It’s the stuff of John Tory (open John Tory's policard)’s dreams.

Toronto laid out before him in miniature. Union Station finished. The subways running on time. Tiny people made of plastic with no opinion about the Gardiner Expressway.

To live out his wildest autocratic fantasies, the mayor need only take the 401 to Mississauga. In a warehouse there – a relatively small, unassuming place on Britannia Rd., with a bare concrete floor – two GTA businessmen have built a model Toronto.

Under construction for a year and a half now, its version of the Rogers Centre has a retractable roof and a working Jumbotron (or Minitron). The St. Lawrence Market teems with piles of amoeba-sized bagels. Trees made of twigs and sponge cluster on the banks of a painted Don.

The chief magistrate of this Lilliputian city is named Jean-Louis Brenninkmeijer. He’s the scion of one of Europe’s richest families, a Dutch-German clan whose net worth was recently estimated at $29-billion. They made their fortune in clothing retail, but for the past 16 years, Jean-Louis has lived in Oakville, since 2002 making investments in wind and hydro power for one of the family businesses.

Raised in Britain, with subsequent stints in France, Belgium, Germany, and Holland, Brenninkmeijer is tall and genteel, with an accent that could be described as English-ish. He got the idea for what he’s calling “Our Home and Miniature Land” from a similar, hugely ambitious set-up in Hamburg, Germany called Miniatur Wunderland.

“It's a dream that I've had for a while. It's a passion,” he says.

Brenninkmeijer is also hoping it will be big business. He’s already spent almost $2-million of his own money on the venture, and is looking for outside investors to help him expand into models of other important Canadian places: Ottawa, Vancouver, the oil sands, north Ontario. Hamilton is already underway.

He envisions a vast complex where students and tourists can learn about his adoptive country using an interactive smart phone app that will guide them through the exhibits. One day, he hopes the whole thing will be housed in downtown Toronto.

If the project’s ambitions and budget are big, its success lies in obsessive attention to detail. A sign at the entrance to the Mississauga warehouse reads, “We sweat the small stuff.”

Vice-president in charge of sweating the small stuff is David MacLean, a lifelong model train hobbyist who now works full-time on the replica Toronto.

Construction began on January 1, 2014. Since then, 25,000 man-hours have been expended on the project, many of them poured into solving abstruse little problems, like the best way to build an inch-high beer vat for the model Distillery District.

“None of this you buy,” said MacLean. “You have to figure out how to do it.”

Rogers Centre: Cost so far: over $50,000. Having a retractable roof and a working Jumbotron playing highlights from the 1993 World Series: priceless.

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Streetcars: Cobbled together from across the world. The shell is from Alberta, the decals are from California, the drive mechanism is from Australia, and it was painted in Leamington, Ont.

Union Station: this is how the transit hub will look when it’s finished. Literally. MacLean and co. got the city to send them the original architectural drawings to ensure maximum realism.

Breweries: you won’t see the Mill Street or Steam Whistle logos anywhere – the companies withheld permission when they learned that the exhibit would be used for children’s educational programs.

Air Canada Centre: contains 4,000 plastic fan figurines, replicating the typical first period of a Leafs game with astonishing precision.

Bloor St. Viaduct: a toy subway, repurposed with TTC decals from a model bought in Austria, runs with completely unrealistic reliability. The bridge has taken 300 hours of work, and will take more when the team adds the Luminous Veil suicide barrier.

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