W ith the strike over and Toronto returning to normal, it's time to get back to more important matters, namely the civilizing of the city.

Pundits and politicians remain fixated on the lowest common denominator, of course, but they can be safely ignored. The mouth-breathers have had their moment in the spotlight, let us now thank them and move on.

And so the Case Ooteses, Denzil Minnan-Wongs and Karen Stintzes can stop blinking and crawl back into the shadows from which they came.

If Toronto hopes to remain competitive in a world increasingly dominated by city and regional economies, it must learn new ways of thinking and doing. However tempting it may be as a strategy, parochialism is not enough. The world no longer ends at the border of Etobicoke, Toronto or even Canada, for that matter. But if the planet has grown smaller than ever, the stage has never been bigger.

Why this city? That's the question we must ask ourselves. What can we offer that any other mid-level burg here or the U.S. or Europe can't?

It has become clear, however, that we are rooted in the mindset of the 1970s, blissfully unaware that a new reality has dawned.

Let's look instead to cities that lead, cities that are reinventing themselves as places where people live because they want to not because they must, places that are remaking themselves in the image of a human being, not a car, places that offer quality of life not just low taxes.

Cities as disparate as New York, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen and now Sydney, Australia, are moving to reclaim their public realm for people. Historic squares that were turned into parking lots in the years after World War II are now being returned to pedestrians. Café life in Copenhagen, for instance, which didn't exist 40 years ago, now flourishes. And, yes, they know what winter is.

Whole precincts in these communities and others have been set aside as pedestrian zones. And local merchants notwithstanding, business prospers in these designated areas.

Toronto, meanwhile, has been too scared to do anything more than close off a street here and there for a day or two.

By contrast, in New York, Times Square itself has been closed to vehicular traffic, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Is it any wonder tourism in Toronto is in a state of slow but steady decline?

When city council voted to close the fifth lane of Jarvis St. recently, the howls of outrage were deafening – and pathetic.

It's time Torontonians woke up and smelled the exhaust.

It doesn't help that we have fallen 25 years behind the rest of the world in public transit, which alone has seriously harmed the GTA's ability to keep pace. Now we are desperately trying to catch up, but many fear the (high-speed) train has already left the station.

How ironic that as we become more like the U.S., the U.S. wants to become more like us.

For Toronto, however, the message is clear: we make it as a city-region or we don't make it at all. This point was reiterated most recently by the Greater Toronto Region Economic Summit, which recommended the formation of a "war cabinet" to oversee growth in the 416 and 905.

The analogy was apt, implying as it does that we must put aside the things that divide us and act in concert to deal with some higher threat.

That threat is real, but it doesn't come from away. It is everywhere we turn. The enemy is us.





Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca.