Markham

Markham is a city in the Regional Municipality of York within the Greater Toronto Area of Southern Ontario, Canada. It is located approximately 30 km (19 mi) northeast of Downtown Toronto. The city is the fourth-most populous community within the Greater Toronto Area after Toronto, Mississauga, and Brampton and is York Region's most populous municipality.

The city gained its name from the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe (in office 1791–1796), who named the area after his friend, William Markham, the Archbishop of York from 1776 to 1807. The first European settlement in Markham occurred when William Berczy, a German artist, and developer, led a group of approximately sixty-four German families to North America. While they planned to settle in New York, disputes over finances and land tenure led Berczy to negotiate with Simcoe for 64,000 acres (260 km2) in Markham Township in 1794. Through much of Markham's history, the community has been described as an agricultural community. A turn towards a more urbanized community within the township began after World War II when the township began to feel the effects of urban encroachment from Toronto. The completion of Highway 404 during the mid-1970s accelerated urban development in Markham.

Markham borders and shares the same climate as Toronto. On an average day, Markham is generally 1–2 °C (1.8–3.6 °F) cooler than in downtown Toronto. It has a humid continental climate and features warm, humid summers with significant rainfall occurring from May to October and cold, snowy winters. The highest temperature recorded was 37.8 °C (100 °F) on August 8, 2001, and the lowest temperature recorded was −35.2 °C (−31 °F) on January 16, 1994.

In the 19th century, Markham had a vibrant, independent community with mills, distilleries, and breweries around the Highway 7 and 48 intersection. The Thomas Speight Wagon Works exported products (wagons, horsecars) around the world and Markham had a reputation as being more active than York (the former name for Toronto) early on. Most of these industries disappeared leaving farming as the main source of business.

Light industries and businesses began to move into Markham in the 1980s attracted by land and lower taxes. Today, it claims to be "Canada's Hi-Tech Capital" with a number of key companies in the area, such as IBM, Motorola, Toshiba, Lucent, Honeywell, Apple, Genesis Microchip, and is home to the head office of graphics card producer ATI (recently merged with AMD). Over 1,100 technology and life science companies have offices in Markham, employing over one-fifth of the total workforce. In 2014, the top five employers in the city in order are IBM Canada, the City of Markham, TD Waterhouse Inc., Markham Stouffville Hospital and AMD Technologies Inc

Markham also maintains economic and cultural cooperation agreements with the city of Laval, Quebec, which is the second largest city in the Greater Montreal area.