Toronto personified: Plain, simple, uniformed, rather generic. She would have a conservative clothing style, probably flannel, wool and sensible shoes. But underneath a dour surface, there is a certain resilience and the capacity to evolve over time. She possesses a personality not entirely averse to new experiences.The Globe and Mail
Brian Gable is The Globe and Mail’s former editorial cartoonist. His new book is Toronto: A Sketchy History, from which the following essay and cartoons are excerpted.
I first encountered the city of Toronto when I arrived there as a university student in 1970. Coming from Saskatoon, at that time a city of roughly 125,000, the immensity of Toronto was impressive. The opportunities to attend galleries and concerts, the variety of neighbourhoods, the architecture – it was all on a significantly larger scale than I was accustomed to.
What came as a surprise was how blasé most Torontonians then seemed to feel about their metropolis. My enthusiasm stood in stark contrast to their indifference to and outright dismissal of the city’s charms. Over the next half century, much of that indifference has faded and many citizens are now more likely to express occasional positive feelings about the place, or at least acknowledge that the city has changed for the better in some ways.
Working as an editorial cartoonist for more than four decades, I quickly became aware that this country, as well as its largest city, have been reluctant to talk about themselves. Unlike our neighbour to the south we have shied away from creating an underlying national “myth” that defines the existence of this nation and its culture. There is a glaring absence of symbols, other than the industrious beaver and our prodigious quantities of maple syrup, that we use to help define ourselves. Toronto is no exception to this unexplored self-image.
Throughout my cartooning career I used established images such as Uncle Sam, Britannia, the Russian bear and a range of other symbols to represent the countries of the world. One day, after sending off my daily cartoon, I decided to see if I could create an icon or a symbol that could represent the city I had lived in for the majority of my life. What would Toronto’s icon look like? The closest I could come up with was the image of a somewhat dour-looking woman who eschewed excitement and glamour and devoted herself to a gray life of discipline, virtue and toil – characteristics that create an aura of stability, if not ebullience. Industrious, but not overly endearing.
A glance at its burgeoning skyline suggests that Toronto continues to draw investors and citizens who appear to feel optimistic about its potential for continued stability and growth, even if the city itself lacks an atmosphere of adventure and exhilaration. It may no longer be “a kind of New York run by the Swiss,” as Peter Ustinov suggested back in the 1980s, but it retains a sense of growth and potential. My intuition suggests that Toronto’s ability to adapt to the ever-growing world diaspora and welcome its new arrivals will be among its greatest assets in the future.
The question remains: Will Toronto be able to meet its increasingly complex challenges?
The Globe and Mail journalist and art critic John Bentley Mayes wrote in 1986 that he feared this city could remain a pedestrian second-tier metropolis, a “Cleveland in rhinestone drag.”
It’s possible. But I hope he was wrong.
Toronto’s ability to absorb successive waves of new arrivals may turn out to be one of the city’s most positive virtues.The Globe and Mail
Sunset over Lake Ontario.The Globe and Mail
Here today … condo tomorrow.BRIAN GABLE