Winter in Toronto (lattitude 43.6) isn't really much different from Chicago (lattitude 41.8) and pretty much the same as most of the US northeast and not nearly as bad as a place like Minnesota (or Vermont or Maine, etc.) etc. Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California, and while it has plenty of very cold days the total length of winter isn't any longer than much of the northern half of the US.
It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.
> Toronto sits at the same latitude as northern California
This is
(a) just actually not literally true (41N at the border vs 43N),
(b) particularly off-base when you consider that "northern California" is typically a reference to the SF Bay Area
(c) completely deceptive.
Four months of the year with around two feet of snow, with an average low below freezing. San Francisco has barely ever gone below freezing in its entire historical record (literal record low of −3C a hundred years ago).
Yes yes, you don't have igloos in Toronto, fair point. But a person who drives on summer tires year round in Toronto is a homicidal maniac. In Vancouver that's merely lazy, an excuse to call in sick a few days a year.
No argument about Minnesota, though, nor about The Texas Of The North. And yes, it's hardly never-ending winters. The summers in T.O. are brutal too.
How about the Texas of the South? Here's my observation.
I would think there is some comparison between Canada and Texas as major trend-setters of their own unique culture, both philosophically and financially, within a diverse North American continent. For some things there are more similarities than differences. A lot of extractiveness with few owners but excess amounts of resources traditionally trickling down from there.
In Texas it's been declining for entrepreneurs starting 40 years ago. The most recent 20 years have been more of the same. There's still bright spots like anywhere else but overall the outlook for independents has only become more negative in the long run.
One of the obvious things nobody really looks at, Houston was founded (on an undeveloped floodplain) as a planned center of industry and commerce for Texas when it became a new nation after independence from Mexico. The idea was to replace San Antonio which had been the capital as a Spanish colony and Mexican state, and which had been inhabited by indigenous cultures since prehistoric times.
Growth-entrepreneurialism was ingrained and universal in Houston from day one, then put on steriods after the discovery of oil & gas.
After the arrival of the telephone most businesses depended on listing in the phone directory. Something I understand many young entrepreneurs have never seen nor utilized, so I digress.
By the 1970's (when everybody still had a land line telephone and the phone company was still a monopoly and quite uniform across the US) most cities had a directory format where the "white pages" at the beginning of the book were the fine-print alphabetic listing of all residential and business numbers, with businesses often appearing in bold in order to stand out among the residences, depending on their service agreement. Followed by the yellow pages which were a business listing with alphabetized categories (rather than alphabetized by business name), containing paid display advertisements, so you could look up consumer-oriented things like plumbers and auto mechanics, etc.
Unless you knew the correct name of the business, you were probably better off looking for a business number in the yellow pages, which would be maybe about the last half of a fairly massive softcover book.
In a place like Atlanta it was getting pretty crowded and they would then issue the white pages and the yellow pages as two separate massive volumes. Atlanta was a pretty hoppin' place.
But in Houston there were so many independent businesses that the phone company published a separate one of their huge soft-cover fine-print black & white directories each year just for individual business phone numbers. No display ads, just data, this was not the "yellow pages" which contained the sometimes whole-page paid advertisements, there were so many of those they were issued in two separate massive alphabetical volumes bound from the traditional yellow paper. This was the fine print and there wasn't room for the businesses within the residential directory anyway since that had already been divided into two separate alphabetical volumes of their own residential white-pages. They might have had a set up like this in other crowded places like Los Angeles.
Even after the Nixon recession had been suffered miserably by small businesses, the Houston business pages alone were about as big or bigger than the entire phone book of most other American cities, which I attribute to enhanced survival due to unprecedented high oil prices. But eventually after the Reagan recession kicked in, the business pages began to dwindle to a shadow of their former self.
We don't have the equivalent documents today to make a valid comparison with, since we're measuring thin pages by the kilo, but the gradual displacement of widespread opportunity with widespread malaise that was apparent in the macro environment has seemed to continue unabated for about 40 years now and it's about time people noticed.
Just another thing independent entrepreneurs have to face, they are an endangered species who has been under constant threat since before so many of them were born.
It ain't California or the PNW, but it also doesn't fit the stereotype of the Great White North, eh? As a person from a part of Canada with actual winters, calling this never-ending winter seems like a giant distortion. Most years we don't really have proper snow on the ground until after Christmas, and it's gone before April. Where I grew up in Alberta it's snow from late October until April.