My East Coasterner friends often ask me: “Jared, why do you hate Toronto so much?” I hate Toronto for the same reasons that Osama bin Laden hates New York: imperialism.

Toronto is a large mass, so a lot of economic services necessarily orbit around it. It is the current choice of head (or these days, national-branch) offices, replacing Montreal, which replaced Quebec City (and it’s just conceivable that someday Toronto could be replaced in that role by Calgary). National economic policy, such as the interest rate, is and should be set based on Toronto’s economic situation, even if it is to the detriment to BC’s economy. Toronto exports economic imperialism.

The suburbs around Toronto are famously vote-rich, proportional to their large population. Politicians get more bang for their buck when “buying” votes – through favourable policies or otherwise – in the Toronto area. Even the highly populated areas of BC are not those with a direct interest in natural resources, which is a source of significant political friction. And besides, urban BC has a tendency to vote left-wing, which makes it a poor right-of-centerre battleground. Toronto exports political imperialism.

Toronto is the only region of Canada large enough to stand up to American mass media (although the actual production of Canadian mass media seems to be largely performed by Maritimers for some reason). Through Canadian Content laws, we are given an alternative between these two mass medias. Of course BC culture is suppressed all the same, and perhaps moreso without the overtly imperialistic American media to rally against. Toronto exports cultural imperialism.

I am jealous of Toronto. I am envious that they have economic, political, and cultural autonomy. I agree with A Pattern Language that regions of 2 to 10 million people follow the Dao, although Cascadia’s 13 million or so would be a step in the right direction.