There are some differences between Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario (I use caps, as Northern Ontario will be its own province someday :)). Today, I will explain one or two of them.
There are the obvious linguistic differences. The obvious differences are sledding/sliding, cottage/camp and snowmobile/snow machine. And I tend to use the southern versions of these words, due to the fact that I spent a large part of my childhood in residual (north western Toronto). But quite apart from the vocabulary, northerners are less guarded in the speech. Where as city born southerners are generally hipper yet closed, while the rural southerners tend to consider their speech carefully. I have no idea why this is, but it is true. As someone who went to university in the south, I was told that I had a Northern Ontario accent. When I came home for Christmas, I had apparently developed a Southern Ontario accent.
Furthermore, there is a cultural wave washing up from the south. Of the shows are set in Ontario, how many of them are set in Northern Ontario? The same applies, though to a lesser extent, to print media and music. If one wants to find media from Northern Ontario, one really has to look. Though this may be largely due to the comparative populations of Northern and Southern Ontario, it still does piss people off.
However, these minor linguistic and cultural differences are not the major things that separate north from south. The major difference between Northern Ontario and Southern Ontario is the same as the difference between Canada and the United States. Now, I will not go off on a rant about the U.S. (but I could), but in general Canadians feel ignored and slighted by the Uncle Sam. There is a feeling of being looked down upon and an assumption that we will toe their line. The only time we seem to get noticed (either Canada, or Northern Ontario) is when we stand up and refuse to agree with what the larger community is saying. So we get ignored even more, and slapped with the whiner label.
And that is unfortunate. Because that means that neither community is listening.
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6 comments:
speaking as a southerner, I tend to feel the language has fewer hidden meanings up north here. (Intentionally no caps).
Southern speak tends to have tiny little hooks in it that draw one towards saying things they might not mean.
Nonetheless, I really do think the south listens more than the north thinks.
I hope Ontario stays together, north and south. For one thing, how would the north ever pay for itself? More importantly, it would be a shame to see Ontario (which is it's own culture) to disintegrate...
You know you're going to get flack for this one, right?
I don't know that I feel slighted by being ignored by Uncle Sam. I think it's when Uncle Sam starts paying attention to you (yeah, You! and pointing at you) that you're kind of in trouble. As for shows set in northern Ontario, well, go ahead and write one! I don't think it's some great conspiracy--far from it. We seem to be falling all over ourselves to fund, for example, ridiculously under-used transit systems in rural areas, but we can't actually buy any new buses here becuase there is no on-going support from either government. I may just be a self-absorbed, naval-gazing southerner now, but is it really still cool to hate Toronto? I mean, really? Isn't there something on the TEEvee that you can watch to distract yourselves? Oh, no, sorry. It has to be a show about YOURSELVES! Best get on that, then.
So, it is a good thing that they are planning to contaminate a major western Canadian river while draining a toxic site of their own? Or that much of the pollution in southern Ontario is generated from the states immediately to the west? Or should we look at the softwood lumber problem? Ignorance like that must be addressed.
Well, sure. But I'm not quite sure how we're going to address major environmental catastrophes while creating mini-dramas in our own back yard. I'm still a little unsure as to how Southern Onatario really fits into the Canada-U.S. metaphor. And, frankly, if an American company is planning to dump toxic waste into a Canadian river, then it's our own damned fault for letting them. We're all bad guys, here.
But the mini drama's are a symptom of a larger problem. We are fighting to keep the waste from flowing into the river, but the US court system seems, well, less than sympathetic to Canadian concerns. In a similar fashion to how the south is less sympathetic to northern concerns, especially in the far north. And this is most obvious in on the native reserves in the far north. Even Sudbury medical services lag behind the southern Ontario standard. Witness our friend Kalika's difficulty getting a cancer diagnosis. I believe that she was told that down south, she could have been seen in half the time. Pretending that there is no divide does not make it go away. Further, the divide is not a one way and I did not mean to claim that it was. I have seen many instances of northerners showing contempt of southerners, particularly in my line of work. If I was to assign blame for this, it goes to human nature and the fear of the other. Kingston dislikes Toronto (a widely held view in my experience) for the same reasons that Timmins dislikes Sudbury or Thunder Bay dislikes most places east of it (as an aside, there is also a movement for western Ontario to join Manitoba). The is the same feeling that is generalized into a north vs south in Ontario, an east vs west in Canada and a Canada vs US internationally. I was not on a tirade about the south screwing the north. I was highlighting the differences. My largest mistake in my post was that I did not explain how things were changing for the better. There are vast amounts of government money coming into the north in an attempt to help the medical system (the new medical schools in Sudbury and Thunder Bay) and the educational system in the north. The playing field is leveling.
Kingston dislikes Toronto for the same reason that Calgary dislikes Toronto (and vice versa) and East dislikes West (and vice versa). The reason is we're all a bunch of bastards who see the world in terms of 'us' and 'them.'
By the time we figure out that that might not the best outlook, we'll likely all be goners because of (a) nuclear holocaust, (b) organised genocide, or (c) too much time having been spent on the blame game instead of focusing on how to save our dying planet.
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