The age-old debate: Toronto versus Ottawa

In an article published Sunday titled "Bright Lights, Declining City", Randall Denley of the Ottawa Citizen took a look at how Toronto is starting to, well, suck:

The city we love to hate is on a losing streak, but don't feel smug
Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen

What's gone wrong with Toronto? Our biggest metropolis is on a remarkable losing streak. Being shut out of the federal cabinet is just the latest blow for a city that's already struggling with a tourism slump, a $532-million shortfall in its municipal budget, gun violence and a general loss of direction. Not to mention the sorry state of the Leafs.

Big, brash, boastful Toronto has been reduced to begging for help while people in Ottawa have two major federal cabinet ministers and a city that's safe and functional, something like a balanced budget and a modestly rebounding technology industry. The Senators are crappy, but not compared to the Leafs.

Sitting in Ottawa, it's easy to feel smug about all of this, until one considers that Toronto is still Canada's most significant city and its failure is bad news, not just for Torontonians, but for the rest of us, too.

Not electing a single Conservative MP is merely a symptom of how out of step Toronto is with most of the rest of the country. Toronto is so anti-Conservative that Prime Minister Stephen Harper couldn't even dredge up a turncoat or a senator to represent it.

Not having a cabinet minister really only matters if you think of them as special pleaders looking for cash for their city. Unfortunately, that seems to be how Toronto views the world. Former prime minister Paul Martin was supposed to deliver big bucks through his new deal for cities, but it wasn't nearly enough. Now, Toronto is counting on the provincial government to make up most of the city budget shortfall, as it has in recent years. Toronto does need more money, but it will be a tough sell. When Toronto pleads for help, it's about as appealing as a street beggar in a three-piece suit.

A drop in American tourism is hurting Toronto and officials there are trying to blame it on Canada's outdated image of offering nothing but "moose, Mounties and mountains." And yet more Americans visited Toronto in 2000 than last year, and it surely wasn't for the moose or the mountains.

Maybe the word is out that Toronto is, in fact, dreadfully boring. Its major art gallery and museum are getting long overdue renovations, but the theatre scene is at a low ebb. The Blue Jays, Leafs and Raptors don't exactly constitute a tourist attraction.

Torontonians might like their city, but to an outsider it just seems like a big cold place with a lot of tall buildings and long traffic jams. What's even remotely exciting about Toronto?

Cities that you want to visit have some kind of image that you can define in a word or two. Paris has romance and culture. London has history and theatre. New York has a unique energy. New Orleans was a premier party town, before the flood. Toronto had an image of money and power. Maybe not a tourism draw and now not too accurate, either.

What is the central idea, what is Toronto about? The city that so recently seemed to define how a big city could work has degenerated into a soul-destroying urban sprawl that is chewing up most of southern Ontario. Toronto is a city that is not so much too big in population, but too big in area. People endure daily commutes that are madness by Ottawa standards. The city's transit system has always made its density work, but it, too, is now being overwhelmed. Ridership is increasing but the city can't afford the extra buses and subway trains to meet the demand.

The Liberal-NDP elite that runs Toronto is too politically correct to really dig into one of its most vexing problems. About 37 per cent of Canada's annual 250,000-person immigrant influx ends up in Toronto. That's an enormous burden to place on one city. At first, Toronto's immigrant influx changed a town that was perceived as white-bread and boring into one that was definitely more cosmopolitan and interesting. Now it has moved into a new zone with so-called visible minorities expected to become a visible majority by 2017. The nature of Toronto has changed profoundly in a very short time. The sheer volume of immigrants from vastly different cultures is more than Toronto can accommodate.

The city's woes seem to have taken the starch out of the cocky Torontonians we loved to hate. Even the hometown-cheerleading Toronto Star recently referred to "years of stagnation, inertia and neglect." The paper then argued unconvincingly that things might be getting a little bit better.

There may be no easy cure for the disease that afflicts Toronto, but it ought to be a concern to all of us. Despite the image of moose and so on, Canadian is an extremely urbanized country. If Toronto is the future, we're all in trouble.

Fellow columnist Andrew Cohen took issue:

The capital of condescension
Andrew Cohen, Citizen Special

TORONTO - This is a city under siege. Its treasury is empty. Its leadership is adrift. Its air is dirty, its streets are clogged and its subway trains are crowded.

What's worse, Canada's largest city has no representative in the new federal cabinet. The Conservatives may be ready to sell their soul to appoint ministers for Montreal and Vancouver, but for scarlet Toronto? Apparently not.

In a country that makes envy an emblem, Toronto is now the object of pity. As other cities prosper, Toronto struggles. Strange how this gives some such perverse pleasure.

"Big, brash, boastful Toronto has been reduced to begging for help while people in Ottawa have two major federal cabinet ministers and a city that's safe and functional," exclaims columnist Randall Denley in the Ottawa Citizen.

"Cocky" Toronto has a bad hockey team, he brays. Tourists aren't coming here anymore. The "politically correct" left of centre council is paralysed.

He has a point, up to a point, about this city. Toronto isn't pretty. It has relatively few parks. It ruined most of its fine mansions on Jarvis Street and cut off the lakeshore with an elevated expressway and a row of Stalinist apartment blocks. Much of its public architecture is soulless. Its suburbs extend forever in unrelenting ugliness.

For his part, Mr. Denley calls Toronto "dreadfully boring" without a "central idea" of itself. With its theatre scene "at low ebb," there is nothing "even remotely exciting" about this awful place.

Coming from an Ottawan you could read this as satire, but Mr. Denley seems to be serious. So here is a serious reply, which isn't written by the Toronto Chamber of Commerce:

By international standards, Toronto is a success. It is a model of the mixed metropolis of the 21st century, absorbing a staggering wave of immigrants (almost half of the city wasn't born in Canada) while maintaining social peace.

In finding the imperfect balance of diversity, prosperity and harmony, Toronto isn't just "world class," that much-mocked encomium of the 1980s. Actually, it may well be in a class by itself.

No central idea? Toronto is a social laboratory, an entrepot of ideas and an engine of aspiration. It is the post-modern society of race and language. Boring? Funky shops and daring boutiques line Queen Street West. New restaurants -- Japanese, Loatian, Jamaican -- sprout everywhere. Along the old industrial thoroughfares, warehouses and factories have become lofts and studios.

Theatre at low ebb? The other day, Soulpepper Theatre Company mounted Our Town in its new home in the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. Next month The Lord of the Rings will have its much-anticipated debut at the Princess of Wales Theatre. This fall, the Canadian Opera Company will present Wagner's The Ring Cycle at the new Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

Innovation? Look at the renewal of the 19th century Victorian red-brick Distillery District. Or the reconstituted National Ballet School of Canada. Or the arresting renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum.

No, Toronto's charms are not obvious. Find them in its network of local libraries. Find them in its wooded ravines, the leafy Lesley Street Spit or the breezy Toronto Islands. Find them in its neighbourhood skating rinks or the charming Riverdale Farm.

Smugness is a Canadian virtue, and the assault on an ailing Toronto ("the city we love to hate") is in character. But tell me, if Toronto is boring, what does that make Ottawa? You know, the Ottawa with no street life, ambience or buzz. The Ottawa with restaurants that close because public servants won't eat out if they cannot put it on their expense accounts, where a courageous local critic recently called a venerable, busy eatery "the worst restaurant" she'd ever reviewed.

Beyond the Great Canadian Theatre Company and the National Arts Centre, the arts are stagnant; unlike every other big city in Canada, Ottawa doesn't have a concert hall. Nor does it have a functional central library. Its museums, with the exception of the new Canadian War Museum, are lacklustre.

While other cities go green, rebuild their centres or open arts institutions, Ottawa's idea of an idea is to build a $5 million footbridge across the Rideau Canal 500 metres from another bridge. It put its hockey arena far from the city centre, and in sub-Arctic climate refuses to cover its successful outdoor farmer's market -- probably because that's what Toronto does. Meanwhile, its pedestrian mall is deteriorating.

They used to call feverish New York a town without foreplay; phlegmatic Ottawa, you might say, is a town without climax. Filled with the superannuated and the somnolent, it is a capital of contentment, living in fear of spontaneity.

At the end of the day, Toronto is a city with problems that talks to the world. Ottawa is a city without ambition that talks to itself.

Now, Denley has taken the gloves completely off and is calling the T-Dot out:

I hit a nerve calling Toronto boring
Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen

Man, what was I thinking? Show a flicker of pity for Torontonians and they turn on you faster than a rabid weasel.

In a column Sunday, I suggested we all needed to be concerned about the decline of Toronto because the city is so important to Canada. From the reaction of fellow Citizen columnist Andrew Cohen, one would have thought I'd suggested all Torontonians ought to take a one-way hike into Lake Ontario, which I would never propose because of the damage it would do to the water quality.

The former Globe and Mail writer concedes Toronto is leaderless and filthy, its public architecture "soulless" and its suburbs "extend forever in unrelenting ugliness." We agree on all of that, but when I suggested Toronto was boring, that hit a raw nerve.

To paraphrase, he said "Toronto boring? What about Ottawa, eh? Got you there."

One does have to feel sorry for Toronto refugees such as Cohen, now a Carleton University journalism professor. Driven to Ottawa's inhospitable shores for political or professional reasons, they must rub shoulders with the "superannuated and somnolent" who make up so much of the population. We apologize if we've gotten in the way as they go about their important business. We're moving as fast as we can.

Cohen creates quite a catalogue of Ottawa's deficiencies.

Ottawa, he charges, is not only desperately short of Laotian restaurants, it also lacks the "funky shops and daring boutiques" that make Toronto so exhilarating.

What is a daring boutique, exactly?

Ottawa is a cultural backwater, lacking even a proper downtown library or a concert hall. We don't have a concert hall, but it isn't because people aren't behind it.

Ottawa City Council has already put up its share of the money and the Ottawa Chamber Music Society is doing all the work. The problem is getting federal and provincial politicians to pony up a measly $6.5 million each. Maybe there's nothing left after the $232 million they have sent Toronto to refurbish its cultural institutions. And the city's asking for $96 million more.

Cohen defended Toronto's lively theatre scene by mentioning a new production of Our Town. Now there's a cutting edge piece. We can only hope the 1938 Thornton Wilder play eventually comes to Ottawa. Torontonians can look forward to the success of The Lord of the Rings, but only after a summer in which the city didn't offer a major musical for the first time since the 1980s.

Ottawa has no street life, Cohen says, and one must concede we don't have beggars sleeping on every heat grate or the excitement of dodging stray bullets on Yonge Street.

Cohen even complains that we haven't covered the Byward Market, probably because it would make us too much like Toronto. Actually, its' because we aren't afraid to go outdoors in winter, unlike Torontonians, who prefer to scuttle underground to their subway and subterranean shops.

Ottawa is "a town without climax," Cohen says. Trust a Torontonian to see everything in sexual terms. It's what you'd expect from a city whose defining symbol is the CN Tower, a perpetual concrete erection. Safe to say Toronto's climax is well past.

Cohen does admit "Toronto's charms are not obvious." Indeed. They can be found, though, by a thorough investigation of the city's ravines and its neighborhood skating rinks.

He argues Toronto is perhaps the world's finest example of the "mixed metropolis," absorbing huge numbers of immigrants while maintaining social peace. He's right, although some might consider the recent wave of gun deaths involving young black men a warning sign.

But what was the purpose of creating this mixed metropolis? Is it some kind of noble social experiment, or merely the outcome of years of aggressive Liberal party immigration policies?

I won't dispute the fact that Ottawa can often be a small thinking place without any real sense of its own possibilities. I've been saying the same thing for more than a decade. I expect I'll be saying it for another decade.

A statement that something is boring, of course, tells as much about the speaker as it does about the thing being described. If one requires a frenetic life that consists primarily of trips to the opera, visiting southeast Asian restaurants and funky boutiques, Toronto's your town. If you want a city where you don't spend a good portion of every day in a traffic jam and can quickly go camping, cottaging or kayaking, you might prefer Ottawa.

Perhaps Cohen would agree it's particularly Canadian to engage in a lively debate over which of your province's two major cities is actually the most boring.

Although I prefer Ottawa, I think they're both all right in their own ways. What does the panel think?