Toronto’s transformation is one of the fastest of any large city. Within living memory it was a byword for Anglo-Protestant conformity. It is now, by several measures, the most diverse city in the world.
The Carrying Place
The name comes from the Mohawk tkaronto, meaning roughly “where there are trees standing in the water” — a reference to fish weirs at the narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, well north of the modern city.
The Toronto Carrying Place Trail was a portage route from Lake Ontario up the Humber River to Lake Simcoe and on to Georgian Bay, bypassing the long journey around the Niagara Peninsula. It had been used for a very long time and it made this stretch of shoreline strategically valuable.
This is the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, an Anishinaabe people, and before them the Wendat and Haudenosaunee.
The Toronto Purchase
In 1787 the Crown acquired land here from the Mississaugas in a transaction that was defective almost from the start — the deed was blank, the boundaries were unclear, and the Mississaugas’ understanding of what had been agreed differed fundamentally from the Crown’s.
It was reconfirmed in 1805 and disputed for two centuries. In 2010 Canada settled the claim with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation for $145 million.
Muddy York
John Graves Simcoe founded the town of York in 1793 as the capital of Upper Canada, choosing it over Niagara for defensibility. It was small, remote and notoriously waterlogged — the nickname was Muddy York — and Kingston and Niagara both resented the choice.
In April 1813 an American force took it and burned the parliament buildings; the British cited that when they burned Washington the following year. See Fort York.
The town was incorporated as the City of Toronto in 1834, with the reformer William Lyon Mackenzie as its first mayor. He led an armed rebellion three years later, failed, and fled to the United States.
Toronto the Good
Through the Victorian period Toronto became a prosperous, overwhelmingly British and militantly Protestant city. The Orange Order dominated municipal politics for over a century; almost every mayor between the 1840s and the 1950s was a member.
Sunday observance laws were strict enough that playgrounds were chained, cinemas closed, and the streetcars barely ran. Sunday sport was illegal until 1950. Alcohol was heavily restricted; the last of the more absurd rules survived into the 1970s.
The nickname was Toronto the Good, and it was not always meant kindly.
There was a Black community from the 1830s, Toronto being a terminus of the Underground Railroad, and Jewish, Italian and Chinese communities from the late nineteenth century. All faced substantial discrimination — restrictive covenants on property, the Christie Pits riot of 1933, the head tax on Chinese immigrants, and the internment of Japanese Canadians in 1942.
The change
Then, quite quickly, it changed.
Postwar migration brought Italians in very large numbers — Toronto now has one of the largest Italian populations of any city outside Italy — along with Portuguese, Greeks and Eastern Europeans.
Canada abolished explicitly racial immigration criteria in 1967, replacing them with a points system, and adopted official multiculturalism as policy in 1971 — the first country in the world to do so.
What followed was migration from the Caribbean, South Asia, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Iran and a very long list besides.
Now
Around half of Toronto’s residents were born outside Canada, and about 200 languages are spoken. The city’s motto, adopted in 1998, is “Diversity Our Strength”.
It is not a resolved story. Housing costs have risen enormously, Little Jamaica on Eglinton West has been badly damaged by a decade of transit construction, and the reconciliation process with Indigenous peoples — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 2015 on the residential schools that removed children from their families for over a century — is ongoing and unfinished.
But the distance travelled between the city that chained its playgrounds on Sundays and the one you are standing in is about seventy years, and it is worth registering.
Where to see this history
Fort York for the founding and 1813 — seven original buildings from the 1810s, the largest such collection anywhere.
Old Town for the first ten blocks, and St Lawrence Hall where the Anti-Slavery Society met and Frederick Douglass spoke.
Kensington Market for the layers of migration, and the Kiever Synagogue of 1927 still standing in it.
Nathan Phillips Square, which stands on two-thirds of the demolished first Chinatown.
The ROM’s First Peoples galleries and the AGO’s Indigenous collection, which is hung with the Canadian rather than separately — a deliberate change.
Land acknowledgement
You will hear one at the start of events, performances and public meetings: a statement recognising that Toronto is on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat, and that it is covered by Treaty 13.
It is standard practice in Canada, and like Australia’s Acknowledgement of Country it is worth understanding rather than tuning out.
Reading
Robert Fulford’s Accidental City on how Toronto happened without planning. Shawn Micallef’s Stroll is a walking book and the best guide to the city’s texture. Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion is the novel — the Bloor Viaduct, the waterworks and the immigrant labour that built them.