In Toronto, I'd tend to say the main tent-pole companies of the scene are clique financed, and know the ins and outs of subsidies. There is quite a bit of skill in the area; but the climate of risk aversion leads to depending on countless hackathons to substitute for any true R&D. Nice city, though tough to find a job.

> Also nitpick - we are the fourth most populous city in North America, and only Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles have a larger population. As of mid last year, Toronto contains more people than Chicago.

Ugh, this is a pet peeve of mine. The city limits are drawn in such a way that Toronto _technically_ edges out Chicago. Torontonians seem to feel this is a meaningful point of pride.

Get real. The metro Toronto area is 7 million people. The metro Chicago area is nearly 10 million.

Huh? Get real? The 10 million "Greater Chicago Area" you're referring to is 10,857 miles. The 6 million Toronto area you're referring to is only 2,751 miles. That's almost 4 times the size but only 1.6 times the population.

I think the sizes are in reality pretty close and figuring out which is bigger seems very nuanced depending on where you draw the lines. That being said I'll go along with you and say Chicago is probably bigger for the most part right now. Chicago definitely feels like a bigger city when you're downtown anyways.

The numbers you're using for comparison though? C'mon, who's being prideful?

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/so-is-toro...

You can include the entire "extended" golden horseshoe area (all the way to K/W and Peterborough) and you've still got only 8.7 million people in 12,185 square miles [1]. By the way, I was already using the golden horseshoe area already (Hamilton, etc.) since I used _seven_ million, not _six_.

There are simply more people in the Chicago area. By a decent margin. There's nothing wrong with that. I think this is a thing for Torontonians because of the perpetual inferiority complex we Canadians [2] have with respect to the U.S. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Horseshoe

[2] I am from Toronto, so it's weird to accuse me of being prideful? I'm guessing you think I'm somehow "defending" Chicago? My point is that having more city in your city is nothing to be proud (or ashamed) about.

Toronto downtown absorbed North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough in the late 90s. It is not until last year that our population edged out Chicago, so whatever the reason for the amalgamation it definitely wasn't because we wanted to beat Chicago out in a pissing contest. However, you want to interpret the data, the truth is that the article writer did not do their homework.

Yes, the author committed another pet peeve of mine: omitting Mexico City from the list of largest cities in North America. Particularly stupid, given that it is the largest!

Toronto is the seventh largest metro area in North America. 2/3 the size of Chicago.

About the same size as Washington and Philadelphia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metro...

REALLY strange choice of data point for Toronto -- it uses a much smaller land area than for the US cities.

Greater Toronto Area - 7,124 km^2

Chicago Metro Area - 28,120 km^2

Houston Metro Area - 26,061 km^2

Dallas-Fort Worth - 24,059 km^2

Washington Metro - 14,412 km^2

Philadelphia Metro - 13,256 km^2

A much more apples-to-apples comparison would be the Golden Horseshoe (7.005 million / 10,097 km^2), or Greater Golden Horseshoe (8.759 million / 31,561 km^2).

I believe that Chicago's population is also stagnant, whereas the GHA has grew 4.5% from 2006-2011, so extrapolating to 2016 would put it at 9.1 million. Still smaller than the Chicago metro area, but not by a lot.

These area are huge. Switzerland is 41,285 km^2, Belgium is 30,528 km^2, The Netherlands is 41,543 km^2.

Try the Los Angeles metro area - 87,490 km^2 (and 18.7m people)...

Having lived in Chicago, I was genuinely surprised by Belgium's comparably small size.

The city of Toronto absorbed many suburbs a while ago, so the metro area isn't much bigger than the city proper. So Toronto (just the city) is bigger than Chicago (just the city), whereas metro Chicago is much bigger than just Chicago.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Dan Martell even moved to the Bay Area to build his companies.