In a city of 3 million, how have you found a sense of community? Share your stories with us on Twitter using #OurTO.

A few days a week, my wife or I walk the kid who lives next door to us home from the school bus stop, because his mother’s work schedule means she can’t often make it there to meet the bus in time. It’s not a big deal — we’re there already picking up our own kids, we’re heading back to our own house anyway, and his company, if anything, just makes the trip more fun and interesting. It’s a tiny, neighbourly thing.

I wouldn’t have even thought about it, except that it seems like the kind of thing Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch believes doesn’t happen in Toronto.

Or I assume it is.

She’s said — first a few years ago to a small-town paper, then again recently to Toronto Life — that she moved out of Toronto because our city has “no sense of community,” and that in Clearview Township, “I know it’s fine if I walk next door and ask for a cup of sugar, they are going to give me a cup of sugar. It’s the neighbourly thing to do. Living in downtown Toronto as a resident, I would never go next door and ask my neighbour for a cup of sugar. It just wouldn’t happen.”

For some reason they were talking about it on the CBC again a few days ago, which is what got me thinking about it.

Now, it could be she’s partly right. I don’t recall ever directly testing the “cup-of-sugar” theory.

We walk a neighbour’s kid home after school, and call on some of our neighbours to babysit our kids sometimes, especially in emergencies.

One neighbour gives us heaping plates of food every time his family has a barbecue.

Another neighbour recently asked me for a drive to Home Depot, and one asked to borrow a kitchen knife, and another, a while back, borrowed a screwdriver.

A bunch of families from my neighbourhood built and maintain a natural ice rink in the local park, and a bunch of us go over regularly in the summer for free “pop-up day camps” and Friday night sing-a-longs and general hanging out.

In South Riverdale, as a kid I would knock on my neighbour’s door and be welcomed in when I locked myself out of the house.

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As a teenager in Scarborough, and a university student at Ryerson, and as an adult in the Annex and the Junction — in a lifetime all over Toronto — I’ve partied with neighbours, and talked with them, and exchanged favours with them.

But I can’t remember any of us ever needing a cup of sugar, so I guess we can’t say for sure.

But all my other experiences lead me to expect that if I needed sugar and asked, one of my neighbours would give it to me.

Maybe during her time in Toronto, Leitch had a diabetic neighbour, and that’s warped her views.

Who knows?

Or maybe, possibly, instead of asking for a cup of sugar straight out, she introduced herself by mentioning she has 247 — or 22, or 18, or whatever the number is these days — letters after her name, so it’s not as if she’s the kind of idiot who usually needs sugar handouts.

Or started interrogating them about their values to see if they were worthy of supplying her sweet tooth.

Or suggested if they weren’t forthcoming with the sugar, she’d report them for un-neighbourly cultural practices.

That sort of thing can set you off on the wrong foot with people, inclining them against welcoming you into their community’s embrace.

Which is to say, it’s possible it wasn’t Toronto that lacked a sense of community.

It’s possible it was Leitch.

Because my experience of life — a life lived in Toronto — is like the phrase in The Beatles song: “And, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” If you’re radiating hostility and suspicion to those around you, that’s what you get back.

If you’re being friendly and helpful, you make friends and get offered help.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t truth to the stereotype of Torontonians being somewhat standoffish and reserved around strangers.

We do tend to keep to ourselves in public, and often avoid making small talk — or even eye contact — with strangers on the bus or in the grocery line.

But I think that this is more of an urban-life defence mechanism based on both personal need and mutual respect: the city is crowded enough that, if we have to pretend we’re friends with everyone we pass in a day, we will never do anything else and never have anywhere we can feel a moment of peace to ourselves.

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This reserve gets interpreted (as does the habit of New Yorkers of being direct and blunt in the interests of not wasting each other’s time) by some from smaller towns as hostility.

(Personally, I feel the stranger in Toronto who leaves me alone to read my book is being more polite than the stranger in some small town who interrogates me about where I’m from and then lectures me on how terrible he thinks Toronto is, but to each her own.)

But when it comes to getting help and support from neighbours, and even strangers in the street, when you need it, I’ve seldom been let down.

And when it comes to what you actually might call a “sense of community,” Toronto has lots of it.

I feel it among my neighbours at the park, and, in the baseball and hockey leagues my kids are part of.

I’ve heard stories from LGBT friends about arriving from other places where they never felt able to be open about themselves and finding what felt like an instant family after walking into Glad Day Bookstore.

I used to work for a Sri Lankan restaurant owner who would tell me how he got into the business, as did so many of his friends, by plugging into an employment network of fellow immigrants with a line on dishwashing and cooking jobs.

There are groups of neighbours who’ve banded together to sponsor refugees from Syria.

Groups of kids who form homework clubs at libraries.

Women from around the world who meet at community hubs to learn English together.

Communities are everywhere you look.

If you bother looking.

And looking closely at Leitch’s quote again, I see what she said “just wouldn’t happen” here was herasking a neighbour for sugar.

That makes more sense.

You seldom find what you don’t look for, and you seldom receive what you don’t ask for.

If only she’d tried it, she might have found values and practices and a culture in this city that surprised her.

A neighbourly sense of community.

At the very least, I’m guessing she would have gotten that cup of sugar.