Where are you from? If you are from a big city and don't know any different, I would say Montreal is one of the most dynamic cities in Canada. But then, I am from there and would never live in a city again if my life depended on it. I left Montreal 40 years ago to live in the forest. Once you know what that is like you would never go back either - dirty, stinky, crowded, polluted, noisy, stressful, expensive.... but, for reasons beyond my comprehension, most people like them or don't know any better. Oh well, no accounting for taste, eh!
The main attraction is the social environment: more access to many different people.
Personally I'd say that I can make more contacts in a big city and that allows me to do more...but when it comes right down to it, it's the wide variety of women I have access to. I have to say that I can dispense with everything else but if it weren't for women, I'd be in the bush...oops, well you know what I mean.
Buses, trams and subways.... and usually they all run very frequently in that usually as soon as you make it to the stop, a bus, tram or subway is arriving within a couple of minutes.
Having spent a lot of time in TO I can tell you that the general public (who don't live by their cars) usually find the transit system wanting and having seen transit systems in Europe, the TTC is really low on the scale of efficiency and quality of service. I've had people from
New York (not exactly stellar in the public transit department) say that they couldn't believe how bad Toronto's transit system was.
To give you an example: I was in Barcelona recently and saw subways that seemed to have a station absolutely everywhere you could want to go--like tentacles spreading all over the city and even connecting to surrounding municipalities--arriving on-the-dot even at rush hour, all-new comfortable buses with their own divided lanes, easily-acquirable scan-based passes of all variations (no ID-based "metropasses" or "tokens"), sidewalk-level streetcars move smooth as silk and have their own Wi-Fi that make the ones in TO look like they should be in a museum...and all this for half the price the TTC charges on a city transit budget proportionally smaller than TO's (no thanks to their federal government) and still digging new subway tunnels in terrain where you bump into rock every few meters and a country has mild environmental issues allowing for all-surface routes without a problem (unlike TO). In Toronto...yes, stuff runs on time (sorta) and the few subway tunnels they have are falling apart because they weren't built to last when they were built half a century ago, like much of that city's infrastructure. (And it's hardly the best in Canada either, so let's not go saying Canadians don't know how to build a good mass-transit system.)
Not having a car in Barcelona...hell you don't need it--the transit system is a pleasure. In Toronto not having a car will limit where you can go within a reasonable amount of time...almost as much as will the city's idiotic traffic system (you'd swear they were trying to
make you waste gas), should you be so bold as to drive with people famous for being among the worse drivers in the world. (I should add that even during rush-hour I could get through Barcelona--an massive old European city with high population density famous for its traffic jams back in the Franco days--in the time it takes me to get a few blocks in downtown TO rush-hour). That's putting aside the risk of you and your car disappearing into one of Toronto's many pot-holes, or practising your stunt car skills losing contact with the ground as you bounce along the patchwork of speed-bump-like road "repairs" for everything
except the bloody pot-holes.
And cycling...in Barcelona the goddamn bikes have their own physically-divided (i.e.
separate) lanes (like the buses do!)--it's like having your own little street to pedal away on, not to mention that some streets are blocked off to car traffic. In Toronto cycling along those painted "paths" between the parked cars and the traffic is to risk life and limb. And a street closed to cars? Oh no, that would be sacrilege against the car gods (oh right, it's Toronto...I mean giant SUV and XL-size pickup gods...well I guess the bad roads are a bit like going off-road). And again, hardly a Canadian leader in this department when you compare to a city like Montreal.
I don’t live in Toronto, and it is not my first choice to live. But if you want to live in a big city, you can’t do much better than Toronto.
I have lived in Toronto and the choice to do so had nothing to do with how much better it was than other cities. What has given Toronto some charm is the population, some nice homely/bohemian corners of it (that are increasingly rare) and certain parkland. Other than that you have the financial district which has a NY-like feel to it (if you're imaginative), some cultural centres such as some top museums/art galleries and some pleasant-looking neighbourhoods. Most of the businesses that gave the place character are going out of business because they lack the clientele they once had and the high taxes make them unviable--the social environment is becoming increasingly yuppified/vulgarized and there's a far less sense of community.
There's little more really (just urban sprawl); you get a job/start a business, make money (if you can) and try and focus on being mediocre, much like you would in the rest of Canada. Lots of competition from hordes of young "professionals" with plenty of talent for losing money and no time to waste on anything that matters. The political climate is temperate at best so don't plan on a future as a "radical."
Compared to the European and Asian metropolises, Toronto is a glob of paint on some canvas compared to a DaVinci. But no need to go so far; Montreal and Vancouver make Toronto look like a highrise shantytown.
Granted, there's enough of the original population left and immigrants who aren't money-obsessed to make it a little more easy-going than Montrealers and less...uh...colourful than residents of Vancouver.
As for US cities, well, they have the problem that they're in the US and you have to deal with their immigration system, which is no fun. But aside from that, the US is generally a 'bigger' country in the social/political sense--more going on there so unless you're just coming to North America to work, you may find more fulfilment in those cities. That said, yanks are nuts.
