To a Detroiter, Toronto is a thing of distant majesty, be it seen in either the eyes of envy or romance. In comparison to a decaying industrial behemoth which once had the possibility of rivaling Chicago or Los Angeles in terms of culture and influence, Toronto looks to be the promise of a Great Lakes capital fulfilled. Here we have a stable city of incredible economic strength and fortune with all the diversity one would expect of a city the size and importance of New York. Here we have gleaming skyscrapers, a remarkable landscape of ravines and naturalistic city parks, all within easy travel of anything from oceanic expanses of water to cliffs, mountains, and north woods. Here we have a city, which while being well-developed, is still so full of promise and young enough to proudly declare that she is far from being finished and ready for so much more. I always thought so. Part of me still does.
This, of course, is the viewpoint of an expatriate looking back ever so passionately over that long, so-called undefended border and dreaming of what life without exile in this United States would have been like had I stayed. Like so many Torontonians, I can only envision my gleaming city as the accepting, open, safe alternative to a post-911 New York. I would love to envision her as being as equal among names like the city at the mouth of the Hudson, London, Paris, or Hong Kong. While instead I realistically consider her to be of the same caliber as a San Francisco, Milan, or Sydney, part of me still imagines Toronto to one day, along with Canada, claim her position in the supreme pantheon of global divinities. She is, after all, extremely well connected and perhaps one of the most tolerant places on the entire planet. Therein, of course, lies the problem. Toronto is too Canadian.
Before I have my countrymen come down on me like a bad case of NAFTA, I would very much like to qualify that statement. I realize how self-hating I sound in writing this, akin to the James Joyce who loved Ireland but for the Irish and their culture (something I could never seem to forgive him for), but the truth of the matter is that so much of the Canadian cultural and political identity is based off of a defensive self-image: namely, we are not American. Even my presentation here of Toronto proposed that part of her greatness lies in being an alternative to an American city! Canadian culture, at least what I have known of it from Ontario, the most defensive province of all, has little maple leaves everywhere poised to force Canadians to remember that while we share material culture with the Yankee beast to the south, those little leaves acting as an apostrophe in a fast food sign tell us that we could not be more different. To a great extent, we are, but again we have the problem in having to point that out to ourselves or the the American tourists who pass through southern Ontario and see strip mall after strip mall standing in silent reminder of just how much control branding has over the world these days... but of course we think instead just about how surely they point and laugh and call us the fifty first state. Some do, to be fair.
But we also don't look at government, guns, or history the same way. The border remains largely because a difference of mentality marks far more of a difference between, say, Michigan, New York, or Ohio and Ontario than there is noticeable between Ohio and Kentucky. Sure, as neighbors we live on the same street, have half the time fought on the same side in battles, to say nothing of fighting in the same battles, and we both eat far too many Big Macs. The truth remains, however, that we are still neighbors and not part of the same family in the same house. This truth, time and again, keeps getting neglected by those in the Canada house, at least in the Ontario department. Those people instead prefer to see their house simply as being either better or worse than the house next door! Any concept of what is Canadian thus evaporates beneath the heat of the comparison lamp. Meanwhile, that city of Toronto keeps getting larger, keeps adding in more people from every part of the known world, and turns into some settling basin where the diverse elements never really add something to the mix but tend to keep to themselves. Unlike New York, where the magic of the city has always been the transformation of cultures into something American and then ultimately into something New York in it's own right, Toronto does not have a Canadian or even Torontonian glue sticking it all into some amazing sculpture. There is neither assimilation nor destruction here, but, in true Toronto fashion, people lowering their heads to the ground or a phone and ignoring one another. Here tolerance is taken to the ugly extreme of opted compartmentalization.
That, of course, is a cultural sin. No, it is not the apparent evil that is the mutually agreed upon racial and socioeconomic segregation popular in Detroit and Buffalo, the two closest border cities, but it is perhaps just as dangerous considering as how this sort of self-absorption is preventing Toronto from becoming truly world-class at the highest levels. This sort of selfishness is deadly insomuch as it is passive-aggressive to the point of not even being acknowledged, even by people who look out for that sort of thing, like your author here. You see, until I was able to see the people avoiding eye contact and concerned about the possibility of random conversation, I did not believe that my Toronto had become so cold and indifferent. I figured that such an image of the city was the result of a worldly friend who wanted more than the mundane every day of next door. Torontonians, after all, have a legacy of self-loathing to uphold, at least in the realm of civic pride. Yet the Toronto that I remembered was through the eyes of a child, who did indeed remember more hopeful people back in the early to mid nineties, who saw those gleaming skyscrapers, and more importantly, who saw that incredible
parliamentary mace, gloriously surrendered back to us by the neighbors who finally had to admit that we made it as a country. When I looked at that mace, when I looked at those old buildings next to those new buildings, I knew what Canada was. I knew what Toronto was. I knew that I was the citizen of a country that proclaimed liberty with a dressing of tolerance, a desire to move cautiously forward with a healthy respect for the past, and a passion for freedom both from without and within.
I also remember a small cluster of the most beautiful tree in existence planted out front. There, in plain sight, I remember three Eastern White Pines not much taller than our teacher, planted surrounding a smaller Colorado Blue Spruce, which then I figured to be nice but unimpressive. The trees, like the mace, were still part of a Toronto that I simply had refuse to acknowledge had changed, or rather refused to change.
A quarter of a century later, these native pines have grown from the fresh landscaping Christmas tree size into their more natural, flowing, majestic sway. The American-born Colorado Blue Spruce has grown with them, and in a rather amusing and illuminating way has not managed to overtake its companions, yet probably still draws more attention than the common place pines. The truth here, though, is that the image has changed somewhat. Like the city around them, they have remained the same but taken on a much grander form... but those who pass them every day probably don't even look up, as they surely don't look around at what an amazing thing has grown around them in the past thirty years, let alone the past ten. Instead, Torontonians are busy with the illusion that they are at the top of bottom of the world, depending on perspective; the city has indeed become something global, and yet... They cannot see the miracle of transformation and continued growth with the fascinating world of formal identity specifics that exist both in the now and then. Toronto is a city that denies itself a taste of what it can be, what it has been, and even what it has become, amazing in being a living example of philosophical potential being, that "which is possibly everything but actually nothing".
I do promise to show, as I do in this blog in general, what Toronto is. Better yet, I invite you to see it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
