As a resident of Toronto, I am a bit reluctant to write about Vancouver. Torontonians and Vancouverites don’t get along very well, even though it is only the regular infusion of Torontonians that keeps Vancouver from losing its status as a city. Scratch a Vancouverite — not that it’s a practice I advocate — and chances are you’ll find an expatriate Hogtowner. Like religious converts, these newfound westerners are the most wild-eyed believers in the mythology, the most likely to promulgate the idea that Vancouverites routinely go skiing in the morning and sailing in the afternoon. There is no recorded instance of anyone actually skiing and sailing in the same day, but the belief that it can be done holds a lot of people in thrall. In fact Vancouver’s traffic nowadays makes such a practice unlikely, and in any case Vancouverites don’t have the time for it, having to work like Torontonians to make the payments on their leaky condos.
What the residents of these two cities have in common is an irrational smugness, an utterly unfounded belief that they are living in the best city in the world. We grasp desperately at warm comments from visitors, keen to be noticed by outsiders. The best of all is when we get acknowledged by international studies that rank the cities of the world. These surveys invariably come up with widely divergent results, and sometimes Toronto does well and other times it’s Vancouver.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
February 9, 2020
QotD: Toronto and Vancouver
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