If I entered Toronto’s heated mayoral race, I would pledge to ban the United Colors of Benetton from the city. While I have no objection to the company’s shirts, coats or knitwear, their advertising, with its image of glossy diversity, must feed the insecurity Toronto feels about its own. As a white male (albeit a non-Canadian one), I bet I’d even do quite well in the election, given the stultifyingly un-diverse leaders that this city of immigrants – its population is 48.6% foreign-born – always seems to vote in as mayor.

Toronto will almost certainly do the same again today, when the third most multicultural city on the planet (after Luxembourg City and Dubai) will likely vote to replace the white, middle-aged, disgraced Rob Ford with the white, middle-aged, as-yet-undisgraced John Tory. It’s not for lack of options: a reasonably varied range of candidates have entered the running. And although many urbanites I spoke to declared an intention to vote for the Chinese-Canadian Olivia Chow – widow of leftwing icon Jack Layton and lately the subject of some racially charged abuse – they also admit to having little confidence in her ability to do the job.

So Tory it probably is for Toronto, a city that proclaims itself the zenith of multiculturalism. It’s a concept that has come to represent the city more than anything else – more, even, than the similar-vintage CN Tower, which for 34 years stood unchallenged as the world’s tallest freestanding structure. “Multiculturalism!” exclaimed Jan Morris in a 1984 essay. “I had never heard the word before, but I was certain to hear it again, for it turned out to be the key word, so to speak, to contemporary Toronto.” It was a city, she wrote, that ostensibly offered “all things to all ethnicities”.

Growing up near San Francisco and Seattle, I assumed that all major cities offered, at the very least, many things to most ethnicities. Subsequent visits to east Asia and northern Europe altered that assumption somewhat; but for the most part, world cities contain the world. Only the most Blimpish could deny the diversity of London, and in the past half century immigration has transformed Los Angeles (where I now live) from America’s whitest metropolis to its least white. But the process took those cities almost by surprise, and, as a result, they both still experience periodic waves of incomprehension and resentment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuffy marriage ... Toronto mayoral candidates John Tory and Doug Ford. Photograph: Richard Lautens/Toronto Star/Getty

Toronto, however, has supposedly cultivated its multiculture deliberately and methodically, welcoming as wide a range of foreign nationals as possible, giving them space to thrive and trying not to meddle with their traditions, most of which are considerably older than Canada. Just as we might know another city for its “world class” industry, politics, architecture or lifestyle, Toronto, long eager for a similar designation, has wanted us to know it for its reflection and accommodation of the world itself. It refuses to subject its people – or rather, peoples – to anything as imperialist as the American-style melting pot, where you’re American first and whatever else second.

You can get a good idea of modern Torontonian multiculturalism at Pearson International Airport, where the world does indeed turn up. Visitors to Canada await entry amid a reassuringly polyglot line of, if not all ethnicities, then surely most of them. A sign above every customs officer’s station announces services in “English and Français,” a charmingly ineffectual defence against the veritable Babel that queues up daily before them.

The muddle of the city turns out, however, to offer an unexpectedly rich urban texture. Writer Russell Smith, whose novels defined young urban Toronto in the 1990s, took me on a tour of his mid-gentrification neighbourhood on the city’s west side: renowned vegan restaurant by crack-dealing corner by Portuguese bakery by lesbian bicycle co-op.



To Smith, it’s the international aspect that remains, above all else, “the part of Toronto that’s absolutely electrifying”. He remembers fondly his first bus trips to the city as a college student in the 1980s: “The excitement for me was to get off in the middle of crowded, bustling, stinky, sweaty Chinatown, with the cries of the food-sellers all around, have a meal that was something very unusual to me, and then a punk rock concert. It was the very definition of urban sophistication and cosmopolitanism.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Absolutely electrifying’ ... Chinatown in Toronto. Photograph: Angelo Cavalli/Getty

On the whole, those qualities remain. Toronto avoided the American-style postwar population drain from its downtown core, and still celebrates the legacy of urbanist provocateur Jane Jacobs, who moved here from Greenwich Village (the neighbourhood that shaped The Death and Life of Great American Cities) to live out her days in Toronto as she had in New York: holding back expressways, revitalising housing projects and getting arrested. But as sure as this has produced a desirable 21st-century city, it has also produced an expensive one – unexpectedly rich urban texture, yes, but also just unexpectedly rich. Does that make it less amenable to the multiculture?

“Whereas in the 1970s and 80s, downtown was lower-income and therefore less white, now we have a downtown becoming higher-income,” says Denise Balkissoon, a journalist who observes Toronto’s multiculturalism and its real-estate market. “That is pushing a lot of racialised communities out to the periphery.” Inner Toronto’s multicultural experience, she says, runs the risk of becoming little more than the freedom to “eat whatever kind of noodles you want”.

Exploring the numerous current and historical ethnic enclaves in this so-called City of Neighbourhoods – the Greek strip east of the Don river, a Koreatown, an unexpected Maltese quarter, several Chinatowns and Little Italys – reveals no immediate shortage of noodle shops, nor any other kind of business offering the transplanted fruits of foreign civilisations. But even enthusiasts acknowledge that quite a few of these areas have aged, their core immigrant populations unreplenished and their purposes thinned to the touristic.

“The core of Toronto, the old city of Toronto, is an incredibly expensive place to live,” says Shawn Micallef, a Toronto Star columnist who has written extensively on the built and social environment. “There has been a Manhattanisation, which makes it homogenous. It risks becoming a boring, corporatised, Starbucks-on-every-corner kind of place. Whereas the suburbs are where the exciting stuff is happening, where the actual multiculturalism happens that we, as Torontonians, embody.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The only local mall that’s open on Christmas Day ... shoppers at the Pacific Mall in the greater Toronto area. Photograph: Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star

And so out I went to the periphery: specifically, to Pacific Mall, an impressive shopping complex located out past the Canadian Tire megastores and strip malls emblazoned with foreign scripts, in a modest Greater Toronto Area town called Markham. Widely known as “the Asian mall”, it is a warehouse-like structure divided into a glass-and-metal “street grid” – with names like Hollywood and Queen’s Avenue – of 450 mobile phone stores, cosmetics outlets, ginseng dealers, bubble tea counters, and shelves of DVDs and luxury handbags of routinely questioned authenticity, all of it serving an entirely Chinese clientele.

Almost entirely Chinese, rather: amid all this, I overheard a couple arguing in Spanish about whether to buy one of the mall’s many miniature light-up miniature waterfalls – a richly multicultural moment, albeit a rarity even out there on the periphery. Canada has defined itself as the “mosaic” rather than the melting pot, and apart from the occasional maple-leaf flag, I saw little in the Pacific Mall that acknowledged the existence of the country around it. Thirty years ago, Morris declared Canadian nationality “no more than a minor social prerequisite, like a driving licence or a spare pair of glasses”. Go as far out as the Pacific Mall (in whose parking lot I also saw a supposedly un-Canadian interracial shouting match over a fender bender), and it counts for even less.

Still, given that we have these same sorts of mono-ethnic suburbs in Los Angeles, with all their inconveniences and pleasures (food critics go to the San Gabriel Valley for the finest Chinese cuisine outside China, after all), I had to wonder if they really count as a meaningful strike against the grand multicultural project, or just a reflection of its complications. In certain areas, such as public education, the multicultural Toronto decidedly puts multicultural Los Angeles to shame: in LA, linguistic difficulties alone have led many parents not just to abandon their neighbourhood schools, but to never consider them in the first place. Many of Toronto’s schools, on the other hand, are thoroughly mixed.



So why all these old white mayors? Multiculturalism remains Toronto’s “great strength on an everyday, personal level – wherever you go, wherever you work, you will see all sorts of multi-ethnic groups of people working together and enjoying each other’s company,” Balkissoon says. “But I don’t think, on a representative level, Toronto has really lived up to that promise. Which groups get the biggest say in the media, or which groups have the most power – that tends to be traditional. There tends to be some stagnation.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuporific ... Rob Ford at Toronto City Hall. Photograph: Aaron Harris/Reuters

That stagnation recently took shape in Rob Ford, he of the crack-smoking “drunken stupors”, the bike lane removals and the professed admiration for “Oriental people” who “work like dogs”. Yet the disgraced mayor did, in his clownish way, stand for a non-PC, non-cosmopolitan, non-urban outer Toronto that has spent years feeling left out. It’s his natural constituency, Ford Nation – and to the surprise of some multiculture-loving downtowners it turned out to include no small number of recent immigrants.



Rob has cancer, so his brother Doug is running instead, similarly untroubled by allegations of drug dealing, which he denies. But though the voters of Toronto may understandably choose not to elect that particular middle-aged white man, they will still most likely elect John Tory: lawyer, corporate executive, media figure and shining representative of anything but the multiculture. This, in stark contrast to the more than 70% white (and comparatively conservative) city of Calgary, which has twice elected Naheed Nenshi, the first Muslim mayor in North America.

Multiculturalism is the sole unifying idea of Canada’s largest city. Whatever else Toronto has impressively achieved in its mission to provide “all things to all ethnicities”, however, it clearly still hasn’t had much of an effect on who runs the place. Or who runs the places, given the deepening divergence of what looks increasingly like two separate Torontos. One of them, a more exciting, more urban and indeed more multicultural city than ever, has done quite well for itself. The other, represented in a stuffy marriage between the Ford brothers and the John Torys and the bitter quasi-suburbanites and un-integrated new arrivals who vote them in, produces embarrassing publicity and an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance with the city’s image of diversity. Maybe Toronto can straighten this out – or maybe, sailing under that off-brand Benetton flag, it will just keep muddling through.