Quote:
Originally Posted by Loco101
I live in Timmins, ON population about 42,000. About 5 years ago our city hired a marketing company, The St. Clements Group, to come up with a new logo, slogan, methods of advertising, etc.. The marketing company is located in Toronto.
A man working for that company visited our city and came up with what he thought of "typical" residents here:
"Tim Hortons, not Starbucks
Ford F-150, not VW Bug
John Wayne, not Hugh Grant
Steak, not sushi
Hockey, not ribbon dancing
The Magnificent Seven, not Wuthering Heights"
Many people here were extremely pissed and insulted when the above was presented at a city council meeting. I get that a small isolated Northeastern Ontario city with mining as the main industry isn't going to have the variety of somewhere like Toronto but that guy's view of us was ridiculous. And just FYI we now have a Starbucks location (okay we do have 8 Tim Hortons locations) and we have two very popular sushi restaurants. And find me somewhere in Canada where ribbon dancing is more popular than hockey!
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It is taking us a long time to let go of these sorts of assumptions, in rural areas and cities of all sizes.
In Canada, like the rest of the developed world, there is no longer a insurmountable cultural division between the city and the countryside. Today, while still a generalization, it's almost more accurate to view small towns as simply having less variety than a large city, as opposed to being an altogether different beast.
Our stereotypes of urban and rural are irrelevant today. I could go to St. Anthony tomorrow and the people there would be little different from those in suburban towns around St. John's. We'd understand each other, get all the same references. The most shocking thing I'm likely to encounter is a middle-aged woman with heavily-hairsprayed bangs and outdated jeans. A century ago? I would've struggled just understanding the local accent and vocabulary. The lifestyle and culture would've been literally medieval compared to St. John's. There wouldn't even be indoor plumbing or electricity. That's the era our stereotypes of each other are based on.
Today we're trying to layer stereotypes based on a division of that magnitude on top of differences as weak as Starbucks versus Tim Horton's. Well, Linda, they're both awful. And they occupy the same cultural niche - the existence of either, whatever their relative dominance, in two places shows they share something in common.