Ontario

Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, home to roughly 15 million people and stretching across an enormous swathe of central Canada — from the banks of the St Lawrence River in the south-east all the way to the shores of Hudson Bay in the far north. Most visitors and new arrivals encounter Ontario through its two biggest cities: Toronto, the provincial capital and Canada’s largest city by some distance, and Ottawa, which also happens to be the national capital. Toronto in particular has grown into one of the most genuinely multicultural cities in the world, where well over 160 languages are spoken and neighbourhoods shaped by communities from every continent sit alongside one another without much fuss. The southern edge of the province runs along the northern shores of four of the five Great Lakes — Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior — giving it a long, varied waterfront that shapes the climate, the economy and the everyday rhythm of life for millions of people. Winters in the south are cold and often snowy but rarely extreme by Canadian standards, while summers tend to be warm, humid and occasionally oppressive in the cities, though perfectly pleasant once you find a patch of water or shade.

Beyond the cities, Ontario contains an extraordinary amount of open space that many people outside the province never quite appreciate. The Canadian Shield — an ancient, rocky expanse of boreal forest, lakes and wetlands — covers the northern two-thirds of the province, and it is home to some of the most accessible wilderness in the country. Algonquin Provincial Park, sitting roughly halfway between Toronto and Ottawa, is one of the most visited parks in Canada and a straightforward introduction to canoe tripping, moose-spotting and the particular quiet of a lake at dawn, all within a few hours’ drive of millions of people. Further north, places like Thunder Bay on the shore of Lake Superior sit in a landscape of extraordinary scale and emptiness, where the distances between towns are measured in hours rather than minutes and the boreal forest stretches to every horizon. This contrast — between the dense, busy south and the vast, thinly populated north — is one of the things that makes Ontario feel genuinely unlike most places, and it gives the province a range of experiences that is hard to match within a single administrative boundary.

Ontario’s economy has long been the engine of Canada as a whole, driven historically by manufacturing in cities like Hamilton and Windsor, by financial services concentrated in Toronto’s downtown core, and by the natural resources — timber, mining, hydroelectric power — that the north has supplied for well over a century. That economic base has shifted considerably in recent decades, with the manufacturing sector contracting and the service economy, technology industry and film and television production all growing to fill some of the gap. The province is also a significant agricultural producer, particularly in the fertile region south of Toronto known as the Golden Horseshoe, where fruit, vegetables, wine grapes and greenhouse crops are grown in conditions that surprise people who think of Canada primarily as a cold country. None of this makes Ontario a particularly straightforward place to describe — it is too large and too varied for easy generalisations — but it does make it a genuinely interesting one, full of the kind of ordinary, unshowy complexity that rewards anyone willing to look past the obvious landmarks.