Toronto's quest for glory

Watching the Toronto mayoralty race begin, from a great distance, makes me reflect on that city's long but desultory effort to gain recognition as one of the world's great cities. It is certainly a successful, noteworthy, prosperous, ethnically diverse, relatively well-organized and even somewhat architecturally distinguished city. But there is something missing from this picture: There is no romance and there is no drama.

There is, of course, the romance of individual stories, many thousands of them, of the great gambles of immigration and enterprise. But there have been no breathtaking, riveting collective ethnic and racial struggles, or financial climaxes, or terrorist outrages, as in New York. Nor can Toronto match the astounding rise of Chicago — the Bar of Abraham Lincoln and the fiefdom of Al Capone; America's sometimes architectural, literary, gangster, industrial and jazz capital.

Drama requires agony, and no one would seek it for himself or his city. Londoners didn't wish the Blitz, or even probably the English Civil War or the so-called Glorious Revolution, the Reformationist marital complexities of Henry VIII, the Fire or the Plague. Parisians could have done without the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Wars of the Fronde, the Reign of Terror, the campaigns of Napoleon, the Siege and the Commune, the Battles of the Marne and the events that gave rise to the Resistance. And Berliners who reflect on the significance, all within a few blocks of each other, of Frederick the Great's Brandenburg Gate, Bismarck's Reichstag, the Hohenzollern cathedral, Hitler's Fuhrerbunker, the Jewish Museum, Stalin's monumental embassy in East Berlin and the gleaming and hopeful structures of the new Federal Republic would probably wish for a less tragic history for their city. But in the case of each of these cities, there were drama, romance, grandeur, squalor, tragedy and sometimes events of a scale and moment that affected civilization.

There are other, slightly less celebrated cities in this category: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Moscow, St. Petersburg, the leading Spanish and Polish cities, Stockholm, Lisbon, Dublin, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Munich and many others. Then there are the medieval and ancient worlds. Rome, Florence, Venice, Istanbul, Athens, Jerusalem, Beirut and some of the cities of Central, Southern and East Asia can consume a productive lifetime's scholarly attention very usefully. And there are modern cities, without such history, but that are romantic by their setting or design, or overpowering by their size and panache, or importance. San Francisco, Cape Town, Washington, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, and perhaps even Los Angeles, all meet one or more of those criteria. And there are fine modern cities making some historic or other exceptional claims, such as Atlanta, San Antonio, Austin, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, New Orleans, Dallas, Melbourne, Singapore.

In Canada, Vancouver comes in pretty well in the natural setting sweepstakes. Quebec City does also, and contributes a good dollop of real history, from Champlain to the Churchill-Roosevelt conferences. Montreal, jaded, faded and half-asphyxiated by the narcissistic excesses of Quebec nationalism, has some of the romance and drama municipal greatness is made of — the abrasions of a trans-Atlantic culture in an American setting, from the wartime detention of the nine-term mayor (Camillien Houde), to the Richard Riot, to the murder of the vice premier (Pierre Laporte) and the imposition of martial law, especially with a bit of creative historical massaging, can be aggregated into a respectable serving of drama. And Hugh MacLennan, Mordecai Richler, and some of the French writers made a number of the city's neighbourhoods vivid and famous (as Margaret Atwood has partly accomplished in Toronto).

The sadness of Montreal is that as it sprinted up the ranks of cities, the province went haywire politically and Montreal lost the 25 years from the FLQ Crisis of 1970 to the second referendum in 1995, during which it ceased to be Canada's leading city and stumbled backwards economically and culturally. It is now a regional centre living off a provincial service-industry economy and is neither here nor there among the great cities of the world.

This paragraph may seem to be a digression, but isn't: I noted that my former sparring partner John Moore, writing in these pages a couple of weeks ago, referred to the "racism" of Premier Maurice Duplessis "padlocking the doors of establishments owned by Jehovah's Witnesses." The Padlock Law applied to storage of communist literature, had nothing to do with Jehovah's Witnesses (who are not a race), and was used once, as a publicity stunt, to no one's inconvenience. (The Jehovah's Witnesses, incidentally, were charged with serial violations of municipal ordinances against the distribution of hate literature — of which they were undoubtedly guilty. They would have had a much rougher ride with the current human rights commissions.) Duplessis was militantly anti-racist. We had to wait for those great liberals Robert Bourassa and René Lévesque for the delights of the language police, language aptitude tests for six-year-olds and the war against bilingualism. Mr. Moore, like many others, has bought into a Liberal Party fairy tale spun out by champagne-swilling poseurs, and this demonstrates again the difficulty of building drama in the land of peace, order and good government. If Duplessis' irritation with the Witnesses is the best we can do for an epochal moral struggle, we won't get there. (During a postal strike 30 years ago, I wrote an editorial suggestion that we entrust the postal service to the Jehovah's Witnesses since they were on our doorsteps every day anyway.)

In any event, Montreal's loss was Toronto's gain, including in the form of hundreds of thousands of people. Toronto has the critical mass for a great city, but you can't manufacture the spontaneity of self-confidence and the genius of originality from an aggregation of windfalls, no matter how graciously received and diligently tended. The greatness of Toronto has to happen; it can't be staged. It can seek excellence in all fields and focus on the mundane but essential structure of a successful metropolis, but some distinctive and alluring esprit is going to have to emerge from the earnest cravings and strivings of the five million people of the GTA.

This brings me to the mayoralty. If what follows is unjust to anyone, I apologize, as I have the same perspective on this election as most readers, not personally knowing the main candidates.

George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi are not the people to take Toronto up the last steps of urban distinction. They are very humdrum; worthy at best, and I wouldn't bet the ranch on that.

Michael Bloombergs, Boris Johnsons and even Jacques Chiracs don't pop up like dandelions, even in the cities where they have been mayor. Not since John P. O'Brien, the cipher who was mayor of New York (1932-1934) between the legendary mayors James J. Walker and Fiorello H. LaGuardia, and who is chiefly remembered for introducing Albert Einstein to a public gathering as "Dr. Weinstein," has the Big Apple had so unprepossessing a mayor as these candidates.

In this spirit of Toronto's quest for municipal greatness, I end the suspense and confer my endorsement: Sarah Thompson. She is a declared candidate, is youngish, attractive, intelligent, peppy, original, is a competent businesswoman with a colourful past and would work tirelessly for the city. She would put an end to this insufferable tussle between the Liberals and NDP that goes back to William Dennison about who can run City Hall with more self-serving complacency. She would be personally incorruptible, the scourge of smugness, a refreshingly surprising ambassadress for Toronto, and would certainly liven things up. If the present front runners are the future, we have seen them for decades and it won't work. Let's have a mayor who doesn't flee before striking garbage men like the Mamelukes before Napoleon. As far as I'm concerned, the Thompson bandwagon is rolling; I hope to be able to vote for her.

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