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Look at the difference. What do people do when they want more space in Vancouver, Toronto, or Calgary? They move away from the core and commute. Mississauga is what it is because people wanted more space and couldn't afford it in Toronto, then Mississauga got exorbitantly priced, so people moved further out to Oakville and Brampton. You can do the same exercise to the east, or to the north. Vaughan, Richmond Hill, etc. Vancouver, there's no moving west, but you can move east. Surrey, Langley, Coquitlam. Calgary? Springbank, Airdrie, Chestermere, Okotoks, Cochrane. Only thing that'll stop that is when the commute becomes too long and expensive for people to tolerate, and well, people still commute in the GTA to the tune of 1hr20m each way, so clearly there's a threshold we haven't broken yet.
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On its surface, sure, this is a convincing argument, and it is pretty commonly trotted out by defenders of the status quo. One thing you've got to ask yourself is "why do cities with large, diverse, and productive urban cores get so damn expensive?"
The answer is, lots and lots of people - especially younger people - want to live in them!
The biggest problem, especially compared to the Japanese, is how we have essentially made multi-family and light commercial zoning for most our land illegal. We also have shifted the property tax burden onto urban taxpayers to subsidize the massive, massive, massive infrastructure costs of the suburbs.
An indirect consequence of both policy choices is a massive increase in home prices, especially near urban cores which are desirable to younger families for both economic productivity and cultural advantages. When most land area, say in Vancouver, is reserved solely for single family homes, you artificially drive up the cost of land, increase the scarcity of housing units (especially for families) and start the flight to the suburbs.
Again, this is a policy choice. People tolerate commutes because they have no choice. They are simply priced out of markets where the landowning class has used its political weight to make the construction of additional supply impossible.
EDIT: Culturally, sure, you are right. In places like Calgary, there is a culture of car-ownership and large suburban homes.