Is Winnipeg a Western city or Midwestern city?
 

Would you consider Winnipeg to share more traits with cities points west, this includes both north and south of the border, or with Midwestern cities in the Great Lakes region? After all, we are the "Gateway to the West" and the "Heart of the Continent" so I can see arguments made for both sides.
The way I see it is that nowadays we might be more "Western", but historically being a frontier city in the Northern Prairies we have the "bones" of Midwestern city.

Canada doesn't have a mid-west, so it's Western.

Exactly this. I suppose there may be some commonalities between Winnipeg and some of the more westerly Midwestern US cities, but in the Canadian context there isn't much to debate here... Winnipeg is a western city through and through.

We may not have a mid-west, but a whole lot of companies here have "Mid-Canada" or "Mid-Continental" in their names.

Central

It's a Western city for the simple reason that, as stated in the first reply, there's no such thing as "mid-western" in Canada.

If, however, that doesn't satisfy some people, it's a matter of choosing what else it could be if not western. It's certainly not central as suggested above. Not only is it ecologically, politically, and popularly not central, it's about 2,000 kms away from anything that we do consider central Canada.

"Where the industrial despair of the east meets the agricultural despair of the west."

If you drove straight south from Winnipeg and looked at the US cities you ran into would you call them Midwest cities?

That said, as others have pointed out, Canada doesn't have a mid-west as that is an American thing.

Some parts of Chicago sure look like Winnipeg.

Halsted is kind of Fort Garry-ish.

The US midwest includes states directly south of Ontario (e.g. Ohio). By that logic, Toronto could be call 'midwestern'. The Dakotas are referred to as the "upper Midwest".

At the end of the day, Canada doesn't use the term Midwest and despite the fact that the longitudinal centre of Canada is just a few miles east of Winnipeg, Ontarians will always say they are central Canada (not eastern Canada).

According to some folks, Nunavut is the centre of Canada

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/t...anadas-middle/

https://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/imag...idwest-map.jpg

I lived two miles further east. I liked telling people that I lived in eastern Canada and commuted to my job in western Canada.

Funny thing. At work, the internal divisions lump Canada into east and west groups. Toronto is part of the western Canada division. They're up in arms about it hahahaha love it.

But yeah, Winnipeg is western Canada. Question is how far east does that go. Is Thunder Bay western Canada?

^ Kenora

Not really. Thunder Bay is tied more to Toronto than Winnipeg or points west, by virtue of being in Ontario. They're separated by 700km, so Thunder Bay is kind of doing its own thing in the middle of nowhere.

The west-east dividing line is roughly the MB/ON border.

If going by the "Central Canada" definition of Ontario and Quebec, the discover Canada website would list Manitoba in the Prairie region with SK and AB while BC is west coast region.

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resourc...ection-13c.jpg

I'd agree that the MB/ON border would be the limit of western Canada. Kenora at most.

Thunder Bay is in no man's land..

We are pretty much a Western Canadian city. Geographically, it's otherwise, but politically and culturally, we are west relative to Central Canada, which is the GTA, southern Ontario, Ottawa-Gatineau, etc.

I would say it isn't a western city simply because it's in a "have not" province. Ergo, it has more in common with the eastern Canada.

An extremely narrow take on things, but OK. Were Sask and and BC not western provinces for all the years when they were net recipient of equalization payments?

Whether Thunder Bay is in Western or Eastern Canada depends on what economic sector you're in. For things like banking, mining, and government, we're in Eastern Canada, though a couple banks (TD and probably BMO) group us into Manitoba. For industries that involve the movement of goods, like retail and agriculture, we're (usually) in Western Canada, the main exceptions I can think of being Metro and Walmart. (For this reason, Superstore and Safeway are always cheaper than Walmart and Metro, as the transportation costs are lower.)

Thunder Bay is additionally unique because it's made up of two smaller cities, and one is very similar to Toronto and other Southern Ontario cities while the other is very similar to Winnipeg and other western Canadian cities. Port Arthur is a port city with a military history, settled by largely affluent British people from the central parts of Southern Ontario, around Kitchener and Guelph, financed by people in Toronto. Fort William on the other hand is a railway city with a fur trading history, initially settled by British people from Southern Ontario but always with a large and raucous immigrant community that leaned further to the left than the working class in Port Arthur. The only thing Port Arthur and Winnipeg really share is the Dawson Road, and that the local Francophone community settled there as opposed to Fort William.