TORONTO

Toronto is the largest city in Canada and the capital of the province of Ontario. However, it is not the federal capital - that's Ottawa (which is also in Ontario). Non-Canadians don't always remember this.

In addition to its many charms, Toronto is also one of the great Stand-In Cities of movie and television fame, as filming in Canada is much cheaper than in the US. The City With No Name is often Toronto. They often need to remember to remove Toronto landmarks in the movies, leaving Canadians watching what's obviously Toronto when it's supposed to be set in the United States. In Canada, it's often (derisively) nicknamed "the centre of the universe", partially because it's the first city anyone outside of Canada will think of. Oh, and everyone in Canada who lives outside the greater Toronto area hates Toronto. And sometimes the ones who live inside it.

One can easily detect foreigners to Toronto by hearing them pronounce it "Toronto". Native speakers all drop the last T, and often the first O, so it's "Toronno", "T'ronno", or even "Ch'ronno" (with the first consonant being the "ch" in "chair") * . Nicknames include T.O., the T-dot, Hogtown, The Big Smoke, and "Toronto the Good". Peter Ustinov famously described it as "New York run by the Swiss", though the appellation isn't quite as accurate as it once was.

Toronto is actually a "mega-city"; in 1998 the core city and its immediate surrounding neighbourhoods were amalgamated into one, leading to confusion and annoyance. Not all of Toronto's suburbs are part of the mega-city; cities like Vaughan (pronounced "vawwn"), Richmond Hill, Mississauga and Brampton are reasonably large cities in their own right. The giant monster is known as the Greater Toronto Area (GTA for short). In general, the core is known as the 416 area and the surrounding GTA as the 905 (the dominant phone area codes in the two segments). The term "Golden Horseshoe" is also used for a larger area surrounding Toronto, containing the GTA and nearby towns and cities on the shores of Lake Ontario. Exceptionally expansive definitions of the Golden Horseshoe include most Southern Ontario and Buffalo, New York. InThe Seventies, just as the rest of the Great Lakes region was beginning its long, slow decline, the city received a huge boost from the provincial government - of Quebec, whose newly passed language laws and talk of separatism led to a flood of formerly Montreal-based Anglophones and businesses leaving for Toronto. Whether cities or suburbs are part of Toronto has led to confusion and general mockery among Canadians. The consensus had become that the farther away one is from Toronto, the larger the city becomes. For example, in southern Ontario, a citizen of Mississauga is not from Toronto and will be insulted if you declare them as such. However, that same Mississaugan will often claim to be from Toronto while travelling overseas (or more than two provinces away) just to keep things simpler.

Toronto is an incredibly multicultural city (47% of it consists of "visible minorities"; soon, "white" may be considered a visible minority, according to censuses) and is known for all sorts of cultural festivals such as Caribana, A Taste of the Danforth (Greek food) and an enormous Gay Pride Parade and will be host to the World Pride festival in 2014. It even has its own film festival, TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival), which is second only to Cannes.

The famous saying is that Toronto has only two seasons: winter and construction. It's not always entirely true, but spring and fall seem pretty short, and sometimes snowstorms are separated from sweltering, smog-filled furnaces by as little as a month. (And yes, we have very hot days during the summer; it's not all Eskimos and igloos. Come to Toronto in July and August dressed in long sleeves, and you will suffer from heat stroke.) As for the construction, because of all the snowfall, Toronto has to concentrate all its road work in the summer months; add the fact that Toronto's highways are some of the busiest in the world (the main crosstown route, Highway 401, is by most measures the busiest highway in the world), so that when construction starts forcing lane closures, things get very gnarly very quickly. Luckily, fewer people are in the city during the summer, as many go off to "cottage country" or elsewhere for vacations.

The snow thing is a sore point. Back in 1999, a particularly huge snowfall had Mayor Mel Lastman so worried he called in the army to help to clear it off. This became a goldmine of mirth for other places in Canada like Montreal, which gets an average of almost twice as much snow as Toronto does and gets ice storms.

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Major Landmarks:

• CN Tower (Canadian National Tower) * - Tallest free-standing tower in the world (losing the "tallest freestanding structure" title to the Burj Kalifa (aka. Burj Dubai) in 2007) and the very symbol of the city. They forgot to airbrush it out in the original theatrical release of Resident Evil.
• City Hall - Two curved towers that would look right at home in any futuristic show like Star Trek
  • And, in fact, did appear as a "futuristic" building on Star Trek TNG at least once.
    • And before that, it appeared as a "futuristic" building on Star Trek: The Original Series, just a few years after its construction.
  • Also appeared as the Umbrella Corporation's headquarters in the second Resident Evil movie.
    • As a Torontonian, one of the joys of watching that movie is seeing city hall blow up.
• Royal York Hotel - the Swankiest hotel in the city
• Air Canada Centre - The hockey arena for the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team so lucrative they haven't won the Stanley Cup since 1967 and they still always earn the most by far of any team in the NHL. The franchise is worth nearly double the next most valuable...every game is a sell-out and the waiting list for season tickets is tens of thousands long.
• Rogers Centre (Originally called Skydome, most locals still refer to it as such) - the first stadium built with a retractable dome. Also has a hotel built right into it—remember to close your blinds if you stay there.
  • If you want a room facing the stadium, you must sign a form stating that you won't do anything lewd in front of the cameras.
• Exhibition Place, aka The Ex
• Casa Loma
• Ontario Science Centre
• Royal Ontario Museum was recently given an overhaul with the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, an architectural monstrosity that sticks out over the sidewalk and is decried by a large population of museumgoers and city residents.
  • It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, which should say something.
  • The Crystal doubled for the Massive Dynamics HQ on Fringe
• Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which has just completed an overhaul of its own with a new design by Frank Gehry, and is one of the largest art museums in North America
• Ontario Place
• Eaton Centre
• Ontario Legislative Building
• Harbourfront
• University of Toronto - tends to get used as a stand-in for Oxbridge or Ivy League colleges in movies (especially the St-George campus).
• Yonge Street: The major street in downtown Toronto, formerly host to the historic Sam the Record Man store (which closed recently, and the trademark neon record signs have been removed), and the surprisingly-visible-in-the-Hulk-Movie Zanzibar strip club, one of the biggest and brightest strip club signs you'll ever see.
  • It is also technically the longest street in the world at 1,896 km, even if the Jerkass Guinness Book of World Records doesn't agree anymore.
• Honest Ed's: The most famous discount store in the city, founded by the late Ed Mirvish, marked by a massive, garish flashing light sign display. Despite this, Ed was renowned as a patron of the arts, such as helping established artist facilities in the neighbourhood of his store and for his well-known turkey giveaways to the poor of the city before Thanksgiving and Christmas. Furthermore, he was most famous across the country for being a theatre impresario, putting on the biggest stage productions in the country, such as Mamma Mia! and The Lion King.

Toronto is a great city to live and work in or just to visit. We have a high quality of life and reliable services in one of the safest urban environments in the world. We have a lot more going for us, too. Just check out the facts! Toronto's population is one of the most diverse in the world. Nearly all of the world's culture groups are represented in Toronto, and more than 100 languages and dialects are spoken.

Located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, farther south than Minnesota and much of Michigan, Toronto is one of the most accessible cities in North America by road, air, rail and water. We are only a one-hour drive away for about five million Canadians and within a 90-minute flight for 60 per cent of the U.S. population.

Toronto lies on the shore of Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes. Home to more than 2 million people, the city is the key to one of North America's most vibrant regions, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). 4.5 million Canadians live in the GTA, the nation's cultural, entertainment, and financial capital. The city is also the seat of the Ontario government.
That is why Toronto abounds in investment and employment opportunities in such diverse fields as banking and financial services, film and television production, and fashion, and also boasts a thriving arts community.

Did you know that Toronto is as far south as the French Riviera or that more people live in Toronto than in Canada's four Atlantic provinces combined? Here you will find interesting and sometimes startling facts about Toronto, Canada'seconomic engine, with its 6th largest government and one of the world's most diverse and multicultural populations.

A Very Short History of Toronto

Humans began to occupy the Toronto region shortly after the last ice age. Many thousands of years later, in the 17th century, these indigenous peoples opened trade with the French, who established trading posts in Toronto in the 18th century. Toronto passed to British control in 1763, and the creation of an urban community began 30 years later when colonial officials built Fort York and laid out a town site. That community, 'York,' became the capital of the province of Upper Canada (now Ontario). It also grew as an important commercial centre, and, in 1834, with 9,250 residents, it was incorporated as the 'City of Toronto.' The population continued to expand: when Canada became a country in 1867, the city was home to 50,000 souls. By 1901, 208,000 people lived here. Today, with well over two million people, Toronto is Canada's largest city, the heart of the nation's commercial, financial, industrial, and cultural life. It is one of the world's most liveable urban centres.