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Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin
I'm curious as to how something like the distances between downtown Vancouver and it's suburban municipalities becomes a frequent topic of conversation in Toronto.
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Where it has come up is for business travel and where to stay in relation to the office. If the office is in Vancouver, there's a reluctance to get a hotel in Burnaby even if it's significantly cheaper than the Vancouver hotels, just because it's "so far away". This recently came up and a colleague doing the hotel booking thought Burnaby was over 50 km away from Vancouver, not realizing they're right next to each other.
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Originally Posted by rousseau
Really? "Up" to London and Windsor? "Down to Toronto"?
This sounds fantastically weird to me. I wonder if this was an idiosyncratic tick of a few students in Toronto?
As best I can tell, there's not much "up" and "down" in southern Ontario unless you're going to cottage country, or Owen Sound, or somewhere like Windsor. You'll hear "going to Toronto," not "going up to Toronto." Not even in Hamilton do people say "going up to Toronto."
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In London I've often heard "up to Toronto". Never have heard that anywhere east of Toronto.
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Originally Posted by GlassCity
As far as people's confusion with populations and things like that, I've learned to let it go. The average person doesn't give a flying fuck what the population of different cities is, and when you don't have something as a reference point, it's easy to not even have a general understanding of these things, leading to interview answers including the population of Canada as 50,000. Aside from feeling better about yourself on internet forums, the populations of different cities really don't matter to most people, so you can't blame them for not knowing anything about them. Think about how much the average person struggles with knowing how our elections work. We have bigger fish to fry.
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This does become an important issue in business settings when you're dealing with budgeting and allocating to different geographic areas. I've had to step in when dealing with how to distribute marketing budgets within Ontario when people have made outlandish claims about Toronto's population relative to, say, Peterborough and budgets are to be allocated based on population. In one case a manager was claiming Toronto's population was over 6 million (the city,
not the GTA) while also claiming the population of Peterborough was only 5,000. Based on the fact the client's budget was supposed to be allocated according to the population of each municipality we were contracted to work in, this was grossly incorrect and the client would have been incensed if I allocated almost all their budget to Toronto (in this case their business goal was to grow their business in Southern Ontario beyond the GTA).
The reason I get annoyed when people make these kinds of grandiose claims about Toronto or the GTA or diminutive claims about other cities is because it has real-world implications in both business and politics when decision-makers hold these beliefs.