IN 1950 the mayor of Toronto, the Hon. Hiram E. McCallum, objected to the display of a painting in an art exhibit at the Canadian National Exhibition. “Sailors and Floozies” had outraged the mayor and other moral guardians of the city by depicting seamen cavorting with strumpets.

“Toronto the Good,” as it was called, without irony, was for much of the last century probably the most God-fearing city in North America, fixed in a Victorian ideal of rectitude enforced by a fire-and-brimstone religious lobby. The Lord’s Day Alliance imposed a kind of civic coma every Sunday: no shopping, no drinking, no movies, no sports — no nothing. The other six days were no hedonistic jamboree, either.

By the third millennium, that stony bastion of Protestant piety lay as buried and forgotten as ancient Troy. Toronto was the fifth most populous city in North America, vivified by hundreds of thousands of immigrants of every ethnicity, admired for its balance of economic power, cultural diversity, sophistication and civic enlightenment. It even had its own prestigious international film festival. The actor Peter Ustinov described Toronto as “New York, run by the Swiss.”

Then came 2010 and the election of Rob Ford as mayor. He spent the next four years trying his best to turn Toronto the Good into something like Deadwood, run by the Snopeses.