Mike Duggan gave his first press conference as the new mayor of Detroit in front of a banner embroidered with the words "What I Love About Detroit." Residents of America's most famous teetering-on-the-abyss city had scrawled messages of hope all over it in black pen, and you know they weren't writing, "The bridge to Windsor."

The residents of Toronto also spent this week scrawling messages to their mayor, Rob Ford, on the walls outside City Hall. In a gloriously Canadian compromise, they wrote in chalk, as if the ephemerality of the medium would take some sting out of the words. Rain might wash away our troubles. "Liar," they wrote, and "Go to rehab." Cruelly, but also quite hilariously, someone dubbed the mayor "Crackula."

So it's come to this. Toronto, smugly chugging along all these years, can learn a lesson in civic engagement from Detroit, that poor, hollow, broken tooth of a city. Or maybe we can just learn about inclusiveness, and not division, from its new mayor, who made reference in his victory speech to the terrible fault lines that have historically divided Detroit.

Story continues below advertisement

"The way we are going to rebuild this city is to value every single person in our community," Mr. Duggan said. "It will no longer matter if you are black, brown or white. It will no longer matter if you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim. It will not matter if you are gay or straight. We want all of your talents. You're all going to be equally valued and welcomed, because only in that way will we rebuild the kind of Detroit everyone in this city deserves."

Imagine: Not the core versus the suburbs, not the cars versus the bikes, but all of us circling wagons together. I have no idea whether Mr. Duggan will be able to succeed. He has few powers, because Detroit's reins are currently in the hands of its emergency manager, who is overseeing the transition through bankruptcy. (A judge is currently deciding Detroit's bankruptcy status.) The city's population is shrinking, it's $18-billion in debt, crime is high, and it's never clear that your 911 call will be answered. Less than 20 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote in the municipal election. As reporter Charlie LeDuff asked Mr. Duggan, incredulously, "Why would you want this stinkin' job?"

Interestingly, Mr. Duggan and Mr. Ford are both wealthy, white suburbanites propelled to office on waves of voter frustration. (Mr. Duggan is the first white mayor of Detroit in 40 years.)

You can understand Detroit's frustration, what with the T-Rex-sized potholes, the garbage collection that comes around with the frequency of Halley's Comet, the morgue that didn't have enough money to bury bodies – and the corruption. Former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick currently resides in that grand residence known as La Hoosegow. Toronto's frustration was … well, I'm not sure what it was about, exactly, except maybe everyone's latte foam wasn't quite foamy enough.

They used to look north and chuckle at our politeness and restraint, the people of the sharp-taloned eagle watching the calmly dam-building people of the beaver. Now they must see us as wealthy children who have too many toys, squabbling over the wrapping paper. Not just here in Toronto, but also in Ottawa, and in Quebec, where a province is tearing itself apart over the issue of precisely how much fabric a woman can wear on her head.

Has it come to the point where we can learn lessons in political civility from Detroit and New York? Is that even possible? New York, home of the Bowery and Hell's Kitchen and clipboard-wielding Amazons who can crush an ego from 20 paces, where "Get out of my way, Charlie" is the early-morning greeting between taxi drivers and spouses.

Tough old New York just elected a mayor, Bill de Blasio, who seems like Che Guevara by modern American standards. The idea that he could successfully run on a platform of higher taxes is astounding in an era in which cutting taxes and "stopping the gravy train" are supposed to be the only frequencies a voter can hear. But Mr. de Blasio's message was different and centred around one phrase: "We all rise together." In his acceptance speech, he said, "The growing inequality we see, the crisis of affordability we face, it has been decades in the making. But its slow creep upon this city cannot weaken our resolve."

Story continues below advertisement

Those words are like a balm for my poor Canadian ears, battered by bickering and name-calling. Maybe those words are just hot air. Who knows? At least it's a warm place to start from, like Mr. Duggan's contention, during his campaign, that none of his supporters should go negative on his opponent, the wonderfully named Benny Napoleon. (I'm afraid Mr. Napoleon met his Waterloo in Detroit this week.)

Mr. Duggan sounded cautiously optimistic about Detroit's future; nobody in his right mind would imagine skipping down those crumbling streets with a picnic basket on his arm. He said something wise, and I only hope his words drift north on some fortuitous wind: "In this business, everything is about relationships. It's about how you treat people. It's about 'Can they trust you?' "