Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/12/AR2007041202045.html

My old pals at Trailervision have a new movie in Hot Docs this year called "Let's All Hate Toronto". It's all about the animosity shared by Canadians toward their largest city. It's been getting quite a bit of press, much like their old documentary Stupidity once did.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but like most Canadians I've heard my fair share of Toronto bashing over the years. The strange thing about the hate aimed at Toronto is that it seems to be based on no one single thing. Nobody really seems to know why they hate Toronto; they only know that they really, really hate it. I thought as a service to my country bumpkin Canadian brothers I would try to help them find a way to justify their deep-seeded hatred for the T dot. Here are my suggestions:

1. Toronto is boring
When I lived in Japan there was never a shortage of interesting things to blog about on this site. Even in little po-dunk Noheji town there were lots of strange and interesting things to share with you, my loyal readers. Ever since coming back to Toronto I've struggled to find interesting topics to write about and as evidenced by the lack of updates over the past 6 months, it hasn't been easy. I thought joining the writing staff of Torontoist would help motivate me to find things to write about, but really all it has done is made me realize just how uninteresting Toronto can be.

2. It's too cold and too hot
We get 2, maybe 2.5 months of good weather tops.

3. No booze in corner stores
There are lots of cities in the world where you can buy beer and liquor from corner stores and they haven't fallen into alcohol induced anarchy.

4. Nowhere to go skiing
That crappy garbage hill in Etobicoke doesn't count.

5. Government Employee Strikes
Not a day goes by without some kind of strike by employees in the public sector. Teachers, nurses, and bus drivers seem to spend as much time on strike as they do at their jobs. I don't mean to say that I don't think they deserve a fair pay; it's just annoying how often fights over money get in the way of life in the city. In good old Japan, striking means coming to work early, protesting for an hour out front and then going to work as normal. How about we take a lesson from Japan and fire all those striking janitors and make the students clean the schools?

6. In New York people know they are rude, and are proud of it. In Toronto people are rude, but are under the delusion that they are actually quite polite.

7. Michael Kuss from City News.
He's lame, and his commercials are beyond stupid. Bring back Harold Hosein!

8. Kensington Market
It's dirty, full of stupid hippies and highly overrated. The rest of Toronto is also pretty dirty these days too. Enough with the lame billboard graffiti and subway scratchiti already.

9. No love hotels, snack bars, print club machines, computerized toilet seats, ginormous electronic stores, capsule hotels or any number of other cool things in Japan that I miss. Also our only Maid Cafe is inferior in quality to those in Akihabara.

10. The Toronto Maple Leafs
They don't know how to win a Stanley Cup or pluralize the word "leaf", and they never will.

*Update: I think the lingering cold winter really put me in nasty mood when I wrote this. The weather has gotten much nicer since then and I'm starting to like my hometown once again. Maybe I'll be saying mean things again in a couple months when scorching heat and smog hits the big smoke, but for I don't think I'll join in the Toronto bashing.