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Want to bash Toronto? Get in line Stephen Marche, Weekend Post

In his impromptu response to Toronto’s request for infrastructure funding, did John Baird speak the truth about Canada’s largest city?

John Baird, the federal Minister of Transport, has already apologized for his profane remarks about Toronto; our mayor has graciously accepted his apology; the premier has tried to turn it all into a joke. Everybody is playing nice but simmering below this joviality is fresh evidence of a resurgence of our traditional national pastime, beating up on Toronto. Which is terrific. I myself love a good bout of Toronto-bashing. I was born and raised in Alberta, and then went to university in Nova Scotia, so I've savoured the two major schools of Toronto-bashing, the Western and the Maritime. And now I've lived in Toronto for nearly a decade, so I have been both the basher and the bashee.

Alberta's is the more thorough brand of Toronto-hatred I would say - it's backed up by oil money, which makes snap judgments of other people's failures so much easier. The Eastern bastards who can freeze in the dark include all of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes, but a special distaste is reserved for arrogant, bullying, mediacentric Toronto. Toronto embodies all the lazy entitlement, the cold-blooded snobbery of the Central Canadian elite - for the Albertan Toronto-basher, the city is, or was anyway, a kind of combination of Britain under Mad King George and the Soviet Comintern. The Maritime equivalent of the "Eastern bastard" is, of course, the "Upper Canadian." The "Upper Canadian" is also a cold-blooded snob, also overwhelmingly consumed with an unearned sense of personal entitlement, but far from being lazy, the Torontonian in the Maritime imagination is a workaholic, constantly treating the other cities of Canada like poor cousins.

I naturally assumed that once I moved to Toronto, I would see how silly such stereotypes were. How wrong I was. Anti-Toronto sentiment in the ROC (Rest of Canada) is eerily accurate. The first week I moved here, a young man at a party, told me "Oh, you're from Alberta. Your parents must be so proud you've moved here." It took me a few moments to realize that, in his mind, living in Toronto was an accomplishment, like having a PhD or playing a musical instrument. Then there was a good friend, the son of a professor of political science, who turned to me early in our friendship and asked, "Alberta, that's the western-most province, right?" I had the great pleasure of describing to him a mysterious and magical land between Alberta and the ocean, called British Columbia.

So much for arrogance. The cold-bloodness of the city is also indisputable. The novelist and journalist David Macfarlane once told me a story about how, on cold winter mornings, he would wake up early to shovel his walk, and, on occasion, a stranger would be walking past him as he shovelled. Invariably, at the last moment, the stranger would look away. People say that the French are rude, but that looking away would never happen in Paris.

The one mistake Toronto-bashers tend to make, in both the West and the East, is to conflate Toronto with Ontario. Ontarians hate Torontonians more than people in either Alberta or Nova Scotia. I suppose it's because they're more familiar with us. John Baird, we should remember, represents Nepean, outside Ottawa. Mike Harris, from North Bay, did more to damage Toronto than any Albertan would ever dream of doing in his or her most hateful NEP-inspired revenge fantasies. Toronto still has not recovered from our North Bay overlords. We may never recover. John Baird's remarks are just more evidence of what everyone already knows: It doesn't really matter what your politics are, a Torontonian voting for a Conservative is, as they say, like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.

Until this week, I thought Toronto-bashing was losing its motivating power in our national life. By now, everybody knows somebody who has moved to Toronto. And the city itself has become much more fun to visit than it used to be, more open-minded and spirited and cool. Also, the health of countries - it is now well-established - is intricately tied to the strength of their biggest cities. It really doesn't matter whether the ROC likes Toronto or not; they just need us. John Baird needs to invest in us, no matter how much it galls him.

Ignatieff will be the real test of Canadians' stomach for the city, however, because he is pure Toronto, even though he's spent virtually none of his adult life in the city. He is exactly the kind of man who, because he has embarrassed himself as a public intellectual - by being so utterly wrong about the most important political question of his time - thinks, "I guess I'll become prime minister of Canada." Christopher Hitchens, we may note, does not have the option of returning to Britain to become prime minister.

Cold-blooded, arrogant, inappropriately self-entitled, that's him. What's not to like?