Yep, ever the same since the Hudsons Bay Company and the Northwest Company ran the whole place.
Now it's just the Westons and Rogers and Bell instead.
Some years ago when I first moved to my farm out here in the Hamilton area there was a meeting about zoning bylaws, as the city was finally -- after 20 years -- harmonizing the rural zoning laws after the municipal amalgamation that Mike Harris had forced on them back in the late 90s.
We're on an A1 zoned farm lot, and I have a small hobby vineyard here, and although I don't have enough acreage myself to run a winery business, I was curious to see what the zoning around that was. But then I noticed that they had language in the zoning laws that explicitly restricted all winery / commercial vineyard operations to be only in the east of the city (Winona, east of Stoney Creek). I was baffled why they would restrict like that, actually have laws preventing you from running a business up here.
So I went to the zoning presentations / meetings and tried to talk to the city staff there about it. She looked at me completely incredulously like I was from Mars.
"That's because that's where the wineries are. Maybe we'd allow cider operations up there, but not wine."
Why on earth would you go out of your way to do that? If someone wants to try it, why stop them? She just took it for granted that their job was to enshrine the existing state of things in a formal law.
It's for some reason just the default Canadian mindset to create an environment to often favour the already entrenched, and to explicitly put gates in front of any upstarts.
It's not a partisan thing. It's not liberal vs conservative vs whatever. It's just some weird mindset that wants to see credentials for everything, and the best credential you can have is your proximity to already existing power privilege or wealth.
Best explanation I have is this is an outcropping of the colonial mindset.
> It's not a partisan thing. It's not liberal vs conservative vs whatever. It's just some weird mindset that wants to see credentials for everything, and the best credential you can have is your proximity to already existing power privilege or wealth.
Bingo, you nailed it! I like how you described it in few words as I have been trying to articulate that for a while, as some people I know they blame it in liberal or whatever, but the reality it has nothing to do with that, it’s just the overall mindset in here. A lot of people here like to hate on Americans or at least have an anti-American identity somehow, but the reality is, Americans are miles better when it comes to practicality of work, diversity of thoughts, and openness to new opportunities. My friend who owns a big drone company in the US told me before how he started the company years ago, it sounds like a movie where all you needed is some determination only, he had zero money and zero connections zero VC investors, and started it after being rejected on something related. Meanwhile it’s almost impossible to achieve that in Canada the same way how he started it. Add to that, Canadian economy is mostly services and real-estate, so anything outside of these two must be directly or indirectly sponsored by one of the companies you mentioned. It’s funny because while doing my business I ended up either that I have to be “blessed” by rogers or bell to actually get going :)