Quote:
Originally Posted by CoffeeBreak
I've often thought that weather played an important role in deciding which cities in Southern and Central Ontario developed more over the last century. For example, Owen Sound is in a snowbelt region that gets significant dumps of snow at certain times of the year. Meanwhile, Toronto appears to be ideally situated in one of the few spots in the region that is rarely impacted from lake effect snow (complete luck of geography). I travel back and forth between Toronto and Barrie during the winter ski season, and I'm often amazed at the difference in snow and temperatures over the course of a two-hour drive. It could be a mere coincidence, but I can't help but wonder if earlier settlers in Ontario noticed the difference too, and gradually just moved and resettled over time to the area around Toronto.
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But then again, upstate NY cities like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are in a snowbelt zone, and yet they grew large populations (in the 20th century) -- in the hundreds of thousands. Not so much now by comparison to other big cities, obviously but the fact that they were bustling places back in their day shows that weather was not an impediment (even though in the US there are a much better variety of climates overall) back in their boom period.