It gets annoying when I find myself defending a city to someone who has never been there. It happened to me on social media, the way most unnecessary arguments do, and it left me thinking less about Toronto and more about the strange Canadian habit of tearing it down. I grew up in the suburbs overseas. I am not a born-and-raised Torontonian with some tribal loyalty to protect. What I am is someone who has travelled widely, paid attention, and realized that downtown Toronto can be a remarkable city, and the reflexive contempt it receives from so many Canadians is worth examining seriously.
To understand Toronto, you have to understand how it came to exist in its current form. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Toronto was a mid-sized, predominantly White city with a reputation for being orderly, conservative, and frankly dull. Locals called it “Toronto the Good,” which was not entirely a compliment. The city kept its parks locked on Sundays, and was widely considered one of the most boring urban centres in the English-speaking world.
What transformed it was immigration. After the Second World War, Italian and Portuguese communities took root in what are now Corso Italia and Little Portugal with their food and their architecture. The liberalization of Canadian immigration policy under Lester Pearson and later Pierre Trudeau dismantled the racist preference for European settlers and opened the country to arrivals from the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, and across Africa. Toronto absorbed more of that shift than anywhere else in the country.
Today, the city is home to many distinct ethnic communities, and much of its population was born outside Canada. It explains why you can eat Moroccan food downtown, Hong Kong food in Scarborough, and Briyani later in Brampton. It explains why the city does not feel like one unified cultural group but like dozens of distinct communities living together. To Torontonians, the city is where their families came, where they found work, where they put down roots.
The criticism levelled at Toronto most often focuses on its residents, who are supposedly arrogant, cold, and self-important. In years of visiting and spending time in the downtown, I have never once encountered the swaggering Torontonian superiority except in a job interview with a local who wanted to become American. What I have encountered is a city full of people getting on with things, largely indifferent to how the world perceives them, which is perhaps the quality that most irritates people from outside.
The Royal Ontario Museum houses one of the finest collections of natural history and world cultures in North America. The Art Gallery of Ontario, renovated by Toronto-born Frank Gehry, holds the largest collection of Canadian art in the world alongside significant European and African holdings. However, Toronto consistently ranks behind New York in the number of theatrical productions. The Toronto International Film Festival is widely considered the most important film festival in the world for cinema and Oscar season momentum, drawing filmmakers, actors, and industry from every corner of the world.
Unlike many cities where a handful of expensive rooms define the culinary identity, Toronto’s food culture lives in almost every price range, shaped by those diverse communities. The pub and bar scene is equally broad, from long-standing neighbourhood institutions to rooftop bars in the Entertainment District. The music scene has produced more internationally recognized artists than most countries manage, let alone cities.
Within ninety minutes of downtown, you can stand at the edge of Niagara Falls, one of the most powerful waterfalls on the planet. The Kawarthas, a sprawling network of lakes and rivers north of the city, offer canoe routes, cottage retreats, and an entirely different rhythm of life. The Niagara wine region, producing internationally awarded Rieslings and ice wines, is also notable.
Perhaps nowhere is the irony of Toronto-bashing concentrated in Alberta. The complaint is familiar: Toronto is arrogant, Toronto controls the country, Toronto doesn’t understand real Canada. What makes this fascinating is that enormous numbers of the people making this argument are themselves from Ontario or were raised by parents who came from there. Calgary and Edmonton have absorbed generations of economic migrants from the east. A good portion of Albertans bashing Toronto have, by any honest accounting, never actually been to Toronto.
A good deal of the hostility traces back to hockey. The Toronto Maple Leafs are the most covered, most discussed, most nationally broadcast hockey franchise in the country, which means their failures, especially spectacular ones, play out to people in Red Deer and Lethbridge who wanted nothing to do with it. That kind of involuntary influence on someone breeds genuine resentment over time.
Toronto exerts an economic and cultural gravity that smaller cities feel, whether they want to or not. Head offices cluster there, the media is there, and film production tends to pass through there. None of this makes the city better, but it makes it easier for frustrations about inequality, regional difference, and national identity to get projected.
The people who expend the most energy hating Toronto are doing so without the city noticing. It does not have the bandwidth to feel superior to Moose Jaw or Lethbridge. This is the truth that provokes the most irritation in people who resent Toronto: the people do not know they exist. There is a famous scene in the television series “Andor” where the character Cassian Andor, when confronted by someone supposedly wronged, responds by not knowing who he is.
Toronto-bashing is just a performance of regional identity. Canada is genuinely diverse in ways that go beyond the multicultural story Toronto tells about itself. The particular beauty of Cape Breton, the French intensity of Quebec City, and the forests of Vancouver. They are entirely different things that deserve to be appreciated in their own terms.
If you have been carrying a hostility toward Toronto, the most useful thing you can do is visit it. Take the streetcar down Queen Street and notice how many distinct communities you pass through. You may not love it, as cities are not obligated to suit everyone. However, you will have an actual opinion rather than a borrowed grievance about a hockey team. For Torontonians, the city is loud, expensive and imperfect, which are real and worth addressing.
If this resonated with you, please give it a like and share it with someone who needs to read it. Your support keeps independent writing alive where algorithms increasingly decide what gets seen. Consider a paid subscription; annual subscriptions are currently discounted, which directly supports our ability to keep publishing long-form, honest work. Prefer a one-time gesture? You can always buy me a coffee. Every bit of it helps, and it is genuinely appreciated.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.