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Promotional video urges Toronto commuters to stay in Hamilton

Commuting around Toronto's backlogged streets and highways is bad enough. You only need to look around at the pained and pinched faces sitting in traffic to get a sense of how unpleasant this transportation ritual can be.

Now imagine the dedicated folks who tack an additional set of hours onto that daily slog to the office.

These are the residents of Toronto's outer rim of towns and cities, who travel long and hard to get to their city jobs — often leaving and coming home in the dark.

One of these key feeder cities is Hamilton, a place once known for its thriving steel mills and its share of notable names (Karen Kain, Eugene Levy, and Martin Short are just a few of the Hammer's great exports).

Nowadays, this port city of just over 500,000 residents has also been exporting skilled workers as locals turn to the big city for higher-paying jobs.

As CBC News reports, around 30,000 Hamiltonians wake up at the crack of dawn each weekday and head out to work in Oakville, Burlington and Toronto.

By contrast, only 10,000 come in to town from outside.

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To tackle this deficit, the Hamilton Economic Development office has commissioned an animated short to encourage businesses to plant their wares locally.

The campaign, entitled "Wake Up From Your Commuting Nightmare" uses the interminable routine of backed up traffic and sardine-packed public transit to illustrate how much better life could be without spending a full third of it en route.

No subtleties to be found here either. The ad opens with an amiable businessman crawling out of bed at 4:30 a.m. and rushing to leave the house before the clock strikes 5:30.

Nearly a full minute is spent tracing the man's snowy, Odyssean journey to his big-city office after which the poor guy is expected to tear through a growing Everest of paperwork.

A few minutes after 5 and he's racing out the door to do it all again in reverse.

The alternative life at the end of the clip — the one where the sun is shining as the man strolls leisurely toward his downtown Hamilton office — could be possible if only he'd decided to keep it local.

While the ad is very well produced and certainly makes an effective point, a number of commenters on the video's YouTube page argue that it glosses over the fact that people would love to stay in Hamilton … if only they could find solid employment.

"Great video, but wouldn't one still have to commute (to Toronto) if they lived in Hamilton? Living & playing is easy enough in Hamilton, but working? I think there needs to be jobs in the Hammer before EcDev can start just telling people to 'work in Hamilton'" said a commenter with the handle duckyboy666.

"That would be the dream," wrote rachelroe33, "unfortunately the good paying jobs are in Toronto."

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There could be some reprieve on the horizon. The Hamilton Spectator reports that despite a host of issues, the city's economy is expected to expand this year.

That two per cent growth predicted by the Conference Board of Canada's Metropolitan Outlook study for 2012 may be modest, but seen from a more optimistic angle, it could also equal another group of former commuters who will now be able to fit a few extra hours of family and friend time into their day.