Royson James – Toronto Star

We are all guilty of it, some more than oth­ers. Run­ning down our city, that is.

A colum­nist who makes the mis­take of cit­ing some of Toronto’s pos­i­tive virtues is bound to get a reader response point­ing to a defi­ciency. It’s a nat­ural reflex, yes, though one that seems to find suc­cor in expan­sive num­bers across the region.

“Maybe we are like Woody Allen’s movie per­sona — too neu­rot­i­cally self-critical,” says David Nay­lor, pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto.

In a speech last month to the Toronto Board of Trade, call­ing on Toron­to­ni­ans to “get over our­selves” and start cel­e­brat­ing the “remark­able munic­i­pal­i­ties that together make up the Toronto met­ro­pol­i­tan region,” Nay­lor terms this self-deprecation as “chronic hypochon­dri­a­sis,” a fix­a­tion on illness.

It doesn’t help when your polit­i­cal lead­ers — the ones who, by def­i­n­i­tion, are expected to be the biggest boost­ers — turn out to be the biggest busters of a city’s pride.

For more than a year, Toron­to­ni­ans have been bom­barded with mes­sages that the city is a fis­cal bas­ket case. Waste is every­where. Taxes are evil — and too high. And it’s essen­tial to take the axe to social, com­mu­nity, cul­tural and artis­tic ser­vices as they may be “nice to haves.” Haven’t you heard what’s hap­pen­ing in Greece?

Our eco­nomic indi­ca­tors sug­gest this is gross fear-mongering. The lat­est report, out now, shows a pos­i­tive out­look in every indi­ca­tor for the City of Toronto proper. For example:

• The sea­son­ally adjusted unem­ploy­ment rate fell to 8.8% in March (above the rest of Canada, but trend­ing down­ward). Some 27,000 more peo­ple are employed in the city than a year ago.

• Toronto con­tin­ues to lead all North Amer­i­can cities or city regions in the num­ber of high-rise con­struc­tion projects (185), more than Mex­ico City (88) and New York (85) com­bined. And they are not just con­dos. Don­ald Trump offi­cially opened his lux­ury hotel Mon­day; com­mer­cial activ­ity is up; indus­trial con­struc­tion is strong; and insti­tu­tional build­ings con­tinue to rise.

• The city’s value of build­ing per­mits was $720 mil­lion in Feb­ru­ary, gal­lop­ing ahead of last year, and higher than the com­bined num­bers across the 905 region.

• Office vacancy rates have been trend­ing down­wards for two years and now stands at 5.5%, even as a num­ber of large down­town office build­ings open up.

• If you’ve heard that new immi­grants are bypass­ing Toronto for bet­ter prospects out west, look at the num­bers again. Almost four in 10 choose the GTA, one in five com­ing to the 416 area.

Com­ment: Over 100,000 peo­ple move to Toronto from other coun­tries, every year. There is a rea­son they come here.

• And a huge num­ber of peo­ple find city life attrac­tive. About 45% of all hous­ing starts in the Toronto region are in the city proper.

• Google is open­ing its Cana­dian head­quar­ters on Rich­mond St. W. Coca-Cola Canada’s new HQ is com­ing to King St. E. And every­where you look, the poten­tial here is great.

Speak­ing to the board of trade, Nay­lor listed the city’s virtues. Spread­ing it across the entire met­ro­pol­i­tan region, he reminded his lis­ten­ers that Toronto is top ranked in Canada for entre­pre­neur­ship, the health sec­tor, food and bev­er­age sec­tor, man­u­fac­tur­ing, finan­cial ser­vices, infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies, the cul­ture and cre­ative sec­tor, legal ser­vices, cul­tural diver­sity, share of top-100 star­tups in Canada, inno­va­tion and the like.

Com­ment: Aren’t we the cen­tre of the app devel­op­ment world?

Inter­na­tion­ally, Toronto is ranked low­est in risk for employ­ers, sec­ond in oppor­tu­nity and as “smart city on the planet;” third for qual­ity of life; fourth for inno­va­tion, liv­abil­ity, rates of entre­pre­neur­ship and as a “city of the future;” sixth in busi­ness com­pet­i­tive­ness, 10^th as a finance cen­tre; and way down the lad­der (59^th) as an expen­sive city.

“Put sim­ply, we are good at every­thing because we are good at every­thing,” said Naylor.

Worth repeat­ing.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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