Why do Canadians who live outside the center of the universe, hate it so much?
A PECULIAR ALCHEMY transpires when Toronto enters conversation beyond its boundaries; a transmutation of tone, a crystallization of sentiment. The metropolis evokes a particular strain of elegant disdain that has, over decades, refined itself into something approaching performance art.
Within this national antipathy resides a more nuanced truth: Toronto embodies a certain transgression against the Canadian sensibility. Its existence – assertive, unapologetic, perpetually ascendant – challenges the collective narrative of measured restraint. When voices across provinces speak its name, a transmutation occurs; intonation carries judgment, a nearly imperceptible modulation that transforms Toronto into something vaguely pejorative. The Center of the Universe’, they murmur, the phrase suspended between observation and indictment.
I have contemplated this reflexive antipathy, this cultivated art of Toronto-aversion, through seasons of observation. The phenomenon resists facile analysis – too profound to dismiss as mere envy, though economic disparity weaves its thread; too textured to attribute solely to the city’s media omnipresence, though the relationship between visibility and resentment bears examination. The sentiment flows from deeper tributaries, touching something essential about Canadian identity itself; about the delicate negotiation between those who articulate what this nation represents and those who inhabit its margins.
Perhaps we harbor this resistance to Toronto because it manifests what we silently fear: a vision of Canada that privileges global relevance over pastoral nationalism, cosmopolitanism over regional character, acceleration over contemplation. A Canada that gazes outward into uncertain horizons rather than inward toward familiar landscapes.
Or perhaps our disquiet stems from Toronto’s crystallization of our collective anxieties regarding wealth, inequality, and influence; a physical manifestation of the forces quietly reshaping our society, rendered visible in concrete and glass, impossible to ignore yet difficult to acknowledge.
Regardless of its origins, this antipathy has become Toronto’s singular inheritance: to function as both the nation’s economic wellspring and its emotional counterweight. To generate prosperity while being denied its complete embrace in the national consciousness.
THE ORIGINAL SIN
Toronto has never solicited Canada’s consent to become what it is. This constitutes its original transgression.
The city extends its reach with meticulous precision, absorbing pastoral landscapes, reconfiguring shorelines, ascending toward sky with increasingly audacious architectural gestures. It reconstructs itself with almost clinical efficiency; clearing districts, elevating structures, consigning history to memory when expedient. Its skyline articulates not an architectural thesis but a financial declaration, each ascending structure proclaiming: capital congregates here, ambition resides here, the future undergoes perpetual negotiation within these boundaries.
Traverse the financial district at midday and you shall encounter it – that distinctive current of a place cognizant of its own significance. The professionals move with metropolitan intention, their gait echoing those found in Manhattan or London or Hong Kong. There exists here no distinctly Canadian hesitation, no deferential positioning. This is Toronto at its most unrestrained: a metropolis that has dispensed with national character in pursuit of global dialogue.
This refusal to remain modest, to confine itself within prescribed Canadian boundaries of self-effacement; herein lies the first of Toronto’s unpardonable transgressions.
THE NEIGHBORHOODS BENEATH THE VERTICAL ASPIRATION
Yet this monolithic perception of Toronto; this vision of calculating ambition and luminous facades; obscures the more intricate reality unfolding beneath those towers. For every Bay Street, there exists a Kensington Market; for every Yorkville, a Parkdale; for every corporate headquarters, countless storefronts operated by families who arrived bearing nothing but aspiration and resilience.
Along these streets, Toronto’s authentic character emerges – not through grand pronouncements of architectural ambition, but within the textured, complicated interplay of communities adapting to one another’s presence. Here, the city becomes a perpetually renegotiated covenant between cultures, between histories, between competing visions of what urban existence might signify.
Punjabi establishments operate in delicate proximity to Portuguese patisseries. Vietnamese merchants share clientele with Ethiopian cafés. Third-generation Italians observe as their neighborhoods transform yet again with successive waves of migration. This is not the curated multiculturalism of tourism ephemera, but something more profound, more vital – a daily improvisation performed by millions, rarely achieving perfection yet persistently alive.
Perhaps what renders Toronto most difficult for Canada to embrace is precisely this quality of perpetual adaptation; its refusal to crystallize into something stable and readily defined. It offers no comforting national mythology, no reassuring narrative regarding what Canada was or ought to become. It simply continues its evolution, indifferent to whether such transformation conforms to external expectations.
THE UNFORGIVABLE PROSPERITY
Few subjects terminate conversation in certain Canadian circles more efficiently than Toronto real estate valuations.
The figures have transcended reason, disconnected from any rational relationship to income or intrinsic value. Modest residences command millions. Conventional apartments require substantial salaries to secure. Young families execute calculated withdrawals to peripheral municipalities, economic exiles from the urban core.
This housing disequilibrium (it warrants no lesser designation) has transformed Toronto into an apparatus for wealth consolidation, for transmuting shelter into speculative instrument, for converting human necessity into investment vehicle. The city’s physical composition increasingly reflects this reality: luxury condominiums ascend adjacent to temporary encampments, their proximity a geographic certainty but their relationship a moral inquiry.
For many Canadians, Toronto’s property market symbolizes everything disquieting about contemporary capitalism – the severing of labour from reward, the elevation of wealth over community, the transformation of urban centers from sites of opportunity to mechanisms of exclusion. That this phenomenon has now extended beyond Toronto to other Canadian municipalities only intensifies the resentment. The contagion originated here, the reasoning suggests, before infecting communities elsewhere.
What remains unacknowledged in these discussions is a more unsettling truth: Toronto’s housing crisis emanates not from failure but from excessive success. From being too desirable, too opportunity-rich, too magnetic. From embodying what cities have historically represented at their finest – concentrations of possibility.
This perhaps constitutes Toronto’s most unforgivable transgression: to have flourished too visibly, too dramatically, in a nation that harbors profound ambivalence regarding wealth and its manifestation.
THE SOPHISTICATED COMPLEXITY OF MULTICULTURALISM
When Canadians reference their country’s multiculturalism, they frequently indicate Toronto as its most visible expression. Yet what exists here transcends both complexity and resolution beyond what national mythology suggests.
Toronto does not merely accommodate difference; it is constituted through it. More than half its residents originated beyond Canadian borders. Over 180 languages resonate through its neighborhoods. The city functions not as assimilative vessel or even mosaic, but as a continuously shifting arrangement of communities that maintain both connection and separation—overlapping in physical proximity while often inhabiting parallel social spheres.
This is not the idealized multiculturalism of political literature. It manifests as something more pragmatic, more contingent – communities adapting to proximity without necessarily achieving integration. Walk through Thorncliffe Park or Flemingdon Park or sections of Scarborough, and you’ll encounter entire ecosystems operating with only tangential relationship to downtown Toronto’s corridors of influence. These represent not failures of integration but alternative modes of belonging; ways of existing simultaneously within Toronto and elsewhere.
The city’s genius, and its challenge, resides in how it accommodates these multiple realities without demanding their dissolution into some singular civic identity. There exists no definitive “Toronto experience,” no essential character that delineates inclusion from exclusion. The city simply continues absorbing, adapting, creating space for difference without requiring its surrender.
This refusal to impose cultural coherence; this embrace of multiplicity without demanding resolution; renders Toronto difficult to narrate, to capture within comforting national mythology. It offers no simple conclusions about Canadian identity, only endless interrogations.
THE REFINED WOUND OF LANDSCAPE
Toronto has maintained a complex relationship with its natural context; with the lake defining its southern perimeter, with the ravines intersecting its urban fabric like geological memories, with the islands suspended just offshore, visible yet psychologically distant.
Unlike Vancouver, which constructed its identity upon its spectacular natural setting, or Montreal, which embraced its island character, Toronto has often appeared determined to transcend its geography, to assert human design over natural form. The waterfront became industrial infrastructure before evolving into real estate opportunity. The ravines became convenient repositories before their rehabilitation as recreational assets. The land itself became substrate for development rather than context for urban composition.
This nuanced relationship with its natural setting reflects a deeper tension within Toronto’s character – between growth and conservation, between economic imperatives and ecological values, between constructing the future and honoring the ancestral. The city has not resolved these contradictions; it embodies them, often with uncomfortable grace.
Walk the shores of Lake Ontario on a summer evening, where families gather to witness the sun’s descent over waters that once served primarily industrial purposes. Stand atop the Bloor Viaduct and contemplate the Don Valley below, where highway infrastructure and natural systems maintain their uneasy coexistence. Traverse Rouge National Urban Park, where protected wilderness meets suburban development in eloquent proximity.
In these moments, Toronto reveals itself as a city still negotiating its relationship with the land it occupies – a negotiation complicated by colonial history, by economic priorities, by competing visions of what urban development ought to signify. The evidence of this negotiation remains inscribed upon the landscape itself.
THE CENTER THAT CANNOT HOLD
Toronto’s most profound challenge lies not in external antipathy but internal coherence – the question of whether a metropolis can maintain functional unity while accommodating such dramatic divergence in experience, in opportunity, in belonging.
The geographic divisions have crystallized into socioeconomic reality. The original city versus the amalgamated periphery. The subway-accessible versus the transit-dependent. The property-owning versus the precariously housed. The globally connected versus the locally constrained.
This transcends mere inequality; though economic disparity runs profound; representing something more fundamental: the fragmentation of urban experience into increasingly separate realities that share geography but little else. A corporate executive in a downtown tower and a recent immigrant in a high-rise apartment building in North Etobicoke might technically inhabit the same city, but their respective Torontos bear minimal resemblance to one another.
This fragmentation threatens the very concept of what a city ought to represent – a shared endeavor, a collective project, a common ground where diverse lives intersect meaningfully. When urban experience becomes excessively segregated by wealth, by mobility, by opportunity, the civic fabric begins to unravel.
Toronto’s challenge lies in reconstructing connective tissue between these separated realities—through public space, through transportation, through institutions that bring different communities into meaningful contact. To create not merely a functional city but a legible one, where residents might recognize themselves as participants in a shared urban project, however diverse their individual experiences.
FOR ALL ITS CONTRADICTIONS – perhaps because of them – Toronto remains Canada’s most necessary city. Not the most beloved, certainly not the most aesthetically refined, but the most essential to understanding what this country is becoming rather than what it once was.
The remainder of Canada may never fully embrace Toronto. The city may continue serving as convenient national antagonist, as shorthand for disconnect, as symbol for everything purportedly un-Canadian. This adversarial relationship may be too deeply intertwined with national identity to achieve resolution.
Yet within that very tension resides productive potential—the opportunity for Toronto to model a different kind of Canadian urbanism, one that embraces global connection without surrendering local character, that accommodates growth without sacrificing sustainability, that welcomes diversity without requiring conformity.
The path forward necessitates acknowledging uncomfortable truths: that prosperity has created new forms of exclusion; that multiculturalism remains more aspiration than achievement; that growth without purpose becomes mere accumulation. It requires reimagining success beyond economic indicators – in the quality of public space, in the accessibility of opportunity, in the sustainability of systems, in the strength of civic bonds across difference.
HERE IN OUR NOVA HEART
I occasionally envision Canada as a corpus with Toronto as its restless, essential heart – the organ circulating economic vitality through national vessels, maintaining critical functions, enabling continued existence.
The heart receives little affection compared to other organs; it makes no claim to beauty like the eyes, possesses no sensuality like the skin. It simply performs, persistently, without sentiment or surrender.
Toronto will never achieve universal affection. Perhaps it need not. Perhaps its greater contribution lies in being necessary rather than beloved; in embodying the complicated, contradictory reality of contemporary urban existence rather than conforming to comforting, seemingly eternal national narratives.
