of political correctness.
Oh jeez, are they ever. Toronto is fiercly proud of being one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, and living downtown, I have to agree it is. In the first week of being here, I managed to extend my “list of countries whose citizens I have met personally” by Mexico, China (about a dozen times), Taiwan, Singapore (about a hundred times, seriously, are people left in Singapore?), Ghana, Colombia and Iran. And that was before going to the Student Exchange Orientation. This, paradoxically, does not lead to widespread stereotyping and suspicion, but it leads to everybody being very friendly, and when you want to label a street in Mandarin Chinese and English, the district council will pay for it, and maverick politicians who paint feverish conspiracies about foreigners taking over are ignored and overruled instead of deadlocking the debate for decades and making a mockery of the legal process by ignoring ruling from the supreme court. How odd is that?
Ahem. It also leads to all white people being very nervous about possibly being inadvertently racist. They have signs on the subways, buses and in major public places (usually worn, and covered in stickers, attesting to their age) that warn you about verbal racism being an infringement of humans rights, and so on. Canadians in general are pretty law-abiding, and coupling that with the utterly dazzling array of pro-civil and anti-racist campaigns going on at any time, I get the feeling they're hiding something...oh right, the First Nations. Hm. Asides from that, it feels like the big-brother vision of PC-enforcement sometimes. To give a crass example, if I walked up to a random person, kneed them in the genitals and called them an old word for a plantation worker from the American South, the fine for what I said would be a lot higher than for what I did. No joke. Speaking of crime -
5. There is virtually no crime.
In the last two months, there were about half a dozen murders, numerous muggings, break-ins, one kidnapping and several instances of random gang violence in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and yes, there were many instances of gta in the GTA. Harhar. So no, Michael Moore's crime-free Canada, should it exist, is not here. And to hope that a urban region of nearly 4 million people would be crime-free would also have been a bit naive, no? Still, the crime rate is very, very low for a North American city, and the third-lowest in the area after Montreal and Ottawa, which are both a lot smaller. While the KIND of murder is different from the average in the United States, the number of murders per year makes Toronto an average Northern American city in that respect.
But seeing how the next two cities of comparable size are Detroit and Chicago, Toronto by comparison is a gated community. Of which there are a bunch too, in fact. There is one down the street from where I am, in the middle of the Annex, the second richest residential area in the downtown area. Some people don't feel safe unless their AC checks the fresh air for ID before letting it in, apparently.
6. The ancient “Canada and the US are the same” argument.
Well, in some respects, the situation of Canada vs. the US is a bit like Austria vs. Germany. Mostly in the respect that Canadians are far more concerned with differentiating themselves from the USA than people from the USA are giving a damn about the existence of Canada, unless they live near the border. And when they do, they see Canada as a place where they can buy cheap drugs, legal and otherwise. Other than that, Toronto feels a lot like New York and London had a child, and that child is going through a mid-teen identity crisis. On the one hand, everybody loves not being Americans, and generally likes Europe and the UK, but every diplomatic contact with the UK is seen as a possible avenue for covert political subversion. At the same time everyone loves being North American, and to hang out with the USA, but every attempt at closer ties to the US is seen as cultural hegemony in the making. Schizophrenic, but feels familiar somehow.
This debate, of course, leaves out the Quebecois, who are close enough to Toronto to be noticable. They are, at least while in Toronto, the most and least french people in the world at the same time. From an Ontario perspective, the most widely felt step in their struggle for independence from the rest of Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, seems to have been allowing its citizens to buy beer in super markets instead of purpose-built cornerstores, which always sort of feel like a prohibition era bootlegging operation set up shop in an abandoned pharmacy. Ontario has one of the highest taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and one of the strictest law systems for the regulation of the same. I blame the proximity of Pennsylvania.
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