I live maybe 400 km from Toronto and when people from that city come by with their "Torontoww" accent they're pretty easy to distibguish from the local lads from up the line as soon as they open their mouths. My wife's relative from up in the valley speak with an almost unintelligible dialect with different phrasing and pronunciation than I'm used to.

So I think the analysis is just lazy.

I'm from SW Ontario and live in BC. Apparently I sound like an American because I routinely get asked if I'm from Seattle. There's definitely an Easy-West divergence even north of the border.

The differences are accentuated when you get into rural areas. A lot of the stereotypes people have of Canadian English are based on the speech of people who in e.g rural or northern Ontario. The raising, the 'eh, etc. Though in fact all Canadians tend towards these things, they're strongest there.

One dialect marker that immediately sets someone from northern or rural Ontario apart: "I seen" (instead of "I saw" or "I've seen") I never heard this growing up in rural Alberta, but when I moved here to Ontario it immediately stuck out to me.

There also seems to be a particular accent (that I noticed more when I was younger) for people who grew up speaking English in the Ottawa valley.

Seen is definitely a SW Ontario thing too, although more rural still. It's considered kinda unrefined I think. Same with "youse" like "you people" except "youse people." If you go further north I notice people talk in a exaggerated ascending and descending pitch inflection, at least along the north Huron coast. I catch myself doing it when I visit family there.

Yeah, for sure it's all over Ontario, but most especially rural-anywhere, but urban in the north, too.

When I was 16 I did an exchange week where I spent a week in Walkerton (SW of Owen Sound) and that was the first time I ever spent time here. The 'youse' and 'seen' thing was something I noticed right away. Nothing like that growing up in the 80s in rural Alberta near Edmonton, though it might be there now.

... tangent... There's also a subtle but noticeable pronounciation difference between southern Alberta and central Alberta, which I've heard language specialists mention. Central Alberta was more heavily settled by German, Ukrainian and British populations (in order of increasing ratio); southern Alberta had a more heavily American influence, people who came over from North Dakota & Idaho, etc (like my great grandmother on my mother's side). Obviously that has blurred in the decades since, but it had a long term impact on both politics and language. Where I grew up west of Edmonton, a sizable quantity of the kids in my school were only second generation Ukrainian, with their parents often still speaking it at home.

Anyways, the English linguistic situation in Canada is a lot more diverse than it appears at first

Rural MB has "I seen" quite a lot. There are some really thick accents in places here. People from Saskatchewan seem to be more nasally and higher up on the palate. Albertans usually sound like mid western Americans.

FWIW (and I may have a bad ear) but I've lived about 20 years equally in the PNW and Central Canada and people in both places sound identical. (The only blatant difference is that I rhyme words like "bag" with "vague").

Otherwise the differences I've experienced most are in word choices. Words like toque and chesterfield draw blank looks in the PNW.

s/Easy/East

Rural Manitobans sound a bit more Canadian than rural North Dakotans