I like that list except Waterloo - I think if you're going to make a serious argument about Waterloo than Berkeley/Oakland would be a separate hub from Silicon Valley - and ditto for Worchester, Boston and Cambridge MA. Waterloo definitely has its own thing going on but it's pretty darn close to being an offshoot of Toronto at this point.

There are definitely people who commute all over the GTA, but I still feel like Waterloo Region is culturally distinct from Toronto proper— Google and Facebook are in Waterloo; there's the devices heritage from Blackberry and then later companies like Thalmic and Pebble; there's the robotics presence in Waterloo with Clearpath, Voyis, Avidbots, and Aeryon/FLIR; and finally there's networking companies like Blue Coat, Sandvine, and Arctic Wolf.

I guess I don't know as much about the Toronto scene, but based on the recruitment emails, it seems to be a lot more fintech, game/mobile dev, and big data analytics stuff.

> there's the devices heritage from Blackberry and then later companies like Thalmic and Pebble

Wouldn't brag about these to be honnest.

No, it's not a brag— but they were all pretty influential and continue to cast a long shadow over the tech culture of the region. Particularly Blackberry, since it made a lot of staff very wealthy, who then went on to found, advise, invest-in, and work-for other companies using those skills.

It's not hard to look around Communitech and clearly see a bunch of startups still running essentially on BlackBerry money.

Well I don't personally have a horse in that race. I'd definitely be interested in seeing the results for a regional Canadian poll though.