Michael J. Doucet

School of Applied Geography

Ryerson Polytechnic University

©2001

Toronto is no longer a Protestant city, it's a mediaeval one: the crowds clogging the street are many-hued, the clothing vivid - Iris Chase Griffen, fictional matron, 2000⁽²⁾

The only reason Toronto is no longer the dullest city on earth is that it is no longer full of Anglo-Canadians. It is full of Hong Kong Chinese. And not a few Italians - Joel Garreau, Washington journalist, 1990⁽³⁾

One TTC subway car is a time capsule freezing the experiences of dozens of countries, religions, languages, and cultures. The passengers are friendly, apathetic, disgruntled - but they cannot avoid each other. They are all equal riders in the fast-moving multicultural express - Olivia Ward, Toronto journalist, 1985⁽⁴⁾

Many people say, if you want to see the real Toronto, travel the subway. Well I do; all the time. I'm so used to the ethnic diversity of this city that it was a shock to be sitting in an audience [for American comedian Red Skelton] composed entirely of white people - Paul Chato, entertainment critic, 1992⁽⁵⁾

What's really interesting on a social level about Toronto is that there are so many different people of different languages and cultures and ethnicities. In fact, it's probably the most successful city of mixed race anywhere in the world. People really do get along. All the time? No, of course not. Do we have problems? Of course we do. But, in fact, generally there is a great deal of tolerance. One of the reasons for that is because we have a very powerful, well-used transit system. And what the transit system does, and it's the great merit of transit in North America, is that it puts people of different colour and language together in the same place and carries them along. And what people learn on that [journey] is not to be afraid of each other - John Sewell, former Toronto Mayor, 1994⁽⁷⁾

Even the crowded, creaky subways in Toronto have their charm. We are so ethnically diverse here. No matter what we might be, chances are good that we're the only ones of that particular kind on that particular car - Diane Dadian, Toronto writer, 1998⁽⁸⁾

Wandering around those inner-city streets [upon my return to Toronto in mid-1992 after a seven-year posting as the Toronto Star's international affairs columnist in London, England], I gradually became aware of a remarkable phenomenon. I began to notice that a strikingly high number of couples walking together were made up of one white person and another who was black or brown or Asian. Less common, but by no means rare, were couples of whom one member was black and the other brown or Asian. In all their colours, there were far more of these pairs and groups than I'd ever noticed in London (almost as polyglot a city as Toronto) or Paris, Berlin, Rome, or, as I would later observe, in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington - Richard Gwyn, journalist, 1995⁽⁹⁾

It is perhaps no accident that [Marshall] McLuhan was a citizen of Toronto, the ideal model of the emerging global village. People from every part of the world have chosen Toronto as their home, and have blended into a new international urban culture. As they enter the Olympic Stadium, every national Olympic team will be welcomed by their countrymen who live here. Everyone has a relative in Toronto. . . . Toronto is a city of the future. Urbane and sophisticated, it is a deliberately multicultural city that rejoices in its diversity. We believe Toronto may well be the most multicultural city on Earth - Toronto Ontario Olympic Council's bid for the 1996 Olympics, 1990⁽¹⁰⁾

Toronto is . . . a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere - a market, a caravansary - bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell - Jacob Beer, fictional immigrant to Toronto, 1996⁽¹¹⁾

Known for many years as one of the most narrow-minded and uncosmopolitan of the British colonial cities, Toronto has become the most ethnically and culturally diverse city in the world in the last thirty years - Robert J. Kasher in Ethnic Toronto, 1997⁽¹²⁾

During my early days in Toronto, I found myself spinning through cultures as if I were sampling World Music rhythms on a hip-hop record. . . . For a Global Soul like me - for anyone born to several cultures - the challenge in the modern world is to find a city that speaks to as many of our homes as possible. . . . In that respect, Toronto felt entirely on my wavelength. It assembled many of the pasts that I knew, from Asia and America and Europe; yet unlike other such outposts of Empire - Adelaide, for example, or Durban - it offered the prospects of uniting all the fragments in a stained-glass whole - Pico Iyer, journalist and Global Soul, 2000⁽¹³⁾

In Toronto you can have a little bit of everything. The multicultural kind of thing we find in Toronto you don't find anywhere else in the world - Zoreh Shams, Iranian-born Toronto travel agent, 2000⁽¹⁴⁾

But some people are moving out of Toronto, to Stratford or Kingston or Vancouver, squeezed out by housing prices or just fed up with frenzy and greed. What surprises me is how little regret they feel, the absence of any loyalty to Toronto. Perhaps it is because this city, unlike New York or Montreal, has created no myth of itself to hold them - Cary Fagan, Toronto writer and literary journalist, 1990⁽¹⁵⁾

Expect the World - official slogan of Toronto's bid for the 2008 Olympic Summer Games, 2000⁽¹⁶⁾

The World at Home - slogan for Toronto multicultural television station CFMT, 2000⁽¹⁷⁾

Diversity - Our Strength - official motto of the amalgamated City of Toronto, 1998⁽¹⁸⁾

The United Nations has declared Toronto to be the most ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse city in the world - Prithi Yelaja, journalism student, 1990⁽¹⁹⁾

Urban Legends

According to the noted American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, urban legends are "realistic stories concerning recent events (or alleged events)." These stories are "an integral part of white Anglo-American culture" and their storytellers "assume that the true facts of each case lie just one or two informants back down the line with a reliable witness (the so-called FOAF, or Friend Of A Friend, factor), or in a news media report."⁽²⁰⁾ More folklore than history, urban legends are believed to be true, and are subject to considerable repetition. While often popularly referred to as urban myths, for Brunvand, they

belong to a subclass of folk narratives, legends, that - unlike fairy tales - are believed, or at least believable, and that - unlike myths - are set in the recent past and involve normal human beings rather than ancient gods or demigods. . . . As with any folk legends, urban legends gain credibility from specific details of time and place or from references to source authorities. . . . In the world of modern urban legends there is usually no geographical or generational gap between teller and event. The story is true; it really occurred and recently, and always to someone else who is quite close to the narrator, or at least a `friend of a friend.'⁽²¹⁾

Urban legends even spread to new media in the 1990s, permitting them to propagate, according to Chicago journalist James Coates, "with a scope and frenzy never before experienced." A scholarly discussion group on the subject, alt.folklore.urban, exists on the Internet, "devoted to the discussion and debunking of urban legends." The first Internet-generated urban legends, including the so-called "Good Times Virus" legend, a story about a computer virus so powerful it can destroy any hard drive in seconds, already have appeared.⁽²⁴⁾ Older urban legends, like the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe story about a woman who exacts revenge after being charged $250 for a cookie recipe that she thought was to cost $2.50, have found new life on the Internet.⁽²⁵⁾ Even though the widely-syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers had debunked this legend in 1992, that was not enough to prevent such highly respected newspapers as The Times of London and Canada's National Newspaper, the Globe and Mail, from running the story, unquestioned, late in 1995 after it had been circulated on the Internet.⁽²⁶⁾ To the delight of the many Canadians who eagerly await any embarrassment that can be associated with Toronto, the Globe's error in printing the story as fact was identified by a writer in the Vancouver Sun within days.⁽²⁷⁾ Almost as difficult as dandelions to uproot, some urban legends have displayed a persistent, cyclical character; lying dormant for a time, only to sprout up again at a later date. The Neiman Marcus story, for example, is at least a decade old and some feel it may well have originated in the 1930s.⁽²⁸⁾

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution, spread, and demise of a particular urban legend about Toronto; namely, the notion that the United Nations had declared Toronto to be the world's most multicultural city. Beginning in the late 1980s, this sentiment began to be expressed in a variety of media: the city's mainstream press;⁽²⁹⁾ letters to editors;⁽³⁰⁾ restaurant reviews;⁽³¹⁾ television news reports;⁽³²⁾ university student newspapers and local entertainment weeklies;⁽³³⁾ articles about Toronto published in out-of-town newspapers;⁽³⁴⁾ speeches by prominent citizens, including one by then-Toronto Mayor Arthur Eggleton, one by former Mayor David Crombie, one by Dr. Joseph Wong, a Toronto family practitioner, community activist, and member of the Provincially-appointed Greater Toronto Area Task Force; and another by Maria Minna, MP for Beaches-Woodbine and then-Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration;⁽³⁵⁾ American magazine articles and Canadian newswire copy about such reports;⁽³⁶⁾ official municipal government advertisements;⁽³⁷⁾ Federal Government documents;⁽³⁸⁾ and probably elsewhere as well. While these reports were essentially identical in some regards - the United Nations always made the declaration - there has been some variation in terms of what that body allegedly had declared Toronto to be - most multicultural, most ethnically/racially/linguistically diverse, most cosmopolitan - though the overall sentiment embodied in these terms was similar. The adverb recently often was used in the reports to lend a sense of immediacy to the event. In classic urban legend fashion, writers began to cite earlier reports as their source; so the legend became almost self-perpetuating, though it did tend to appear in the media in definite cycles. Nobody ever seemed to question the veracity of the assertion. Sadly, as I shall show presently, there was no truth to the statement whatsoever.

It is not entirely clear how a decision on the world's most multicultural city could be reached. Would it be based on a simple count of the number of different ethnic, racial, and linguistic groups living in a given place? Are data sources for the demographic structure of different cities both compatible and reliable enough for such conclusions even to be drawn? National censuses, the prime source for most such data, ask different questions about ethnicity and are taken at different times. Assuming such data problems could be resolved, could a place be the world's most multicultural city if it could count among its citizenry one member of each ethnic/racial/linguistic group? Or would the size of the different groups have any bearing on such a decision? As John Barber, the Globe and Mail's urban affairs columnist, observed in 1996:

there is no doubt that Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities, and it is reasonable to wonder whether it might be the ultimate in that respect. But rankings are hard to establish. You look hard for facts and quickly begin wondering what `culture' is.⁽³⁹⁾

When American geographers James P. Allen and Eugene Turner attempted to find the most ethnically diverse place in the US, they suggested:

diversity in a population refers to its heterogeneity, and a measure of relative diversity should describe both the richness or variety of subpopulations and the equality or evenness of their sizes.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Stalking the Legend

Not surprisingly, the arrival of the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) in Toronto in 1996 fostered academic interest in Toronto's demographic structure. In an earlier report in this series, I explored the statistical evidence concerning Toronto's increasingly complex demographic structure, while Harold Troper has detailed Toronto's immigration history since 1945 and Larry S. Bourne has examined the issues of migration, immigration, and social sustainability.⁽⁴²⁾ Without question, Toronto is Canada's most cosmopolitan city, and certainly is one of the most diverse urban centres in the world, a place recently described as a "City of Nations." What is in dispute, then, is not the remarkable ethnic/racial/linguistic/religious diversity of Toronto, but whether or not the United Nations, or any of its agencies, ever officially commented on it in the fashion described so often in the media. There is no doubt that the UN and its agencies do make declarations about places from time to time. Most notable here are the more than four hundred designations of World Heritage Sites, both natural and cultural, made since 1978 by the Paris-based United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The list includes 13 Canadian locations, mostly spectacular natural features like the Canadian Rocky Mountain National Parks, and two World Heritage Towns - the old sections of Quebec City and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. None of the Canadian World Heritage Sites is located in Ontario. UNESCO would have been the logical arm of the United Nations to make a declaration about Toronto's multicultural character. In fact, it never did any such thing, though an initiative by Metro Community Services was one of a dozen such municipal organizations to receive an award from the United Nations Habitat II Technical Advisory Committee early in 1996. The so-called Best Practices Award, funded by the Municipality of Dubai and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, was given to Metropolitan Toronto for the way in which it had adapted its service provision to reflect the immigrant patterns of the municipality, making it "among the world's best in delivering social services that are accessible, sensitive, and responsive to a diverse and changing metropolitan community." More than 600 entries were submitted to the Technical Advisory Committee, with a ten-member International Best Practices Jury convening in Toronto to select the twelve winners. A plaque and scroll were presented to each of the winners at the Habitat II City Summit in Istanbul in June of 1996. Even this did not make Toronto the world's most multicultural city, and the award was largely ignored by Toronto journalists.⁽⁴³⁾

The first published reference to a UN pronouncement appeared early in 1989 and quoted then-Toronto Mayor Arthur Eggleton: "[Toronto is] noted by the United Nations as being the most racially and culturally diverse city in the world."⁽⁴⁴⁾ Within two months, the American press was reporting "the United Nations has proclaimed Toronto the world's most multicultural city."⁽⁴⁵⁾ By the end of the year, the sentiment was being routinely included in publicity material issued by Toronto's professional boosters at the Metropolitan Toronto Convention and Visitors Association.⁽⁴⁶⁾ By mid-1993, the use of the idea was as much a part of the message of American travel writers in their analyses of Toronto as the mandatory reference to the height of the CN Tower.⁽⁴⁷⁾ It had even found its way into the storied type of the New York Times.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Unlike their Canadian counterparts, American journalists were confident enough to put a date on the declaration. Jay Clarke of the Miami Herald, Steve Jacobson of Newsday, John Fitzgerald of Ladies Home Journal, and Valerie Vaz of Essence all agreed that the deed had been done in 1989, a clear confusion between fact and press release.⁽⁴⁹⁾

My search for evidence to support this notion began late in 1990 and, to date, I have been unable to find any concrete indication of a UN declaration attesting to the reality of Toronto's demographic diversity. With the advent of digital editions of Toronto newspapers and the provision of access to such on-line entry points to American and international newspapers and periodicals as Lexis®/Nexis®, the search for the published use of particular combinations of words and phrases has never been easier. Of interest here were articles containing the following: (Toronto) [and] (United Nations [or] UN) [and] (most multicultural [or] most cosmopolitan [or] most ethnically diverse [or] most culturally diverse [or] most racially diverse). Including reprints, about three dozen examples of the use of the phrase were discovered in this fashion. In every case, however, the sentiment was included simply as an unquestioned fact about Toronto. Not a single story could be found about the UN actually making a declaration about Toronto's multicultural character. Surely such a proclamation would have been front-page news, especially in the pages of the very parochial Toronto Star and Toronto Sun; but I have no such clipping in my extensive files, nor did one exist in the files of the Urban Affairs Library at Metro Hall; and a search of the entire text of the Toronto Star, via CD-ROM for the period from 1989 to 1994, uncovered no such story either. This search, however, did reveal one glorious, missed opportunity to trumpet and verify the oft-repeated UN declaration story. In late May of 1990, the then-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Javier Perez de Cuellar, visited Toronto. Addressing a group of school children gathered at Ontario Place to promote literacy, he praised Canada's "more and more multi-racial and multicultural society," its "beautiful diversity," and its "literacy in different languages" without any reported reference to a UN declaration about Toronto's demographic situation.⁽⁵⁰⁾

A search of another CD-ROM data base, Canadian Business and Current Affairs, which captures article titles back as far as 1981 in leading Canadian daily newspapers, including the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, and a host of other Canadian publications, also produced a negative result. However, I did find a suggestion in a 1990 column by the Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy that "it is rumored that somewhere in the bureaucracy of the United Nations, Toronto has been declared the most culturally diverse city in the world." And rumour, after all, is the essence of any urban legend. A search of the Globe and Mail's on-line service, Info Globe, which extends back to 1977, revealed no other reference to the idea prior to the Valpy article.⁽⁵¹⁾

Similarly, an on-line search of the tabloid Toronto Sun extending back to 1 January 1989, uncovered no articles about a UN declaration and only two stories in which the infamous concept was employed, though Sun columnist Christina Blizzard did once refer to Toronto as "a city that boasts it is the most multicultural place on the face of the earth."⁽⁵²⁾ One of the Sun stories was about the use of the term in a 1994 Fortune magazine article about the best cities for business in the world that was very similar to a Canadian Press article to be discussed later.⁽⁵³⁾ The other, however, was revealing about the extent to which the legend had become entrenched in the minds of some Torontonians. In August of 1995, court reporter Gretchen Drummie quoted from the closing arguments employed by prosecuting attorney Paul Normandeau in asking for a stiff sentence in a case involving the use of racial insults and fisticuffs on a downtown street outside the Whiskey Saigon nightclub: "It was a racist attack. The United Nations has said Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, but it only works if people get along."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Judge Ken Ross may well have been swayed by this line of reasoning. He sentenced the defendant to one year in jail and ordered him to stay out of Metro Toronto for the following two years.

Puzzled by the absence of a newspaper-clipping trail, I telephoned Mayor Arthur Eggleton's office early in 1991 and spoke about the matter with his assistant, Peter Donolo. I asked Donolo whether the notion of a UN declaration was true and, if so, when the UN had made it? He knew nothing about it except that the Mayor used to use the statement in his speeches, but no longer did so. I asked if the Mayor had a citation from the UN that might confirm the quotation. Donolo said that he did not, but that it was a good idea. He then suggested that I contact members of the Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations to see if they could shed any light on the matter.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Janice Dembo of that office, too, could provide no concrete evidence that the UN had made any such declaration.⁽⁵⁶⁾

I then wrote to Ambassador Yves Fortier at the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations. In his reply to that letter, Graham Green, First Secretary Political/Public Affairs, noted that

like you, we have seen some media references to the United Nations designating Toronto as the world's most multicultural city. Unfortunately, despite repeated attempts, we have not been able to obtain any concrete information on this from the United Nations or its agencies. It is likely that such a reference would have been made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, but our Mission to UNESCO in Paris has not been able to obtain any further details from the organization.

In desperation, I called the office of the then-Metropolitan Toronto Chairman, Alan Tonks, and was directed from there to Mark Nakamura of Metro's Multicultural Relations Office. At last I found the source of something relating to the much used quotation. Nakamura recalled that some documents released by his Office had made reference to Toronto as Canada's most multicultural city and had used some UNESCO data to make the claim that Toronto was one of the world's most multicultural cities -- a far cry from a formal UN declaration. This sequence of events later was confirmed by Dr. Suwanda Sugunasiri, a research associate in Buddhist studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and a keen observer of Toronto's multicultural structure who had assisted the efforts of the Multicultural Relations Office from time to time.⁽⁵⁸⁾ How the leap was made from such a simple assertion of fact to a full-blown UN declaration, however, remains a mystery, and whatever documents were prepared by the members of the Multicultural and Race Relations Division of the Metropolitan Toronto government were never formally published, though a non-comparative demographic study of Toronto's changing population was commissioned and summarized.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Perhaps the creation of the UN declaration legend was simply the work of an overly-zealous municipal civil servant, for the temptation to embellish is almost always present in such circumstances. In some civic situations it is often downright irresistible. Earlier, I discussed the Best Practices Award that was bestowed by the United Nations Habitat II Technical Advisory Committee on the Metropolitan Toronto Community Services department in 1996 for adapting its operations to serve a diverse population. By mid-May of 1998, this simple act of recognition had been transformed into a much grander episode in Toronto's history. At that time, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman, in a speech to the G-8 Summit of the Cities Conference in Birmingham, England, that was entitled "Diversity in Toronto," shamelessly proclaimed to a prestigious international audience: ". . . the United Nations came to Toronto to study us and they used our plan as a role model."⁽⁶⁰⁾

Perhaps Lastman has sewn the seeds for a new urban legend about the United Nations and Toronto. If so, he is merely continuing a well-established tradition of myth-making by Toronto boosters. Among other things, Torontonians recently and shamelessly have proclaimed their city to be "The Big Apple of the North," "Hollywood North,""Broadway North," "The City That Works," "The Megacity," "A New City for a New Century," and the favourite Toronto mantra of its boosters during the late-1980s, "A World-Class City." Still, the contrast between the nineteenth-century image of Toronto as "The Belfast of America" and the concept of the place as "The World's Most Multicultural City" is striking. And this sense of change has been quietly captured in three new Toronto appellations. As the amalgamated City of Toronto was taking shape late in 1997, the editors of the Toronto Star ran a contest to pick a new slogan for the new city. The winning entry was "Toronto - Home to the World." When the local politicians came to the task of deciding on a motto for the new, enlarged City of Toronto, their choice reflected Toronto's post-World War II demographic transformation: "Diversity - Our Strength." And in the summer of 1998, officials at Tourism Toronto launched their new slogan - "Toronto: The World Within a City." Furthermore, the official slogan chosen for the Toronto bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics was "Expect the World," and Toronto's diversity was said to be a key to the city's "Olympic sales pitch." Cary Fagan, the Toronto writer quoted in the epigraphs found at outset of this paper, therefore, is quite wrong. There have been many myths created over the years concerning the image and meaning of Toronto by both local residents and outsiders, many of which have been rooted in the city's demographic structure.⁽⁶¹⁾

Yet, Toronto does have something of an image problem, especially within Canada. For example, Montreal is still viewed by many as Canada's cosmopolitan city; but Toronto, a city that did not get its first commercial espresso machine until the early 1960s and its first Paris-style sidewalk café until 1971, clearly is now its multicultural heart. The persistence of the cosmopolitan label almost exclusively for Montreal is a bit puzzling, and seems, to me at least, to reflect a decidedly Eurocentric perspective. Because of its age, parts of the Quebec metropolis and especially the area known as Old Montreal or le vieux quartier, present streetscapes that have a definite European look and feel to them. No one, however, would ever call Montreal the world's most multicultural city, though the October 1999 cover story in Toronto Life magazine did inform readers about "Where to Find Montreal in Toronto," perhaps suggesting yet another "ethnic" group resident within the Ontario capital.⁽⁶²⁾

A Legend With Remarkable Persistence

After the initial flurry of activity in 1989, 1990, and 1991, only two relatively harmless references to a UN declaration on Toronto appeared in the local media in 1992 and 1993, though, as we have already seen, the idea continued to percolate among US travel writers.⁽⁶³⁾ But late in 1994, the floodgates opened once more. The catalyst seemed to be a comment made in an article in Fortune magazine. In naming Toronto the seventh best city in the world for business, journalist Bill Saporito noted: "[Toronto's] critics carp the town is pleasant to the point of somnolence" and suggested "the United Nations has called metro Toronto the most multicultural city in the world."⁽⁶⁴⁾ The Canadian love of American praise is a well-established fact of life; so it is not surprising that this article was pounced upon by the Canadian media. Before the magazine even hit Canadian newsstands, a story about Fortune's rankings was circulated by Canadian Press and published in several Canadian newspapers, including the Calgary Herald, the Halifax Daily News, the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star.⁽⁶⁵⁾ A separate story also ran in the Toronto Sun.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Each paper published the story on 26 October, and each one carried, unquestioned, a direct quote from the Fortune article about the UN declaration. (In the 1995 edition of the Fortune survey, Toronto finished eighth, and no mention was made of its multicultural character at all).⁽⁶⁷⁾

Before November of 1994 was out the Toronto Star's respected urban affairs columnist, David Lewis Stein, had repeated the idea of a UN declaration twice; and before 1994 was over, the statement also surfaced in an article about Toronto that appeared in the Montreal Gazette.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Almost a year later, the Globe and Mail's newly-appointed Multiculturalism Reporter, Isabel Vincent, repeated the phrase in an article about ethnic marketing, and was taken to task for it.⁽⁶⁹⁾ About the same time, an advertisement appearing over the signature of Toronto Mayor Barbara Hall surfaced in a brand new, Toronto-based urban affairs magazine, The Next City. Entitled "Consider Toronto," and clearly designed to entice business relocation to Ontario's capital, the advertisement gushed about how well Toronto had fared in international surveys, including the one done by Fortune magazine, and concluded the first paragraph of its text with: "And the United Nations has declared Toronto the world's most multicultural city."⁽⁷⁰⁾

Old legends, especially urban ones, apparently die hard. What was good enough for Fortune, was good enough for City Hall. Neither organization had bothered to check the facts. I wrote to Mayor Barbara Hall after the "Consider Toronto" advertisement appeared and outlined my research into the mysterious UN declaration for her.⁽⁷¹⁾ In her reply, she confirmed my earlier conclusions:

as a result of your note, I instructed those concerned to look into the matter and they, too, were unable to track down the origin of the declaration. You were right. City of Toronto staff have now been alerted to the issue, and I have asked City of Toronto staff to 'expunge' the phrase from all future communications.⁽⁷²⁾

True to Mayor Hall's word, the next time the "Consider Toronto" advertisement appeared, it did so without any reference to the United Nations whatsoever. But the staff at City Hall had gone too far. There was no longer any reference to Toronto's multicultural character at all. Surely its uncommon and unquestioned multicultural character stands as one of Toronto's greatest attractions for businesses, migrants, and tourists. The only point in dispute was whether or not the United Nations had ever pronounced upon Toronto's multicultural character. Sadly, in attempting to fix one mistake, the baby had been thrown out with the bath water by the copy writers at City Hall.⁽⁷⁴⁾

Toronto is certainly "one of" or "among" the world's most multicultural cities, to borrow a phrasing that has been used recently in the Report of the Task Force on the GTA.⁽⁷⁵⁾ Lamentably, even this modest claim was misinterpreted soon afterwards as "the world's most multicultural area" by veteran Maclean's columnist Allan Fotheringham in a February 1996 attempt to ridicule Toronto's legendary sense of its own self-importance, an error for which he was criticized by the Chair of the Task Force, Anne Golden.⁽⁷⁶⁾ No wonder urban legends get started and persist, when journalists ignore small but important modifiers like "among" and "one of."

If the past is any indicator, "the United Nations has declared" phrase should disappear from the vocabulary of the members of the Toronto media, at least for a time. Nonetheless, Metropolitan Toronto's submission to the United Nations Best Practices Award, held in conjunction with the Habitat II Conference, did contain the following statement: "The United Nations recognizes Metro Toronto as the most multicultural city in the world." There no longer seems to be any use of this idea, however, in publications issued by the Metropolitan Toronto Convention and Visitors Association, though a recent brochure does proclaim, in no fewer than six languages - English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Japanese - "Toronto is the world's most ethnically diverse city." This sentiment was repeated as the opening point in Together We Are One: A Summary Paper on Diversity in Toronto, a 1998 report produced by the Access and Equity Centre of the City of Toronto for Mayor Mel Lastman. In neither case was any attempt made to provide so much as a shred of comparative evidence, except for an observation in the latter report that "no other city in the world has a higher proportion who are foreign-born than Toronto" and "in 1990, only 28% of New York's population was foreign-born."⁽⁷⁷⁾

A controversial June 1996 article in National Geographic that was prepared with extensive help from the people at the MTCVA contained a similar sentiment:

. . . back before World War II, . . . the biggest parade in Toronto was the Orange Order's July celebration of Protestant supremacy. . . . Not only have the Orangemen receded, but their children now boast that Toronto is the most ethnically and racially diverse city on earth.

I was looking for a few issues to focus on, and while researching the story, learned that in 1989 or '91 the UN chose Toronto as the world's most ethnically diverse city. And when I got here, I was totally delighted by how vibrant the city is. The young flair and street life are very unusual for the downtown of a city.

Obviously intrigued by this vibrancy, Ludwig shot some 30,000 frames during three visits to Toronto in 1994 and 1995.⁽⁷⁸⁾

The removal of references to UN certification from civic documents and in the Toronto media did not mean, however, that the legend had been completely eradicated. In preparation for the mid-February 1996 celebrations of National Citizenship Week, Flag Day, and Heritage Day, the Government of Canada, in conjunction with the Department of Canadian Heritage, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Human Resources Development Canada, issued a new activity book for young Canadians. Some 75,000 copies were distributed in February of 1996. As its final activity, Canada, Take It to Heart included a Canadiana Quiz, and the very first question in that quiz, in both official languages, was: What Canadian city has the honour of being the most multicultural in the world, as designated by the United Nations? The answer given in the brochure was, of course, Toronto.⁽⁷⁹⁾ The inappropriateness of the question was reported on CBC Radio. Kevin Macleod, a spokesperson for the Heritage Department who had been involved in the preparation of the document, told reporter Trisha Naylor that the question was based on an unspecified "newspaper article," and suggested that it must be true because it had been used by "dozens of journalists and politicians."⁽⁸⁰⁾ It is never easy to wrestle an urban legend to its knees; but this kind of faith in the truth of the printed word, makes the task virtually impossible.

In 1995, John Barber, the respected urban affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail, described the "United Nations has declared . . ." idea as a "myth . . . which harmlessly stroked the civic ego."⁽⁸¹⁾ But there is more to it than that. The belief in the legend, and the palpable desire for it to be true, are symptomatic of a long-standing characteristic of Toronto and its citizens; namely, an abiding insecurity about their place within the urban world, an insecurity that fuels a desire to be loved and recognized by others, especially Americans. It was this sentiment that lay behind the unsuccessful push to gain global extravaganzas - World's Fairs and the Olympic Games - for Toronto in the 1980s. These were seen as the tools needed to put Toronto "on the map," and to gain for the city the much-coveted "world-class" status. Yet, as former Toronto Mayor John Sewell cogently observed in 1986, "insecurity [really lay] behind [Toronto's pursuit of a] world-class image." "We dream," he suggested, "of being known as the international city," and observed:

Toronto's leaders have a psychological problem of major proportions. They are desperately insecure about the city's status and image. They long for Toronto to be deemed part of the big leagues.⁽⁸²⁾

Celebrating Diversity

Torontonians and those who visit the place know that Ontario's capital probably has very few equals in terms of its complex demographic structure. The fact Toronto celebrates its multiculturalism, through almost countless festivals and other cultural events, is both highly symbolic and quite unusual among world cities. Royson James, the Toronto Star's urban affairs columnist, calls diversity "Toronto's best calling card." In fact, the headline chosen by the Toronto Star's editors for the first piece in a 1994 series on Urban Issues declared that multiculturalism was a "unifying force" in Toronto, with author Antoni Shelton observing: "one feature that makes Toronto unique and other cities green with envy is that our multiracial communities live cheek-to-cheek in relative harmony."⁽⁸³⁾

It is just that level of peaceful co-existence that led organizers to develop the Sahara Cup cricket matches, an annual series of five one-day matches between India and Pakistan held on a tree-ringed pitch at the Toronto Cricket, Skating, and Curling Club in a tranquil residential section of North York. These matches could not have been contested safely in either country because of past threats of violence, but they have been conducted almost without incident in Toronto since 1996 and were scheduled to continue each fall at least until the year 2001. Each match begins at 9:30 am Toronto time so that it can be shown live in prime time to huge, but separate, audiences in India and Pakistan. While the main concern of the viewers is the quality of the cricket, they have learned about Toronto in the process. As Haroon Siddiqui, cricket fan and editorial page editor emeritus at the Toronto Star observed on the eve of the 1998 match:

A TV audience of more than a billion in Asia, Africa, Australia, England and the Caribbean has heard that cosmopolitan, peaceful Canada is the perfect natural venue for two warring nations unable to host each other's teams on their own turfs, for fear of riots. . . .

There is much more to Toronto's multiculturalism than can be found in the cold, hard numbers that constitute census data. The city now has a global look and feel to it. Many things from street signs in foreign languages to the snatches of conversations you hear on the streets to the smell of exotic culinary delights being prepared, bespeak anything but a uni-dimensional city. As the Globe and Mail's John Barber observed: "every few blocks you get a different Toronto." Attesting to this multicultural reality, information brochures published by the City of Toronto, the Toronto Transit Commission, and other organizations usually come in a variety of linguistic versions. A 1989 publication, Your TTC: A User's Guide, for example, appeared in separate English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, Polish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, and Punjabi versions. Reflecting the city's cosmopolitan nature, a new, telephone-based interpretation and translation service was introduced in the middle of 1992 to allow the Commission to provide information in more than 140 languages. It was seen by Al Leach, then-Chief General Manager of the TTC, as an important step to ensure "members of all cultural and ethno-racial communities . . . feel comfortable with the TTC and believe it fully supports and recognizes their needs." Nor is such a service unusual. Starphone, the Toronto Star's computerized telephone information service, provides multicultural lines in Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Punjabi, while a similar system installed by the TTC in 2000 provides lines in Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian, French, Tamil, and Polish. Recently, several Toronto hospitals have become sensitized to the birthing customs of the city's different ethnic and religious groups, "melding cultural sensitivity with Western medicine for women who want to follow childbirth traditions."⁽⁸⁵⁾

Toronto's cultural diversity has long been recognized and promoted. The city's Urban Alliance on Race Relations dates from the mid-1970s, with its first employment equity policy approved in 1977. An official multiculturalism policy was adopted by the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in 1978 and multicultural and race relations committees were established by a number of area municipalities around the same time. Furthermore, in 1979, Toronto became the first Canadian municipality to officially designate February as Black History Month. In 1981, the City of Toronto became the first Canadian municipality to survey its workforce to determine the distribution of its employees who were women, visible minorities, aboriginals, and disabled. This survey was extended to the municipality's agencies, boards, and commissions in 1985. The Metro Toronto government established an employment equity policy in 1980, and conducted its first survey of employees in 1985. Both the City and Metro made progress in the equity-hiring area prior to their absorption into the new City of Toronto in 1998.⁽⁸⁶⁾

Multiculturalism has proven to be good for the local economy, attracting local residents and tourists alike to a variety of special celebrations. For more than two decades, multiculturalism has been one of Toronto's best tourist magnets, especially through the CHIN International Picnic at Exhibition Place, Caribana, and the annual week-long, multi-pavilion Metro International Caravan festivals. One study concluded that Caribana pumped an estimated $200 million into Toronto's economy each year by the mid-1990s, with the annual parade attracting spectators in the hundreds of thousands. In some years, the eight- or nine-day Caravan has drawn more visitors than the three-week long Canadian National Exhibition. While most of these festivals quite naturally focussed on single communities/cultures, the 1999 edition of the Chinese community's Toronto Lion Dance Festival, reputedly the largest of its kind in North America, placed a spotlight on Jewish and Black cultures, and several others maintain a multicultural focus (Metro International Caravan, Kensington Market Summer Festival, Global Roots Music Festival, Rhythms of the World Festival, and the Scarborough Culturefest). By 2000, the Toronto social calendar boasted more than four dozen ethnocultural festivals, parades, and related events each year, two-thirds of which had started since 1990, and more than half since the end of 1994 (Table 1). At the same time as these dynamic, new events were drawing large and varied crowds, Toronto's oldest, and historically most divisive, ethnic event, the annual Orange Parade, was said to be "fading quietly" into oblivion, with the 1998 version described by Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno as "our sad little Orange parade."⁽⁸⁷⁾

Table 1

Orange Parade 1822

Hadassah-Wizo Bazaar (Jewish community) 1925

Good Friday Passion Parade (Italian community) 1934

CHIN International Picnic (early July - CNE) 1966

Caribana (Caribbean Culture - early August) 1967

Metro International Caravan (Ethnic Pavilions - mid-June) 1969

Ratha Yatra Festival of Chariots (Hindu Community) 1971

Senhora de Pedra [Our Lady of the Rock] Parade (Portuguese community) 1973

Black History Month [February]¹ 1979

International Hispanic Fiesta² 1982

Semaine Francophone² 1982

Khalsa Parade (Sikh Community - part of Baisakhi Day festivities) 1984

Harriet Tubman Games (Track & Field - Black Community) 1988

St. Patrick's Day Parade (Reincarnation) 1988

AfroFest 1989

International Dragon Boat Race Festival 1989

Kensington Carnival Festival of Lights (Multi-ethnic - December) 1989

Desh Pardesh [Home Away From Home] Festival of South Asian Culture 1991

Earth Spirit Festival (Japanese and Native Cultures) 1991

Jewish Storytelling Festival 1992

Kuumba [Creativity] Festival (part of Black History Month)² 1992

Toronto International Pow Wow (at the SkyDome) 1992

Jewish Film Festival 1993

Krinos Foods Taste of the Danforth (Greektown BIA - food and music) 1994

Ashkenaz: Festival of New Yiddish Culture (biennial)² 1995

416 Graf Expo: A Celebration of Hip Hop Culture 1995

AfriCaribeat Festival² 1996

Celebrating African Identity (CELAFI) Festival 1996

Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival 1997

Caribbean Sunfest at Mel Lastman Square 1997

Chinese New Year Festival (after Vancouver festival - 1995) 1997

Festival of Caribbean Writers 1997

Kensington Market Summer Festival 1997

Northern Encounters (Nordic arts festival) 1997

Toronto Lion Dance Festival (Chinese community) 1997

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival 1997

Aboriginal Voices Festival of Music and Film² 1998

Cinefranco (Festival of French Films) 1998

Global Roots Music Festival (St. Lawrence Market) 1998

Hot & Spicy Food Festival² 1998

Ritmo y Color (Latin American Arts Festival)² 1998

Super Latin Fest (Mel Lastman Square) 1998

Toronto Fiesta (Music and arts festival - St. Clair and Dufferin area) 1998

Get Reel: Black Film Festival 1999

Rhythms of the World Festival (Global Culture)² 1999

Taste of Little Italy (College and Grace area - June) 1999

Toronto Italian Film Festival 1999

Diwali Festival Parade (Hindu community) 2000

ReelWorld Film Festival (Featuring films with a focus on ethnicity) 2000

Sabor Saudade (Pan-Portuguese Arts Festival)² 2000

Scarborough Culturefest (Milliken Park Community Centre) 2000

Notes: ¹ While first held in the 1960s, in 1979, the City of Toronto became the first Canadian municipality to officially recognize Black History Month in 1979.     

              ² Held at Harbourfront Centre

Some, however, would argue that even more media access in Toronto needs to be given to minority groups, especially in ownership roles. Two serious attempts to establish a black-owned urban/dance station on the FM dial were thwarted in the 1990s, with the station licences being awarded to a broadcaster offering new country music in 1990 for 92.5 FM and to the CBC for its Radio One service on 99.1 FM in 1997. While both decisions were controversial, the latter drew some half-dozen editorials in support of an urban/dance station and similar sentiments from many newspaper columnists. Happily, diversity on Toronto's radio dial was increased in 2000 when a licence to operate an urban/dance station on 93.5 FM was granted to Milestone Communications. At the same time Aboriginal Voices was given a licence to broadcast to Toronto's growing aboriginal community on 106.5 FM. These initiatives were greeted with joy in most parts of Toronto and the new stations are expected to be on the air by 2001.⁽⁸⁹⁾

At the end of 1998, Toronto's ethnic press numbered 157 publications, serving about forty different groups. Most of these appear weekly or monthly, but Toronto boasts daily papers in Chinese, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Spanish (Appendix 1). Moreover, Chinese editions of two popular magazines - Maclean's and Toronto Life - were launched in 1995, and in 2000 ChineseWorld Magazine, aimed at upscale members of the community began publication in suburban Markham. In all, the Greater Toronto Area accounted for 49.8 per cent of the 315 ethnic listings provided by the respected Bowdens Information Services. (This figure rises to 53.2 per cent if native peoples' publications, none of which is published in Toronto, are excluded from the total). Montreal and Vancouver, in contrast, account for just 13.0 per cent (41) and 10.2 per cent (32), respectively, of all such listings, barely half of the Toronto total. Nearly three-quarters of the offices of ethnic press organizations in the GTA were found within the City of Toronto, or the 416 area code.⁽⁹⁰⁾

In addition to the GTA's rich ethnic press, there was evidence of increased interest in multicultural news and issues in the mainstream press. By late 1995, the Globe and Mail had named its first multiculturalism reporter, Isabel Vincent, and the Toronto Star had appointed Elaine Carey as its first demographics reporter. In 1998, the latter paper entered into a formal financial and news exchange relationship with Sing Tao, Canada's largest Chinese-language daily, and also named Maureen Murray as its inaugural diversity reporter. Early in 1999, the Star launched a special, year-long "millennium project" entitled "Beyond 2000: Home to the World" that was intended to provide a "study of the ethnic and cultural mix that is Great Toronto" through a regular series of feature articles. Overall, the focus for the series was to be on three questions:

• Is Toronto working for everyone - or getting frayed at the edges?
• What challenges must the Greater Toronto Area confront as we head into the year 2000?
• How can we best equitably build on the strengths of successive waves of newcomers who bring many talents to the country?

In all, 68 articles were published as part of the "Beyond 2000" initiative, with almost 65 per cent of them taking up at least one full page. The Star was honoured in 2000 by the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement for the "Beyond 2000" series, which, according to CERIS, demonstrated "commitment to insightful, balanced, and sensitive coverage of immigration and diversity." More recently, the newspaper also was awarded the Canadian Association of Black Journalists' first Media Award for Excellence in Diversity for best demonstrating "the spirit and reality of Canada's cultural diversity in their journalism and for their integrity and innovation." Haroon Siddiqui, the paper's editorial page editor emeritus, was given the Order of Ontario in 2000 for his efforts to challenge readers to "rethink outmoded stereotypes of immigrants and minorities." Late in 2000, the Globe launched "New Life," a series of articles in which immigrants were asked to describe "the challenges and joys of making a new start in the Toronto region."⁽⁹¹⁾

While such changes and developments are welcome in the mainstream media, Toronto newsrooms do not yet reflect the city's diversity. Writing in 1998, journalism professor John Miller, a former employee of the Toronto Star, observed:

things have changed, but you don't have to look far to realize that our newspapers really haven't kept pace with the dramatic changes in society. In Toronto, Canada's most multicultural city where one in every three residents is a person of colour, the four competing daily newspapers employ only two staff columnists who are non-white: Royson James of the Star and Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail. There is no black sports columnist, no Asian business columnist, and no one on staff writing about lifestyles from a diverse perspective. The blind spots are glaring, even disturbing, and one wonders why, when circulation is declining, newspapers are not reaching out more aggressively to the fastest growing segments of their population. Why is race covered so negatively and stereotypically, and racism - the polite, silent Canadian variety - covered hardly at all? Why do the images seen in the pages of our newspapers fail to match the images of the people we see in the streets around us?

I have noticed that every Saturday for the past several months, you have included posters of Shania Twain, the Backstreet Boys, and the Spice Girls. I noticed that you have not put any Black performers in The Star for posters. . . . Black people like me would appreciate it if you had some rappers and R & B singers. I know that you can't put them all in the paper, but you could include some.⁽⁹²⁾

Any place that aspires to the title of the world's most multicultural city must be a locale characterized by harmony and a willingness to share power in all of its myriad forms. By most measures, Ontario's capital city has at least some room for improvement on both counts. Toronto has not been without some moments of racial discomfort. Early in May of 1992, hundreds of young people, black and white, left an anti-racism rally and rioted in the downtown area, smashing more than 100 shop windows along Yonge Street and looting stores as they surged northward. The following day, editors at the Toronto Sun succinctly captured the essence of the events on their front page: "UGLY: Toronto Loses Its Innocence." And the Maclean's cover for 18 May 1992 featured a picture of a young, black man over which was superimposed "Young, Black, and Angry: A Toronto Riot Spotlights a Season of Urban Tension." In a report on the riots to Premier of Ontario Bob Rae, former Ontario NDP leader and former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations Stephen Lewis concluded both that Toronto had a problem of "anti-Black racism" and "racism is pervasive," though not everyone totally agreed with his theoretical framework, methodologies, or findings. While not denying that a problem existed, for this was but the latest in a series of reports on racism in Toronto, a scathing editorial in the Globe and Mail called the rigour of the Lewis report into some question. This criticism was not without some justification, for Lewis had been given only one month to investigate the situation and report to the Premier. Nevertheless, the city that had long, and perhaps too smugly, prided itself on its rich and harmonious racial mix suddenly looked very vulnerable to some of the worst pitfalls of life as lived in large US cities. No one should have been surprised by this turn of events. Months before the riots, a report for the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority by a Toronto research organization called the Reference Group suggested that Blacks made up 50 to 70 per cent of the population in the 10 high-rise developments studied and concluded that they were living in "near-ghettos." It is worth remembering as well Toronto had been warned in the mid-1970s not to be smug about racism. The seeds of the problem already were visible according to Charles Hightower, a Black Chicagoan who was editor of the United Methodist weekly newspaper Newscope. With a Black population then approaching 150,000, Hightower suggested that Metro Toronto was "poised at the crossroads on the road to racial harmony or holocaust." For most Torontonians, the 1992 Yonge Street riot was nothing like a holocaust, but it was a troubling incident nonetheless.⁽⁹³⁾

While some business leaders speculated that "one violent night" would not hurt Toronto's tourism industry, others felt the scars of the riot would be difficult to heal, and the city's troubles did make headlines around the world, getting at least some media coverage in New York, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, and South Africa. It was also the subject of an award-winning play, Riot, by the young Toronto playwright Andrew Moodie, which was the hit of the 1995-96 season at the Factory Theatre. According to Toronto Star theatre critic Vit Wagner, Riot offered audience members:

a frank, conversationally profane and frequently hilarious, slice-of-life take on community and racism in contemporary Toronto. It is set in May, 1992, against a backdrop of racial tension and rioting sparked by the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers charged with the brutal beating of Rodney King.

brought members of [Toronto's] very diverse [African Canadian] group together as few issues have been able to do. . . . The power symbolized by the protest and the empowerment it afforded the African Canadian community leads us to a new phase in the continuing struggle against racism. . . . The denunciation of this production . . . sends out an important signal to other mainstream institutions that the voices of African Canadians and other people of color no longer can be ignored.⁽⁹⁵⁾

It wasn't the first or even the hundredth time this had happened in Toronto. Blacks, Natives, and Orientals report that they are regularly stopped by the police and have to prove that they are law-abiding citizens just to continue walking along the street or driving to work. All that set Drummond apart was that he could rally some media outrage.

The 1993 trial of Black activist Dudley Laws, a founder of the Black Action Defence Committee, on charges of smuggling immigrants into Canada and the US was later ruled to have been invalid for a number of reasons. One of these was a decision by the trial judge, Mr. Justice Arthur Whealey, to exclude from the courtroom supporters of the accused who were wearing religious headcoverings. The headwear in question was a kufi, a traditional cap worn as a Muslim sign of piety and respect. Whealey's decision served to strengthen suspicions about a lack of fair treatment for minorities by the criminal justice system. Many Blacks already suspected the Toronto Police laid the charges against Laws because of his outspoken criticism against police shootings. Late in 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada decided not to hear the case involving the expulsion of those wearing kufis at the 1993 trial of Dudley Laws, thus bringing the matter to a close.⁽⁹⁷⁾

In the summer of 1993, problems emerged at the Scarborough Town Centre shopping mall between security staff and Filipino teenagers. Some of the teens were banned from the mall, and charges of racism were filed with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Protest marches were held and it took several months before the problems were resolved. Meanwhile, in the western suburb of Etobicoke, reports surfaced in 1994 and 1995 of both the mis-treatment of Somalis in a condominium complex of six high-rise buildings on Dixon Road and racial tensions between young Somalis and Black and East Indian students at Kipling Collegiate Institute. Happily, the problems at that school at least, seem to have been resolved, though violence did erupt between Sri Lankan and Punjabi students at another Etobicoke school - North Albion Collegiate - in 1997.⁽⁹⁸⁾

Finally, in the middle of 1995, Carole Bell, the Deputy-Mayor of Markham made a series of comments about demographic changes in her municipality that enraged members of the Chinese community. In essence, Bell opined that multiculturalism was a strength and a weakness in a community. Her remarks suggested parts of Markham had become too Chinese, and these changes were forcing long-time residents to move away. She also objected to the amount of Chinese retail activity, in the form of so-called Asian theme malls, that had emerged or were about to be developed in the community. Bell steadfastly refused to apologize for her remarks, even though they were condemned by a dozen GTA Mayors and a variety of organizations and agencies, including the National Congress of Chinese Canadians and B'nai B'rith Canada. Furthermore, the members of Markham's race relations committee voted to resign over Bell's comments. Nevertheless, members of Markham Council, led by Mayor Don Cousens, and some citizens rallied to her support, while Bell claimed she was merely voicing the concerns of her constituents. The entire episode was keenly followed by the local and national media, and by the global Chinese press. It was not defused until late September when Markham Council appointed an advisory committee to examine issues of concern to the Chinese community. This was hardly Markham's finest hour. As one early editorial in the Toronto Star suggested:

By elevating anti-Chinese comments to official status and drawing all the wrong conclusions from it, Markham's Deputy Mayor Carole Bell has done a great disservice. . . . If Markham is getting too many ugly malls, the issue is one of aesthetics and zoning, not ethnicity. Making it into one sows the seeds of dissension and violates the fundamental tenets of the democratic civil society with which we are blessed.⁽⁹⁹⁾

Other surveys, however, have produced more balanced findings. In 1985, an extensive survey for the Toronto Star involving interviews with about 200 randomly-selected members of each of seven groups - Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, East Indian/Pakistani, Jewish, Black, and Anglo Saxon - found respondents to be reasonably satisfied with most aspects of their life in Toronto. All groups were happy with their access to health care and with the quality of TTC service and recreational facilities, and every group was dissatisfied with the availability of rental accommodation in Metro Toronto. Several groups, however, expressed concerns about life in Toronto. When asked if their ethnic group has less opportunity than other Canadians, 61 per cent of East Indian/Pakistani, 57 per cent of Chinese, and 48 per cent of West Indian/Black respondents replied in the affirmative. Prejudice/discrimination was seen as the most pressing problem for 38 per cent of East Indian/Pakistani, 42 per cent of West Indian/Black, and 44 per cent of Jewish respondents. Author Olivia Ward concluded: "our multiculturalism isn't perfect but it works."⁽¹⁰¹⁾

A similar survey conducted for the same newspaper in 1999 examined the attitudes of 150 members of each of eight major ethnic groups - Italian, Portuguese, Caribbean and African Blacks, Chinese, Hispanic, South Asian, Filipino, and West Asian/Arab, along with a random sample of 402 Torontonians from all backgrounds. At least one-fifth of the members of each group expressed feelings that there was prejudice against their community and at least one-tenth from each group had faced discrimination in finding a job. On the other hand, at least 89 per cent of the members of each group were either somewhat satisfied or very satisfied with life in Toronto, and at least 87 per cent in each case felt their children had good opportunities in Toronto. Nevertheless, discrimination has been the experience of too many Toronto citizens. According to the 1999 survey, respondents personally experienced discrimination of some form at the following rates: Chinese - 37 per cent, Filipino - 40 per cent, Hispanic - 37 per cent, and Black - 60 per cent, compared with a 29 per cent rate for the random sample of Torontonians. Only about 40 per cent of Black respondents felt their community had been fairly treated by police and the courts, by far the lowest score on this measure. The next lowest rating was for the Hispanic group, where 59 per cent claimed to have been fairly treated by police and 65 per cent so treated by the courts. Almost half of the South Asian, Filipino, and Hispanic respondents, and 64 per cent of Chinese and 68 per cent of Black participants felt there was prejudice against their community in Toronto. Just 49 per cent of South Asians and 32 per cent of Blacks felt their communities had been fairly treated by the media. Racism was expressed as a concern by 71 per cent of Black respondents, a figure described by the Star's polling company, Goldfarb and Associates, as "alarming." On the matter of power sharing, respondents were asked to consider the following question: have the members of your group been given equal access in being named to boards and commissions. The results were not particularly encouraging. While 77 per cent of Italians, 63 per cent of Portuguese, and 50 per cent of Chinese participants responded in the affirmative, the figures were lower for other groups - 43 per cent for South Asians and 37 per cent for Hispanics.⁽¹⁰²⁾

A 1998 survey of 827 randomly-selected Torontonians conducted by York University's Institute for Social Research found "no statistically significant differences in the unhappiness of Whites and non-Whites, the young and the old, and males and females." The study, however, did uncover that the level of happiness increased with English proficiency, underscoring the problems encountered by many upon arrival in Toronto. "World-class" Toronto, apparently, failed "to make everybody smile," especially many well-educated immigrants who experienced difficulty entering the professions in their new home city. Overall, the results of these surveys seemed to indicate "the `City That Works' could be even better."⁽¹⁰³⁾

When the results of its first-ever Toronto Survey were published in Toronto Life early in 1996, the importance of Toronto's demographic mix emerged in at least two places. Respondents were asked to indicate reasons why Toronto would be a better place to live in 10 years, and the second most popular response, after an economic upswing and job creation, was "racial tolerance improving." And "the city's ethnic and cultural diversity" was the sixth most popular response when people were asked to name the one thing about Toronto they liked the most. As John Barber, the Globe and Mail's urban affairs columnist, recently observed:

. . . Torontonians are proud of the diversity of their city. From Kensington to Thornhill, there are few ethnically exclusive neighborhoods anywhere in the city. Our diversity unites us, and it persists despite powerful homogenizing forces.

the people of Toronto appreciate the enormous contribution that new immigrants bring to the cultural vitality of the City, and their importance to Toronto's future economic prosperity. Toronto's diversity is recognized as one of the City's greatest assets.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

Diversity, then, is a key and cherished characteristic of contemporary Toronto for most citizens. It is not at all surprising that one of the first international speeches given by Mel Lastman, first mayor of the unified City of Toronto, took the title "Toronto: Diversity Is Our Strength," a sentiment that later would be captured in the official motto for the new City of Toronto: "Diversity - Our Strength."⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ As the late Northrop Frye, the renowned Toronto-based literary critic and, according to Maclean's magazine, the second most important Canadian of all time (after only former Governor-General Georges Vanier), suggested in the penultimate paragraph of the final formal address he delivered at the University of Toronto in the Fall of 1990:

Canada has now become cosmopolitan to a degree that would have been incomprehensible 50 years ago. If Toronto is a world-class city, it is not because it bids for the Olympics or builds follies like the SkyDome, but because of the tolerated variety of the people in its streets.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾

Toronto is a city that once took itself so seriously that no one else could. . . . It was the kind of place no one called Fun City, not even as a joke. Citizens sneaked their liquor home under their coats and World War II had been over for two years before Toronto got its first cocktail lounge. In those days, Sunday sports and movies were banned and so was just about everything else. Fortunately, there is hardly a vestige of this Toronto left today. Almost over night it has entered the big league of tourist cities.

What happened? The greatest postwar immigration boom to hit any city on this continent. More than a million newcomers arrived, 600,000 of them from Europe alone, and they finally got it across to Tory Toronto that having fun was not necessarily associated with sin.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾

I really believe Toronto has the opportunity to make the best hip-hop in the world: there's such a richness of cultures we could harness. We could dominate internationally because of that. For a kid living in Toronto, there's really no ghettoes here, so there's nothing holding you down. The only thing holding you back is yourself.

It really is time to bury the "United Nations has declared . . ." urban legend once and for all. Multiculturalism has enriched the life of Toronto on many levels, as anyone who has lived in the city for more than a few months must realize. Toronto's diversity has improved the quality of life in the city; some even have suggested it saved the inner city from the ravages of developers. As social historian Robert Harney argued in 1981:

There are now in downtown Toronto, along with vestiges of pre-war ethnic settlements, four new major ethnic neighbourhoods, the Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek, and they will inform the character of the city for the future. These and earlier middle European groups, especially the Hungarian, have provided the ethnic population density, the community and neighbourhood sense, and the commitment to home ownership which has saved postwar Toronto as a residential city. . . . Toronto remains a city of neighbourhoods because it is a city of ethnic communities. One of the greatest contributions of ethnicity to Toronto is in its maintaining the human scale of the cityscape. The reformers and middle class who have returned to colonize the inner city, who live next to neighbours who paint their houses pastel while they sandblast theirs to natural colour, would do well to remember that it is their neighbours who saved the city from miles of barren concrete and iron.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

And Toronto's rich ethnic mix has become well known, even in medical and sporting circles. Early in 1996, former major league baseball star Rod Carew began a desperate search for a suitable bone-marrow donor for his 18-year-old daughter Michelle, who was battling leukemia. The search was made especially difficult because of Michelle's ethnic background - a Panamanian and West Indian father and a Ukrainian-Jewish mother. Given its ethnic diversity, Rod Carew felt "it makes a lot of sense to look at Toronto," and he included the city in his search.⁽¹¹¹⁾

Ethnicity, however, is an inherited trait. Others have actively sought to immerse themselves in different cultures. When students at Oakwood Collegiate, a highly cosmopolitan high school in Toronto's west end, decided to form an African dance troupe in the Fall of 1995, more than half of the participants were not from the Black community. The multiracial ensemble performed proudly and to considerable acclaim during Toronto's celebration of Black History Month in February of 1996. Nor is this level of diversity restricted to the inner city or to schools. In 1998, people from 19 different ethnic groups in the Rexdale area came together to form the Association of Concerned Citizens of Etobicoke North to deal with common issues such as integration, school bullying, and workplace exploitation. Kipling Collegiate Institute, which is located near Pearson International Airport, counted students from some 57 countries among the members of its student body of 750 in 1995, with 43 per cent enrolled in English as a Second Language programs. Students from all backgrounds banded together to deal with problems of racism. T.L. Kennedy Secondary School in suburban Peel Region housed students from more than 65 countries in 1996; and its baseball team, the Kougars, boasted 12 different nationalities among its 18 players, including participants from such relative baseball wastelands as Nigeria and Sri Lanka. It has been common to view Canadian society as a cultural mosaic, in contrast to the melting pot found in the United States. Neither myth, of course, is entirely true; but the most apt metaphor for Toronto may well be that of a slowly-stirred mixing bowl.⁽¹¹²⁾

Civic leaders, however, will need much more foresight if these opportunities are to be fully exploited. For example, the decisions to grant exclusive contracts to an American multinational firm, McDonald's, to provide food at such important institutions as the Metropolitan Toronto Zoo and the SkyDome did nothing to enhance Toronto's reputation as an important multicultural city in the minds of tourists and citizens alike. Such decisions simply represent lost opportunities to establish a positive and distinctive image for Toronto. As Cynthia Wine, restaurant critic for the Toronto Star, observed at the start of the 1996 Major League Baseball season:

Toronto has some of the best bun food on the continent. Our ethnic diversity gives us steamy hot Italian veal sandwiches and Greek souvlaki with fat chunks of meat and rich garlic sauce. There's masala dosai, the huge East India crepe stuffed with curried potatoes from Gerrard St. E., or the juicy mile-high pea meal bacon sandwiches from St. Lawrence Market. But at [the] SkyDome, where we and the world go to see our best, we get McDonald's, the corporate food of America. Close your eyes and you could be eating a Big Mac in Cincinnati . . . . Other stadiums offer food that reflects the populations of their home cities. New York's Yankee Stadium offers knishes. . . . Instead of corporate souvlaki and mystery meat at our stadium, we should have a choice of Toronto's excellent sandwiches. . . . Why can't we have our own food?

Some Distance Yet to Travel

Ultimately, the city's reputation on the world stage will be determined by facts, achievements, and the imaginative promotion of Toronto's multicultural character and overall quality of life, and not by internally-fabricated urban legends. Only then, when Torontonians learn to fully appreciate the wonderful complexity of their city without a nod of approval from others, will Toronto be able to claim a place near the pinnacle of the urban hierarchy. And the mark of that achievement undoubtedly will be measured by the degree to which Toronto's diverse residents participate in the life of their city and its institutions, itself a recognition of their acceptance as Torontonians.

One small indicator of the change afoot in Toronto society was the publication in the July 1997 issue of Toronto Life of an extensive article on "Who's Who in the Chinese Community."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ The true test of what the Globe and Mail's John Barber has called the "remarkable [multicultural] experiment" now playing in Toronto, however, will lie in the extent to which power, in all of its myriad urban forms, is shared by its residents. In fact, Royson James, the Toronto Star's urban affairs columnist, recently suggested that a key indicator of Toronto's success in the near future might well rest in the way in which a single question is handled: "Is this diverse cosmopolitan city - by its actions in providing opportunity, a sense of openness, and access to good jobs and the halls of power - creating the grid for a future of strife or one of continued prosperity?"⁽¹¹⁵⁾

Should the latter outcome occur, then the United Nations, or one of its agencies, may well want to bestow an honour of some sort on Toronto; but that kind of award-deserving-level of maturity and sophistication has not yet been realized. For example, the annual Caribana festival, described by a 1996 Metropolitan Toronto Task Force as "A Jewel Worth Polishing," has not, in the view of many members of Toronto's growing Black community, received the respect it deserves. In their view, government and corporate support, when given at all, seems to have been provided reluctantly, even grudgingly, with too few of the economic benefits generated by the festival returning to the community. To be sure, Caribana needs to be better organized. With some justification, journalist Ali Sharrif recently described it as being "endlessly mismanaged." But it also needs more support from the business sector and the broader community, neither of which could imagine a Toronto summer without Caribana.⁽¹¹⁶⁾

In fact, the 1998 festival opened with a much greater sense of optimism because of both the appointment of Hassan Jaffer, a widely-respected Bay Street insolvency expert, as its new CEO and the promise of federal funding in the form of annual $100,000 Heritage Canada grants, though the Globe's political columnist John Ibitson wondered: "how much do you think it would spend if Caribana were centred in Montreal?" The first of these grants was received in time for the 1998 festival, which was one of the most successful ever, allowing the organizers to cut the festival's accumulated debt by more than half to around $495,000. Some, however, complained about the festival's increasing commercialization, its apparent evolution towards becoming a more- multicultural and less-Caribbean event, and Jaffer's heritage - Tanzanian-born and not Black. So, the future of Caribana looked better, but its problems were a long way from being resolved to the satisfaction of all interested parties. Jaffer, in fact, surprised many when he resigned after just eight months in March of 1999, and was quickly replaced by a young Black woman, Michelle Jones, a Montreal native who had been a culture and education program co-ordinator with the Canadian Embassy in Washington. For her, the priorities were familiar ones: to restore the festival's credibility and to increase its corporate sponsorship. Within a year, she, too, had been replaced. Her contract was not renewed by the Caribbean Cultural Committee, and Ken Jeffers, a long-time manager with the City of Toronto, took over when he was elected chair of the CCC. While the 2000 edition of Caribana was its usual artistic success, the festival remained "woefully underfunded," bereft of corporate sponsors, in search of respect, and subject to "games" within the organizing committee, and the Caribbean Cultural Committee was rated as the worst organization in the year 2000 by the editor of The Caribbean Camera, who opined:

Caribana has been sitting on a gold mine for three decades, with a potential to make millions and millions for re-investment in the community. But instead it drives away local talent, wastes public money, and squanders enormous goodwill.

At times, even today, Toronto's institutions and some citizens can appear to be quite churlish in the face of certain ethnocultural activities. In 1998, Toronto police threatened to crack down on the flag-waving celebrations that usually follow World Cup soccer games. Fortunately, the police gave up on their plan in the face of both public sentiment and the sheer hopelessness of their task. And some ordinary citizens have been known to object to such flag-waving as unpatriotic. Others, however, see in such views a convenient "cloak for racism." As Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star observed, it is not uncommon for Canadians living in the US to cheer for Canadian-based National Hockey League teams, especially the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens, and against their hometown teams. Seldom is such behaviour treated as unpatriotic.⁽¹¹⁸⁾

Toronto's famed tolerance invariably is put to the test whenever the question of renaming a street rises to the fore. In 1993, Mississauga City Council, by a vote of 8 to 1, rejected a proposal to rename a "virtually undeveloped" portion of the Second Line, between Eglinton Avenue and Britannia Road, after the Indian pacifist and humanitarian Mohandas Gandhi. In spite of a promise to name a new street after Gandhi, at the time of writing, no such thoroughfare existed in Mississauga or anywhere else in the Greater Toronto Area. The same Council also refused to name a portion of Airport Road after Indian freedom fighter Veer Shaheed Bhagat Singhji. Such decisions cannot be viewed as mere aversions to the memorialization of foreign dignitaries. Canada's first superhighway, the Queen Elizabeth Way, was named in 1939 after the wife of King George VI, the current Queen Mother. One of the main streets in Mississauga is Winston Churchill Boulevard, and the former British Prime Minister is also remembered in Scarborough's Winston Churchill Drive. Nor have such gestures been used only to recall Canada's ties to Great Britain. Former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been memorialized in Roosevelt Avenue (Ajax), Roosevelt Drive (Richmond Hill), and two Roosevelt Roads (Mississauga and East York). Meanwhile, to honour the 1992 World Series victory, Toronto City Council voted to rename part of Peter Street as Blue Jays Way, and later voted to extend the new name farther to the north so that hockey star Wayne Gretzky's restaurant could take as its address 99 Blue Jays Way.⁽¹¹⁹⁾

By their very nature, street renamings are invariably controversial. Even in tolerant Toronto, they can sometimes bring to the surface long-standing animosities. A 1998 proposal to rename a small portion of William Morgan Drive in East York as Patriarch Bartholomew Way, in honour of the visit to Toronto of the Greek Orthodox Christian leader, met with opposition from members of Toronto's Macedonian community. Few should have been surprised by this dispute, for there is a long-standing history of ill-will between these two groups in Toronto. Late in 1992, a brawl broke out between members of the two groups over the right to call themselves Macedonians during a flag-raising ceremony at Mel Lastman Square. Lastman, then Mayor of North York, was kicked and punched during the melee, and some spoke of the need for a ban on the raising of "ethnic flags" on municipal property, except during official visits by dignitaries from foreign countries.⁽¹²⁰⁾

And, before Torontonians step forward to receive any multiculturalism awards, they should remember their city is home to Ernst Zundel, one of the world's most infamous Holocaust deniers. Toronto streets recently have served as battlefields between neo-Nazis and anti-racist groups, and between rival gangs, with Toronto described as a "ripe market" for such organizations. Immigrants have suffered severe beatings at the hands of neo-Nazis in entirely unprovoked attacks. And hate crimes have been on the increase in the area (by 22 per cent in the City of Toronto in 1998, and by a further 28 per cent in 1999, the fourth consecutive annual increase), with Muslims, Sikhs, and Roma as new targets, though such cases have been poorly covered in the press according to Don Sellar, ombud at the Toronto Star. Old hatreds also remain visible from time to time. Swastikas are still applied to Toronto synagogues periodically, and both Jewish and Roman Catholic cemeteries have been vandalized. In 1999 two elderly, Jewish men were beaten with a pipe for no apparent reason near a Bathurst Street synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Nor have politicians always displayed leadership on such matters. In 1997, Gordon Chong, a member of Metro Council, was forced to apologize to his fellow politicians for remarks made during an interview with a newspaper reporter in which he categorized recent Gypsy refugees from Europe as "pimps and criminals."⁽¹²¹⁾

Youth bear an often heavy burden in the new Toronto. Many young, immigrant Torontonians still search for "racial peace" in their new environment, making "new worlds out of their parents' old ways," while many agonize over pressures created by the need to balance their "heritage with Canadian culture." Sadly, some recent initiatives have spawned friction between communities. When a branch of the US-based Nation of Islam set up its first mosque in Toronto in the summer of 1998, controversy erupted over allegedly anti-Semitic remarks by its pastor, charges that church members denied. Recently, and quite surprisingly given the importance of tourism to the Toronto economy, complaints have surfaced about the lack of information and services available to visitors in languages other than English.⁽¹²²⁾

Any residual smugness about the equality of life in Toronto received a significant jolt in the spring of 2000 with the release of four reports into the immigrant and visible minority experience in Toronto. One study based on a survey of more than twelve hundred white, Black, and Chinese adults, by Scot Wortley of the U of T and Gail Kellough of York University, concluded Blacks were much more likely to be stopped, questioned, and searched by police than whites or Asians. The study also identified race-based differences in the treatment of individuals by the courts. Blacks, for example, were 1.6 times more likely than the members of other races to be held without bail.⁽¹²³⁾

The second report, by Edward Harvey and Kathleen Reil of the U of T, examined changes in unemployment rates, employment income, and the per cent of families living below the poverty line for visible minorities and non-visible minorities. On every measure for the Toronto area, the visible minorities fared more poorly. For example, whereas the unemployment rate fell for non-visible minorities from 11.7 per cent to 7.6 per cent between 1991 and 1996, it actually rose for visible minorities from 13.1 per cent to 13.4 per cent over the same period. According to the study, average employment income figures for visible minorities averaged $24,606, compared to $33,600 for non-visible minorities. Incomes for visible minorities increased by just 3.9 per cent between 1991 and 1996, compared to an increase of 20.2 per cent for non-visible minorities.⁽¹²⁴⁾

The third report, by Frances Henry and Carol Tator of York University, examined the degree of racial bias within Canada's English print media. It pointed to the continuing presence of racist statements in the mainstream press, the under-representation of people of colour in the media, and an ongoing tendency to misrepresent and stereotype them. A subsequent study by the Canadian Islamic Congress identified the National Post as the worst and the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail as the best in terms of their coverage of Islamic issues.⁽¹²⁵⁾

Finally, the spring of 2000 saw the release of a detailed study of the conditions of the 89 ethno-racial groups with at least 2,500 members in City of Toronto. This study, authored by Michael Ornstein of York University, was commissioned by the Access and Equity Unit of the City of Toronto and prepared by the Institute for Social Research at York. Based upon special tabulations of the 1996 Census results, this study uncovered "enormous ethno-racial variation" on a variety of socio-economic dimensions such as income, employment rates, education, and rates of poverty, with the differences almost all tied to race. For example, the study found 14.4 per cent of European-background families living in poverty. The figures for other groups were - East and Southeast Asian and Pacific, 29.6 per cent; Aboriginal, 32.1 per cent; South Asian, 34.6 per cent; Latin American, 41.4 per cent; African, Black, and Caribbean, 44.6 per cent; and Arab and West Asian, 45.2 per cent. More than half of the families from the following groups lived in poverty according the 1996 census: Ethiopian, Ghanaian, Somali, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Tamil, Afghan, Iranian, and Central American. While perfect comparisons were not possible because of changes in the way things were measured and recorded, the plight of immigrants, especially those from visible minorities, seemed to worsen on many dimensions between 1991 and 1996. More groups were disadvantaged in the latter year than in the former on most measures, and the proportion regarded as disadvantaged often rose. For example, in 1991 some 20 groups were identified as being at a significant disadvantage or worse on the measure of the proportion of poor families in the group. The minimum proportion for inclusion as significantly disadvantaged in that year was 30 per cent. In 1996, 19 groups were identified as significantly disadvantaged or worse, with the minimum proportion of such families now set at 40 per cent. As Share editor Arnold Auguste observed shortly after the release of the report:

while our city and province attempt to convince the world that Toronto is indeed a world class city, large numbers of people from around the world are experiencing just the opposite here. Soon our dirty little secret will get out⁽¹²⁶⁾

But the problems go well beyond the confines of Toronto's police force. Statistics released in the summer of 1998 seemed to suggested that Jamaicans were being targeted for deportation by the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration. Of the 355 people deported from Ontario since mid-1995, 138 were sent back to Jamaica, with Trinidad in second place as a destination at 22 deportations. This trend continued during 1999, when 310 people were deported to Jamaica from the GTA, with the next most significant destinations including Hungary (135), Grenada (73), Trinidad and Tobago (62), Mexico (53), and India (50). Only 22 people were deported to the United States from the GTA in 1999. Some have even begun to speak of a "racialization" of crime among certain segments of Toronto society - an assumption that violent crimes are the work of Blacks and other immigrants. This was clearly the case in the aftermath of the tragic stabbing death of Toronto police officer William Hancox in the summer of 1998. According to representatives of the African Canadian Legal Clinic, callers to radio and television phone-in shows ". . . judging by the area where the act took place [Scarborough] and the brutal nature of the crime, jumped to the conclusion that the killing must have been committed by an immigrant, and specifically by a Black man." Two white women, in fact, were subsequently charged with the crime. A poster in the Toronto subway system used by the Toronto Police Association during the 1999 Provincial election was widely viewed as stereotyping young, Latin American males as criminals. In spite of requests to do so, officials with the Police Association refused to apologize for the image portrayed in the poster, even though members of Toronto's Hispanic community were said to be "deeply hurt" by it. About a year later, the newly formed Latin American Coalition Against Racism countered with its own "Racism Is A Crime" posters.⁽¹²⁸⁾

In the face of such racist attitudes, it is no wonder that some communities have begun to turn inward for strength, support, and self-esteem. Since 1992, a Black Prom has been staged for high school graduates from the community, and there has even been talk of the need to established black-focussed schools to better acquaint students with their history and place in Canadian society. Many complaints about the education system have been raised, and some progress has been made. The insistence by Black parents in the late 1980s that their children not be "streamed" into dead-end educational programs was a firm step in the right direction which led to changes in the Ontario high school curriculum, most notably, the "de-streaming" of grade nine. Former Toronto Mayor John Sewell shares these concerns. In a 1994 television interview he warned fellow citizens:

It's clear that the Black community is getting isolated from the mainstream in Toronto. That's a really significant problem for any community - to opt out or to feel it's being pushed out. What do we do to start strengthening our links there and pulling people back together? ⁽¹²⁹⁾

In contrast, fewer than 5 per cent of the firefighters in the City of Toronto in 1997 were from minority groups, and the organization was seen to be resisting changes to its hiring practices. At the TTC, minorities made up just 12 per cent of the workforce in 1991, a figure that had improved to just 14 per cent by 1993. Some, like the Toronto Star's Ali Sharrif, and City Councillor and for