Along-standing complaint against Canada’s national media is that so many newsrooms are based in Toronto. And, for years, accusations of “Toronto centrism” against publications like The Walrus have been all too richly earned. The fact is a huge number of the country’s journalists live and work in the country’s biggest city. But a couple of major shifts have started to turn that story around. One is the normalization of remote and hybrid work. Over the past couple of years, for example, we were able to deepen our coverage of Manitoba, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada simply because we finally have editorial staff based in those places; as many people now work across the country as in Ontario.
My own life has taken me more regularly to Ottawa, a city I’d previously known mainly as a tourist or from work trips that exposed me only to its more glamorous venues, like the National Arts Centre or Rideau Hall. That’s the face the city promotes to the world. Now, conversations with neighbours and new friends have revealed to me one of the daily realities of what it’s like to actually live and work there: the city’s astonishingly dysfunctional transit system.
