City Information

The economic and cultural focus of English-speaking Canada, Toronto is the country's largest metropolis. It sprawls along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, its vibrant, appealing centre encased by a jangle of satellite townships and industrial zones that cover - as "Greater Toronto" - no less than 100 square kilometres. For decades, Toronto was saddled with unflattering sobriquets - "Toronto the Good," "Hogtown" - that reflected a perhaps deserved reputation for complacent mediocrity and greed. Spurred into years of image-building, the city's postwar administrations have lavished millions of dollars on glitzy architecture, slick museums, an excellent public-transport system, and the reclamation and development of the lakefront. As a result, Toronto has become one of North America's most likeable cities, an eminently liveable place whose citizens keep a wary eye on both their politicians and the developers.

Huge new shopping malls and skyrise office blocks reflect the economic successes of the last two or three decades, a boom that has attracted immigrants from all over the world, transforming an overwhelmingly anglophone city into a cosmopolitan one of some sixty significant minorities. Furthermore, the city's multiculturalism goes far deeper than an extravagant diversity of restaurants and sporadic pockets of multilingual street signs. Toronto's schools, for example, have extensive "Heritage Language Programmes," which encourage the maintenance of the immigrants' first cultures.

Getting the feel of Toronto's diversity is one of the city's great pleasures, but there are attention-grabbing sights here as well. Most are conveniently clustered in the city centre, and the most celebrated of them all is the CN Tower, the world's tallest free-standing structure. Next door lies the modern hump of the SkyDome sports stadium. The city's other prestige attractions are led by the Art Gallery of Ontario, which possesses a first-rate selection of Canadian painting, and the Royal Ontario Museum, where pride of place goes to the Chinese collection. But it's the pick of Toronto's smaller, less-visited galleries and period homes that really add to the city's charm. There are superb Canadian paintings at the Thomson Gallery and a fascinating range of footwear at the Bata Shoe Museum. The Toronto Dominion Bank boasts the eclectic Gallery of Inuit Art, and the mock-Gothic extravagances of Casa Loma, the Victorian gentility of Spadina House and the replica of Fort York, the colonial settlement where Toronto began, all vie for the visitor's attention.

Toronto's sights illustrate different facets of the city, but in no way do they crystallize its identity. The city remains opaque, too big and diverse to allow for a defining personality. This, however, adds an air of excitement and unpredictability to the place. Toronto caters to everything, and the city surges with Canada's most vibrant restaurant, performing-arts and nightlife scenes.

Toronto's downtown core is sandwiched between Front Street to the south, Bloor to the north, Spadina to the west and Jarvis to the east. Yonge Street is the main north-south artery: principal street numbers start and names change from "West" to "East" from here. Note, therefore, that 1000 Queen Street W is a long way from 1000 Queen Street E. To appreciate the transition between the different downtown neighbourhoods, it's best to walk around the centre - Front to Bloor is about 2km, Spadina to Jarvis 1km. In an attempt to protect shoppers from Ontario's climate, there's also an enormous sequence of pedestrianized shopping arcades called the PATH Walkway, which begins beneath Union Station, twisting up to the Eaton Centre shopping mall and beyond. Both visitor centres issue free PATH maps.

Situated on the slab of land separating Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay, Toronto was on one of the three early portage routes to the northwest, its name taken from the Huron for "place of meeting." The first European to visit the district was the French explorer Étienne Brûlé in 1615, but it wasn't until the middle of the eighteenth century that the French made a serious effort to control the area with the development of a simple settlement and stockade, Fort Rouillé. The British pushed the French from the northern shore of Lake Ontario in 1759, but then chose to ignore the site for almost forty years until the arrival of hundreds of Loyalist settlers in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

In 1791 the British divided their remaining American territories into two, Upper and Lower Canada, each with its own legislative councils. The first capital of Upper Canada was Niagara-on-the-Lake, but this was too near the American border for comfort and the province's new lieutenant-governor, John Graves Simcoe, moved his administration to the relative safety of Toronto in 1793, calling the new settlement York. Simcoe had grand classical visions of colonial settlement, but even he was exasperated by the conditions of frontier life - "the city's site was better calculated for a frog pond than for the residence of human beings." Soon nicknamed "Muddy York," the capital was little more than a village when, in 1812, the Americans attacked and burnt the main buildings.

In the early nineteenth century, effective economic and political power lay in the hands of an anglophilic oligarchy christened the Family Compact by the radical polemicists of the day. Their most vociferous opponent was a radical Scot, William Lyon Mackenzie , who promulgated his views both in his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate , and as a member of the Legislative Assembly. Mackenzie became the first mayor of Toronto, as the town was renamed in 1834, but the radicals were defeated in the elections two years later and a frustrated Mackenzie drifted towards the idea of armed revolt. In 1837, he staged the Upper Canadian insurrection, a badly organized uprising of a few hundred farmers, who marched down Yonge Street, fought a couple of half-hearted skirmishes and then melted away. Mackenzie fled across the border and two of the other ringleaders were executed, but the British parliament, mindful of their earlier experiences in New England, moved to liberalize Upper Canada's administration instead of taking reprisals. In 1841, they granted Canada responsible government, reuniting the two provinces in a loose confederation, pre-figuring the final union of 1867 when Upper Canada was redesignated Ontario. Even Mackenzie was pardoned and allowed to return, arguably giving the lie to his portrayal of the oligarchs as hard-faced reactionaries; indeed, this same privileged group had even pushed progressive antislavery bills through the legislature as early as the 1830s.

By the end of the nineteenth century Toronto had become a major manufacturing centre dominated by a conservative mercantile elite who were exceedingly loyal to British interests and maintained a strong Protestant tradition. This elite was sustained by the working-class Orange Lodges, whose reactionary influence was a key feature of municipal politics - no wonder Charles Dickens had been offended by the city's "rabid Toryism." That said, these same Protestants were enthusiastic about public education, just like the Methodist-leaning middle classes, who also spearheaded social reform movements, principally Suffrage and Temperance. The trappings, however, remained far from alluring - well into the twentieth century Sunday was preserved as a "day of rest" and Eaton's store even drew its curtains to prevent Sabbath window-shopping. Indeed, for all its capital status, the city was strikingly provincial by comparison with Montréal until the 1950s, when the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway in 1959 gave the place a jolt and the first wave of non-white immigrants began to transform its complexion. More recently, Toronto was an indirect beneficiary of the assertion of francophone identity in Québec, as many of Montréal's anglophone-dominated financial institutions and big businesses transferred their operations here. The boom that ensued launched downtown property values into the stratosphere - but then came the crash of 1988, which spread near panic amongst developers. Since then, the economy has been more sedate, though many blame Governor Harris and his conservative cronies for the increase (and increasingly obvious) degree of poverty afflicting the city: since 1980, the number of Toronto families living below the poverty line has quadrupled.