City size designation has always intrigued me. This is my own personal chart, made up just now on the spot (with no wiki referencing). I suppose all city fetishists carry one of these in their heads.
City sizes: (agglomerations, not official municipalities)
Small: 50,000 - 500,000 Ex. Brandon, Kingston, London (Ont)
Mid-sized: 500,000 - 2 million Ex. Quebec City, Calgary, Portland (Ore)
Large: 2 million - 5 million Ex. Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney
Very Large: 5 million - 12 million Ex. Toronto, Chicago, Paris
Huge: 12 million - 22 million Ex. London, New York, Shanghai, Mumbai
Hyper: 22 million and over Ex. Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, Pearl River Delta
So, by my own reckoning, Toronto just makes it into the very large city group. Of course, many will disagree.
If you categorize them into large, very large and hyper large, of course Toronto can be considered large. it is all
relative.
Places like Kingston, Brandon are not even "cities" in my definition. A
city of 50,000 people? That's almost funny. In order to be called a city, it got have to have a population of 500K. That's a good start. Anything below, such as Barrie etc are just small towns, as there is really no "city" vibe at all. In Ottawa, you walk for 20 minutes from the core and all you see are single family houses, that's typical small cities. Barrie is basically a village.
In my opinion, (municipality population)
below 50,000 -- towns
500,000 - 1 mil -- small city: eg: Quebec city, Ottawa, Vancouver, Seattle, Boston etc
1 mil - 3 mil - mid-sized city: Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Philadelphia
3 mil - 10 mil - large city: New York, London, Hong Kong
10 mil + - huge city: Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo
The fact is, we can call Toronto big or huge all your want, especially for someone from some suburban town who has never lived in a 10mil+ city with 10+ subway lines, Toronto might look huge. However, I would never say something ridiculous as "in North American, Toronto is big". North America is a small part of the world. When you look at world cities, Toronto is truly a mid-sized city. If you call Toronto large or very large, you simply run out of words to describe Tokyo and Shanghai. The city vibe is of completely different leagues. As to Vancouver, let's put it this way: there is a city called "nanjing" only 2 hours west of Shanghai, and Hangzhou, 2 hours sourth, the capitals of the wealthy Jiangsu and Zhejiang Province, respectively, and both have a population of 8.5 million and no one considers them as large cities. Do you think anyone outside Canada would actually think Vancouver with its tiny downtown and limited commercial/entertainment activities "large"?
To say Toronto is "very large" sounds like small-townish mentality. The density is simply not there. If you drive from Dundas Square for 40 minutes, what do you see? Brampton? Markham? Small single family houses with very few low rise retail/offices, almost the middle of nowhere. If you drive 40 minutes from Shanghai's People's Square or Toyko's Ginza, you are still in the middle of skyscrapers, offices, retail and dense residential. That's called "very large".