Stop Pretending Toronto is More Than It Is

False claims of excellence exacerbate mediocrity, and make me feel sad inside.

A kind of person I really don’t want to be is someone who lives in a city, and spends all their time complaining about how it sucks, about how things are better in other places. I fear I may be becoming that person, and it makes me genuinely uncomfortable. I want to try and talk about this here. 

I live in Toronto. I’ve lived here a long time. At times I have loved it, at times not. Recently I’ve been struggling with what it means to have lived here a long time, about how it has shaped and continues to shape me, and, especially, about how I go about finding the people who are here who will feel like my people. 

I often feel alienated by what gets described as the “go-for-bronze” attitude of this place. I miss the level of aspiration that’s more common in cities like SF and New York and LA (and probably non-American cities I have yet to visit). I want to find the people who want to make Toronto a better place for excellence and agency. I already know some of them. I’m finding more of them, and as I find them, it makes me really happy. 

But also there’s this thing that makes me really sad: In many cases, in their efforts to improve Toronto, people make false claims about how good it already is, or diminish the differences between Toronto and those really impactful cities. This kills me. 

I made a new friend recently (let’s call him Ben) who’s involved in Toronto’s tech scene, a scene I don’t know a lot about. He was telling me about all the cool stuff happening here, and his aspirations to do ambitious things. It was exciting!! 

Then a couple of days later, he and his friends released a rap video on Twitter, saying that ambitious tech people should stay in Toronto and not move to SF. The gist of the video was “the real action is here”. The rap was, I think it’s fair to say, very bad. Yet the comments were overwhelmingly things like "banger” and “amazing!!’. 

This experience felt, to me, like a microcosm of everything here that currently makes me feel lonely and sad:

1. An outrageous claim about the merit of the city,  (The idea that “the real action is here and not in SF”- more on this later)

2. Some very mediocre work (the rap itself)

3. A lot of people agreeing with the outrageous claim and applauding the mediocre work

As someone who worked in Canadian media for a while, this cycle feels super-familiar to me, and somehow I felt personally embarrassed. 

I have no quarrel with the rap being bad. I don’t want to discourage people from doing stuff fast, and putting it into the world, even if it kinda sucks. What bums me out is people then saying that the bad stuff is good. Are they lying? Can they not tell? Either way it’s depressing. Acting as if crappy stuff is great is soul-rotting on a personal level, and a sure-fire recipe for ongoing mediocrity on a community level. 

Another example: MaRS is a private-public partnership organization. It’s a reasonably important institution for innovation in Toronto. I want to like MaRS and take it seriously. The front page on their website describes them as “The Largest Urban Innovation Hub in North America”. This sounds impressive for about a second, until you think about it. What would it mean to be the “The Largest Urban Innovation Hub in North America?” Are you not sure what “Urban Innovation Hub” means? I suspect that’s because, as near as I can tell, this is a made-up phrase. 

MaRS invented a category so that it could award itself the distinction of being the biggest in that made up category. There is no second-biggest or third biggest urban innovation hub, there is only MaRS. Also, they don’t quantify what they mean by “biggest.” From what I can tell, they are referring to the substantial square footage of their real estate. It feels heartbreakingly Torontonian in the worst way to imagine that when you think “innovation,” what comes to mind is “very large office building.”

MaRS is fine. It’s nice that we have MaRS. But MaRS is miniscule in impact compared to, say, y-combinator or any of a number of genuinely high-impact institutions. Pretending it’s the “biggest” something is exactly the sort of thing that makes the city feel hopelessly small. 

I want to make it clear: It is entirely okay for a city to not be a burning-hot-cauldron of ambition and accomplishment. It’s totally reasonable for a person to say, “Ugh, I’d hate to live in a place where people are competing all the time to be the best/biggest/whatever.” For a long time, what I liked about Toronto was that it was kinda chill, and mid-size, and you could sort of fuck around and live your life, and that brought with it a special kind of possibility. 

Right now though, right this very second, for some reason, I’m craving that other stuff – I want more of that ambition, of that possibility that feels so present in its absence after spending a bunch of time in other other places these last few months (SF here and here and here and here). I am also trying to make Toronto as, I experience it, “better”, (here and here and here). Writing this post is part of that effort. 

I’m a big fan of seeing things as they are.  If you want Toronto to be more impactful, your solution can’t start with pretending it’s already more impactful than it actually is. 

I’ve found that a lot of progress in my life has come from looking at things that are hard to look at, and saying things that are hard to say. So, I want to say some of the things that seem true to me about Toronto, which feel a little uncomfortable, and which I feel there is some pressure to not say out loud.

The first thing is just to make clear the massive disparity between the impact of Toronto and cities like SF, NYC, LA. Everyone knows that those cities are more impactful. But sometimes people talk as if Toronto is close. It is not close. 

By population, Toronto is a pretty big city: by most measures, the fourth-biggest city in North America. But size isn’t the same as impact. New York may be just 3x the size of Toronto but is more than 3x the impact (more on this below). It’s not just about population – a big city can be a small place.  

Statistics like “fourth largest city” or whatever can make it seem like the differences between cities are not so great. You can find sources that say Toronto is, say, the 7th best city in North America for VC funding, and that can sound impressive, but it’s a power law distribution where the top city (SF) has over 40 times the amount of funding as Toronto. That’s a completely different kind of place.

The “not-so-different-here” boosters will name examples: Drake! Geoff Hinton! Insulin! Every article about Toronto’s tech industry mentions Shopify. They mention it even though it isn’t even in Toronto, and is run by a German guy, and that German guy talks a lot about Canada’s low-ambitiousness problem. Pretty quickly you start to  realize – it’s the same few examples over and over. It’s Drake, Insulin, Shopify, Hinton. Drake, Insulin, Shopify, Hinton, like the repeating characters in the crowd scene of a low-budget cartoon. 

Again: It’s totally okay if you think this whole situation sucks, if you think that a small number of cities should not dominate in this way. It’s great if you want to change that. But if that’s your belief, it is especially important to see reality as it is. The reality is that a small number of cities have enormous influence in the world. Tech companies from around the Bay Area have, for better or worse, fundamentally changed how humans interact with each other, how we understand the world, how we make friends and date, how we access knowledge. San Francisco gave us hippies and oat milk and huge swaths of what queer culture and kink culture look like in other cities (including Toronto).They gave us Burning Man and the maker movement and avocado toast. New York gave us hip-hop culture, Abstract Expressionism, the cronut and Pop Art and most of the shape of modern finance. Toronto has individual contributors in all these areas but the scale of impact is completely different: Toronto has good players, while these places are inventing and dominating whole games. 

These differences make these cities feel different, for everyone. Part of the story is just how people self-select into places. If there is a city that is clearly the World Capital for a thing, lots of the most ambitious people from other cities will leave to go there. The number of ambitious people in the World Capital will go up and the number of ambitious people everywhere else will go down. 

(Note that “ambitious” here can mean a lot of things - I mostly just mean having lots of agency and wanting to shape the world in some way. That can mean making money, but can also mean wanting to drop out and take acid, or find new ways to organize sex or families, or new kinds of art or music, or new ways to be a social activist. New York gave us Wall Street and Madison Avenue but also gave us Occupy and the Stonewall Riots and Hip-hop, and I think those things are all interrelated.)

People move to New York/SF/LA on purpose to do Big Things. This is deeply true of these cities in ways in which it is not of Toronto. Try and come up with a list of notable people who have moved from Canada to one of these cities to make their mark. You can come up with dozens and dozens¹. Now try to come up with notable people from the US who moved to Canada. Jane Jacobs moved here from New York. Prince lived here for two years. The third-most-impressive example I could find was Colonel Sanders, who lived his final years in Mississauga. 

The part that most matters to me is also the part that feels most uncomfortable to talk about. The difference between these cities isn’t just about the talented and ambitious people leaving one place for another. It’s that places also end up shaping their residents. If you live in a place where Big Things Happen, and are surrounded by people trying to make Big Things Happen, you’ll grow and change differently than if you live in a place where the Big Things are understood to happen somewhere else.  

People I encounter in the Bay seem almost hubristically full of a sense of their own capacity to shape the world. In Toronto the opposite seems true – I encounter so many conversations about obstacles, about what is impossible. It saddens me so much when I see it in other people. And it feels hard to talk about. It feels ungenerous to those around me. It makes me feel like a snob and a rube at the same time: The person who lives in a small town, and won’t shut up about how cool it was that one time they were in the big city.  

But it feels very real. I worry about how this city affects me as a person: I want to be someone who sees life as full of great possibility, and I worry that this city shapes me into the opposite of that.

I think there’s a lot of shame at work here. I think part of what’s happening when people over-state their claims about the city is out of a kind of shame, and I think my hesitation and discomfort to talk about it comes from a different kind of shame. I strongly believe that part of the solution to shame, in general, is talking about it. So I want to say all this stuff out loud. I’m hoping that in writing about this I can jostle something up out of this city, maybe for myself, maybe for other people too.  

Toronto is not “The New York Of Canada.” TheNew York of Canada” is an oxymoron. There may be great things about Toronto, or things you want to change. I want to find a way for the people who care about ambition and agency and possibility in this city to talk honestly about it, about the frustrations and about the hopes, and to do that in a way that looks squarely in the face of reality. I want to find the people who want to make Toronto better and who are also willing to see it as it is. 

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1. I’ll start: James Cameron, Jim Carrey, Ryan Gosling, Lorne Michaels, Rachel McAdams, Malcolm Gladwell, Frank Gehry, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Saul Bellow, John Candy, Pamela Anderson, Alanis Morissette, Justin Bieber, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Paul Anka, Avril Lavigne, William Shatner, Morley Safer, Seth Rogan, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dan Levy, Alex Trebek, The Weeknd, Steven Pinker