Yeah, for me it's always been the other way around: Vancouver is a poor man's Seattle.
You can always tell how not world class a city is by how much they point out to you how world class they are. People in Toronto threw that "world class" label around for years, more in hope than as a statement of fact. Thanks largely to economic and corporate favoritism (and by benefitting from Montreal's economic destruction at the hands of the linguistic zealots) Toronto has finally achieved it's long sought-after world class status. But Vancouver, despite the Winter Olympics (which, let's face it, has more to do with geography than anything else) is still a backwater populated with provincial hicks, aging hippies, wannabe hipsters and Asians who are only here for the real estate deals. It's got decent weather and some nice views but it never was, is not now and likely never will be "world class" in the same sense as the New York's, Paris's and London's of the world.
