I took a tour the last ten days of the classic “905” region of the Canadian federation, namely Burlington and Etobicoke, Ontario. These archtypical Toronto satellite cities comprise the essence of the “905” region. “905” refers to the telephone prefix in the heavily populated region surrounding, but not including, Toronto, whose telephones are prefixed with 416.

The 905 region rose to prominence in the last federal election because it was here where ridings swung from Liberal incumbents to newly minted Conservative candidates providing enough of a national redistribution of seats to end a decade of Liberal government and put the unlikely figure of Stephen Harper in the Prime Minister’s Office.

The 905 region has become to Canadian politics what the soccer mom is to American politics. The next federal election, whenever that occurs, will just as significantly be decided by voters in the 905 region who will by themselves determine if Harper should be rewarded with a majority government, be restrained with another minority victory, return the Liberals to a restrained minority government, or take the country all the way back to a Liberal majority government. Every one of those outcomes is, at this point, equally likely and each outcome would be profoundly interesting and will be a pivot to a transformed future.

No one in their own usual habitat ever gets a good read on where the people are at around them. It takes a visitor, an outsider, to sense the pulse underlying the familiar complaints and issues. But most outsiders visiting this crucial part of the country visit Toronto, and if they learn anything about the people of the 905 region, it is very often only through coloured Toronto eyes.

My mother lives in Burlington and my good friends live in Etobicoke and I spent most of my time in these places, with side trips to Hamilton and Niagara Falls, also important outposts in the new federal topography.

So what are they thinking, the people whose thinking will determine the future direction of the country in these pivotal times? The first thing to note is the overwhelming dominance of the car throughout the vast 905 region. There can be no public debate about the future of the car here just as surely as fish will never debate the future of water. Simply put, there could never by a 905 region were it not for the car. To say it dominates every aspect of daily life here would be to understate the technology’s role. It doesn’t dominate life here, it is life here. It was a generation or two ago when it was intriguing to note that one can’t do anything, go anyplace, complete any task, without a car. By now, such an observation would be as confoundingly self-evident as saying one can’t do anything without limbs. So long has the car been intrinsic to life in the 905 region that it is by now a limb itself. One might even foresee the day, not far off, when the car won’t be a limb of the human, but rather the human will be a limb of the car.

The second thing to note is that these are whole new cities despite their old names, which now only refer to very small and nearly totally defunct and obsolete sections of them that barely linger on. These old small cities by the same name create the false impression that the new cities grew up out of them in the same historical processes that grew the large old cities like London and Paris. The fact is, the old small centres are at best dead museum pieces the vast majority of residents of these cities do not generally know anything about or ever visit. They might as well be buried under the new cities: they are as relevant to them as Ur is to modern Baghdad.

From the point of view of a car, these all-new cities are organically designed. Every curb, corner and driveway, every parking lot, sign and light, every possible direction of travel, every destination and every measured distance is a projection of the mind of the car. The purposes, the layout and the scale of these new cities are totally oriented to the needs and desires of the car. Parking lots utterly dominate the transaction landscape and are the face of every commercial installation, placed out front and made readily visible, inviting even, for the tens of thousands of cars passing through every intersection. Consequently, the cost of fueling cars, should it continue to radically rise, will impact life in the 905 region more than anyone living in it could possibly imagine.

The third thing to note is that, when not attached to their cars, the people here are mostly in their homes, if not at work, though a surprisingly large proportion of people here work in, through, or by their vehicles, not to mention the great many employed at work making cars, making parts for cars, fixing cars or fueling cars.

Unlike life in Toronto, life in the 905 district is spent, if not in a car, at home. The homes are generally very comfortable places to be—they are usually large, multi-leveled, modern, air-conditioned, well-lit, and equipped with several specialty rooms. There is not a great deal of neighbourlyness here—there are typically no people on the sidewalks, on their porches, or “around” in any visible way. They live inside. Human contact in the 905 region is therefore not dominated by neighbours as was the case with earlier generations of satellite-city dwellers, or by institutions like churches and clubs, which are as dead here as they are in downtown districts of the big cities. There are no cafes here, just Tim Hortons and Starbucks coffee shops at which there may be line ups, but only for take-out cups, to be consumed in the car.

So the fourth thing to note about the 905 region is that human contact outside the immediate family one co-habitates with, and outside the formalized and regulated social structures of the workplace, is almost entirely restricted to television, through which 905 people receive both network programming and feature-length movies. This, then, provides the material of the mind to the same extent the car provides the material of the body. The television dominates the mental landscape in the 905 region in a way and to a degree remarkably equivalent to the way the car dominates the physical landscape. As much as the car is now a limb of the 905 body, the television is a lobe of the 905 mind. As sure as the physical 905 body will soon be a limb of the car, the 905 mind will soon be a lobe of the television brain, if it isn’t already.

The landscape of the 905 district is as totally designed for the needs and desires of the car as the mental terrain is totally designed for the needs and desires of the television. And the role 905 people have accepted, have internalized, in the life of their cars, has equally been accepted and internalized in the life of their television. It isn’t so much that life revolves around the television—that was already the case a generation or two ago, long before the creation of these new cities. Life doesn’t revolve around television, it is television. Consequently, what happens on television is what happens in life in the 905 region. One as easily falls into it as one falls into the car after only a few days in this region.

As gasoline is the fuel of the car, aberrant behavior is the fuel of television—crime, misbehavior, sin, accidents and errors. To take aberration out of television would be as much an end to it as taking gas out of the car. There are crime shows, shows about celebrities in trouble, shows comprised of videos sent in by people showing their household accidents, shows that dramatize curious true-crime tales, shows that put real people in situations where they might show aberrant behavior, and shows about people having problems with others’ aberrant behavior. And, of course, there are the news shows, an authoritative presentation of each day’s incidences of aberrant acts by high-profile people.

As the television is life itself, the effect all this aberration has on the 905 people is counter-logically to create the impression that aberration is the norm. And this is where the two basic facts of life in the 905 region—the car and the television—intersect. For just as dominated with aberration is life in television, life in the car is rigidly ordered and aberration-free. Cars travel in single-file, well-marked lanes at highly regulated speeds, they park in grid-patterned utterly regular lots, and their movement is proscribed by a long list of rules and penalties governing every moment spent in them. What is more, even slight aberrant behavior in a car runs the risk of serious injury or death at any moment, as much of life in the car in the 905 region is spent on high-speed freeways. Drivers tend to occupy their mind, and engage in conversation, on matters to do with slight aberrations noticed in other drivers around them.

It is this essential tension, then, that drives the political preferences of the 905 region, and thus the political future of the country. Embedded in a world around them that appears to be utterly aberrant, the 905 people, in their own world, cannot abide any aberration. The drastically low standards of aberration tolerated in their car-dominated lives outside clash terminally with the drastically high standards of aberration in their television-dominated lives inside. There is little opportunity to mitigate this tension: life in a car is as anti-social as life with the television, leaving few chances for 905 people to compare experiences and arrive at tempered conclusions about both the high aberration on television and the high restrictions against aberration in the car.

The result of all this unmitigated tension is frustration. Neither side of their sparse two-sided life conforms one to the other. It is likely therefore that whoever is incumbent in office will be blamed for the frustration, creating a mood for drastic change at each election, either that or a mood of complete fatalism. Just as the 905 region en masse jumped from the Liberals to the Conservatives in the last election, they are likely to jump en masse back to the Liberals in the next election, not because they prefer the Liberals to the Conservatives now (just as they didn’t really prefer the Conservatives to the Liberals two years ago), but only because they must change who they prefer, no matter who it is they are changing from or to. Their propensity to change their votes somehow compensates for their total inability to change anything about their car and television-dominated lives.