In Ontario, Canada. Why are there two towns/cities named "London" and "Paris"? Did the names have any influence from the much larger, famous European counterparts?

I have a great book called "Ontario Place Names" by David E. Scott. He has tracked the history and meaning of the name for pretty much every hamlet/village/town/city in Ontario. Some are quite brief and he cannot determine the meaning of the name, but he usually goes into more detail for the larger towns and cities and those with a more detailed history. Gingerbreadman42 is right about the names, but I can give a bit more detail from the book.

For London, he says that Col. John Graves Simcoe (who later became the governor of Upper Canada) chose London to be the capital of Upper Canada in 1793, and named it after London England. However, his choice for capital city was overruled by governor-in-chief Lord Dorchester, and York (Toronto) became capital.

Paris was named by William Holmes, the first settler, who built a mill to grind gypsum, otherwise known as plaster of Paris. Gypsum was (is?) used as a fertilizer and got the plaster of Paris name because its usefulness as a fertilizer was first discovered near Paris, France.

And those are just the two biggest places in Ontario named after foreign capitals. Washington, Dublin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Moscow, Warsaw, Athens, Manilla, Delhi, and Cairo are all places in Ontario. And so are Zurich, Adelaide, Ceylon, and Gibralter.

And based on my casual reading of this book, I figure that a solid quarter to a third of all place names in Ontario are named after either a place in Great Britain & Ireland, or a 18th or 19th century English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish person. Think York (formerly Toronto but also York Region, North York, East York, etc.), Stratford, Southampton, Malton, Manchester, Lansdowne, Kilbride, Embro, Dorchester, Cumberland, and Chatham, to name a few.

Oh, and Punkeydoodle's Corners. Punkeydoodle's Corners is also the name of a hamlet in Ontario. It's near Stratford and Tavistock. There's not much there. Apparently they have to replace the sign often because it get stolen all the time.