When Canada was founded in 1867, 80 per cent of the country’s 3.3 million people lived in rural settings. Today that percentage is flipped around, with just more than 80 per cent of Canada’s nearly 36 million people living in its handful of large and medium-sized cities.

The country has changed in other ways of course, such as demographics and economics, but this migration from rural to urban is a radical shift in our country’s nature. Instead of spreading out over all that land, we chose to stick closer together, perhaps for warmth. For a country perpetually worried about its identity, we are overwhelmingly city people, living either urban or suburban lives that are more alike in terms of lifestyle than not.

It’s a pan-Canadian connection that should be exploited by anybody who’s working to unify this sometimes-fractured country.

All that other land, whether rural, wilderness or something in between the two, is great and good and has given the country part of its identity, but it also has consequences today: Canadian cities remain in the shadow of all that landscape.

Our cities are impressive creations that took much effort and resources to build. They’ve also become engines of our economy but they’re beholden to their respective provincial governments and Canada has never had a national cities plan or policy at the federal level, something that might help connect that 80 per cent of the country together in common causes like transit, housing and climate change.

Changing the idea of what Canada is has been long and slow. The 1967 centennial celebrations saw Montreal take the Canadian and world stage rather dramatically. Montreal, with its new Metro system, Expo 67, skyscrapers and freeways, was the poster child for modern urban Canada.

If you watch the revelatory 1967-era films produced by the National Film Board or other outfits you won’t see much Toronto in them. Perhaps a glimpse of New City Hall, but this city didn’t capture the nation’s attention. Montreal got the deserved glory while Toronto remained Canada’s sleeper city, gestating away, soon to become the biggest, and an economic and cultural powerhouse that — you might say — is world-class.

It’s interesting then to visit Toronto in the Camera: A Series of Photographic Views of the Principal Buildings in the City of Toronto, a book of photos by Octavius Thompson, published in 1868 just as Canada was founded. The book, available in the Toronto Public Library’s special collection, reveals an ambitious city that was gestating even then, and a familiar preoccupation with its own self-worth.

The pictures depict a vaguely familiar Toronto, if you can imagine the structures as heritage buildings today, scattered about downtown in isolation from each other. Toronto was incredibly small and compact at this time as its major expansions came later, with the frilly gingerbread of late-Victorian suburbs like Cabbagetown or the more reserved Edwardian neighbourhoods like The Annex. Toronto’s greatest expansion, and one that saw the extraordinary conversion of rural areas to urban, occurred after the Second World War, when farmland was gobbled up as Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough were developed.

That postwar expansion, coupled with the demolition and replacement of most of the 19th-century buildings seen here, means Toronto’s built form is largely a modern one. While these historic buildings may not have provided Toronto with a uniform and enduring look like Paris, Prague or Edinburgh, cities that remain beholden to a particular historic era, they were the beginnings of something big.

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In these early photos you can see signs of what created Toronto and fed its growth, like the Grand Trunk Railway General Office, and those ever-present institutions dominating the downtown core: the banks.

In the book, much was made of the building dimensions and the amount of capital each bank had access to. That the manager had a private entrance of his own to one of the banks was a big deal, and the Queen’s Hotel might have been quite nice as is, but it was noted the landlord hoped to make it even nicer by adding a floor. Over at the Rossin House hotel, there were 12 “first-class” stores. “We’re big, we’re important,” suggested these descriptions, but they also reveal a city worried about being whatever the 1867 version of “world class” was.

Even the write-up of King St. boasted of its width (66 feet) and how substantial the brick and stone buildings along it were: size and girth fixation, a Toronto tradition.

Toronto was a provincial outpost with muddy streets, but it was an aspirational one. The architecture seen in these photos echoed that of the colonial mother country, striving to be seen as cut from the same kind of cloth, or brick, as London and other big important cities of the day. We’ve been desperately repeating this ever since, though of late this kind of worried navel gazing has been waning a bit. This is Drake’s city now, confident and loud rather than small and nervous.

The Toronto in these photos was a religious city, too, and even the destitute denizens of the Boys’ Home were encouraged to go to worship at the denomination of their choice each Sunday morning, and the “divine service” was even celebrated at the home on Sunday afternoon. We see here too the roots of puritanical Toronto, another thing we’re slowly shaking.

Toronto was a city founded on business and piety; it wasn’t a party. Still, something about that mix has drawn people here from all around the world who have continued to build this city and make it better.