Victoria Savage: Looking for Upper Canada
Away from the steel and sprawl of 'Sloptario' is a place to stand, and a place to grow.
To get from one end of the GTA to the other, as I had to do earlier this month, one must pass through what my husband uncharitably likes to call “Sloptario”. The stream of suburban roadside shopping malls sprawled beneath elevated highways that bleed from one exit to the next, each indistinguishable from the last, paints a bleak picture of our province.
The story inside these towns isn’t much sunnier. Many of these places are in their infancy, at least compared to other parts of the country, and especially at the population levels they now boast. What negligible regional character existed at all in these areas has been largely ironed out in favour of clear-cut, cookie-cutter suburbs. They are indistinguishable, visually and culturally, from any other bit of suburban sprawl in North America. There’s nothing ‘local’ about them. They are places with no history, no memory. They are the ‘Anywhere’ places in Ontario, where Anywhere people live.
Half of Ontario lives here. It is easy, therefore, to assume, as many do, that these places represent all there is of Ontario. It is a province often cast, including sometimes by its own inhabitants, as having no provincial pride or unique culture or traditions.
While I understand this impulse, and even used to feel this way myself, I no longer believe this to be the whole picture of our province. Those of us who have managed to escape the grips of the GTA suburbs know that the other half of Ontario is living a very different story.
In this other half, there exists some memory of older, regional cultural identities. From Northern Ontario to the Ottawa Valley, and from the St. Lawrence lowlands to the south-west, there are millions of Ontarians keeping these local cultures alive.
These are Ontario’s ‘Somewheres’, and the identity of these places is etched into every corner of their existence, from their vernacular architecture, to their local museums, to street names, to regional dialects.