The major centres such as Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver are like international melting pots now, and you can find every kind of ethnic influence in their music. That has had a big effect on the whole country through the mass media.

Toronto used to be a "white English culture" city, but not any more. When I was a kid, Toronto seemed like a bastion of English and Scottish culture with a good deal of Irish influence there as well. There were plenty of other ethnic neighborhoods downtown, of course...the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Italians, the Greeks, etc...but the city overall seemed like an Anglo-Saxon society. It's not at all like that now. As a matter of fact, I think caucasians are now outnumbered by other races in the city of Toronto. There's been a diaspora of middle class whites out of Toronto to the smaller outlying cities and country towns to the north, the east and the west of Toronto. This has caused cities like Barrie, Newmarket, and Orillia to grow very rapidly in the past few decades, and in those cities you find the predominantly white-English culture that you used to find in Toronto when I was a child.

Now, as Ed says, the East Coast culture hasn't changed all that much, aside from the collapse of the Fishery.

I agree, Henry, that the multi-ethnic contributions add a lot to the vitality of music. On the other hand, it's kind of neat when you have a long established musical culture with its own set of traditions such as the maritime music of the East Coast in Canada and Maine. Either situation can produce some excellent music.