Toronto Green Standard: Fill & Download for Free

The City of Guelph is an increasingly important part of the Waterloo region, and is, in fact, one of Canada’s fastest growing cities, boasting low unemployment, a low crime rate, and a high standard of living. Located just 45 minutes outside of Toronto, Guelph offers home buyers the perfect combination of big city life and conveniences and small-town charm and friendliness.Guelph HistoryThe City of Guelph was officially founded on St. George’s Day, April 23rd, 1827 with the ceremonial felling of a large maple tree. It was one of Canada’s first ‘planned towns’, having been created by the Canada Company and designed by Scottish author and newly appointed Supervisor of the Company, John Galt. He envisioned a new kind of town, one that could be as friendly to families as it could to businesses, all based around the beauty of the Speed River.It was Galt who chose the name for the new town. His superiors at the Canada Company had suggested Goderich, but he chose Guelph, as it was a name belonging to the British Royal Family – whose current monarch was George IV – that had never been used for a town in their honour before.Since its founding Guelph has become a modern, vibrant place that intermingles the old with the new seamlessly. The history is still there, the unique street layouts created by Galt are still there but so are all of the modern conveniences homebuyers are seeking in the 21st Century.Guelph Today – A Booming EconomyIt is its very diverse economy that has helped Guelph achieve its current level of economic success. The 2016 unemployment rate of 3.9% is the lowest in the country while the standard of living is consistently voted and named as one of the best.Manufacturing, education, technology and bio-technology are all major players in the city’s current economy. There is even a growing television and movie making presence, with numerous TV and film productions using Guelph as a base, including James Franco’s 11.22.63, CBCs Murdoch Mysteries and the current Starz smash hit American Gods.Guelph Today – An Education CentreEducational opportunities in Guelph are plentiful. Conestoga College and The University of Guelph offer excellent post secondary education and a highly rated network of both public and private schools offer a diverse set of offerings for students of all ages from toddlers to teens.Guelph Today – Arts, Entertainment and Recreation for AllThe residents of Guelph tend to work hard but they play hard too. From the scenic beauty and outdoor recreational opportunities offered by the city’s many green spaces, including the Riverside Park and the Royal City Natural Area, to the many restaurants, cafes and bars to concerts, plays and more offered at the city’s numerous entertainment venues, including the 4,715 seat multi-purpose Sleeman Centre, there is something for everyone. And the fact that all that the great city of Toronto has to offer is just a 45-minute drive away expands the cultural and recreational opportunities for Guelph residents even further.

No, it's not the same thing.One of the reasons that the cultures of Toronto and Ontario don't dominate Canada is because New York and California are already there. The cultural border between Canada and the USA is essentially an open one. Who can resist something like Seinfeld or the Kim Kardashian juggernaut?I should state this great Canadian basic reality, there are two official languages in Canada, with quite distinct popular cultures. Quebec has its own distinct culture, not a subculture of a larger Canadian one. There isn't one Canadian culture. There can't be.I am talking primarily about what is called “popular culture”. Classical music, operas and ballet are really international, with a fair amount of Germany, Russia and Italy thrown in, and some Elgar, some Handel (A successful German immigrant to England), etc.The Economics of Popular and Not So CultureCanada has a population of about 37,000,000 people. Perhaps about 28,000,000 or so are fairly fluent in English. Maybe 7,000,000 or somewhat more have French as their mother tongue. There are Canadians who still haven't attained fluency in either official languages, recent immigrants or older ones and aboriginal Canadians who speak their own ancestral ones.37,000,000 people is considerably less than the population of California. They are dispersed across a huge geographic area. Toronto is the biggest metropolitan area in Canada, with somewhat over 6,000,000 people. Compared to the New York or Los Angeles metropolitan areas, it is small. Toronto is also by far the most important immigrant receiving city in Canada. A substantial part of Toronto's population are relatively recent immigrants with a limited command of English and still a lot of involvement in the culture and affairs of their country and origin. They live in the same city with English-speaking Canada's media “elite”, but have little involvement with the cultural products of that elite.I say “products” quite deliberately. Culture requires a consumer base. English-speaking Canada's is small, much of it very far away from Toronto in a country where air travel is costly and the media and social media are full of American product with very high production standards. The Torontonians have too small a market to produce a lot of products of that kind.Not that long ago Canada's population was far smaller. When I was a child in the 1950's it was about 14,000,000. Metro Toronto only had somewhat more than 1,000,000. Canada does not have a long tradition of mass marketing cultural products.Compare that Broadway, to a large extent a descendant of thriving vaudeville, even before 1900, itself partially a product of the Yiddish theatre of the very large numbers of East European Jews who settled in New York City.Consider Hollywood, itself to some extent an offshoot of that vaudeville. Hollywood began grinding out silent films early in the twentieth century. There is a century of experience there.Ontario Ain't No California!What teenage Canadian boy of my generation could resist the exotic charm of Annette Funicello? Did not “Beach Blanket Bingo” speak directly to our hopes and desires? Did Jack Benny and Phil Silvers not make us laugh? How could we not dream of walking the The Hollywood Walk of Fame? How could Disneyland not tantalize us?California is warm. It has palm trees. It has Venice Beach. It has really, really attractive people who one could dream of sleeping with, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Lindsay Logan, the incredible Britney Spears. It has bars that don't have to serve food.Ontario doesn't. Until relatively recent times it prided itself in its puritanism. They were most reluctant to admit that anybody slept within anybody. Think of a New Hampshire writ large. Think about the Church of England, think of the most dire type of Methodism and turbo Presbyterianism. Annette alone could have beaten their brains out.Toronto is the capital of Ontario. It used to proudly style itself as the Belfast of North America, “Toronto the Good”. Sex and booze negative environments can't culturally dominate anyone.Toronto doesn't have anyone raising a lamp beside the golden door. Toronto was about a comfortable, British elite in a social class ridden city. Then, since the 1950's, it has been about high levels of immigration generating very large ethnic neighbourhoods.Generally, Toronto's elite was and, not infrequently, still is nationally disliked. The business portion did nasty economic things to Canadians elsewhere, even within Ontario. So, what do other Canadians call Toronto?-Hog Town-The Canadian (little) Big Apple-The Big SmokeNo Jack Parr in Toronto. No David Letterman. No Conan O'Brien. No Jimmy Kimmel. Just small time pale imitations on the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.The CBC Doesn't Convince AnybodyThe English-language headquarters of the CBC in Toronto did have a sort of golden age in the late 1950's and early 1960's. For a few years it did produce a number of local stars.This period guttered out. Because CBC is a taxpayer funded (It does accept commercials to reduce some of its high costs.) it has a political agenda that doesn't necessarily correspond to Canadian consumer demand. The CBC was meant to educate. Nowadays it educates a lot about political correctness, feminism and aboriginal affairs.Interestingly, some of the CBC's most popular shows did not reference Toronto and were not very Ontarian. Don Messer's Jubilee and Anne of Green Gables glorified the rural culture of Prince Edward Island. The highly popular “Beachcombers” was set on British Columbia's Pacific coast.In 1961 the Government of Canada authorized Canada's first private television network, CTV. CTV, being commercial, wanted very much to show American shows. So did the other private networks and stations that were authorized after.And then, cable TV became virtually a necessity of life in English-speaking Canada. The primary purpose of cable TV is to show American networks and super stations. Whatever Toronto can produce is at least partially drowned out.Writers, Poets?Yes, English-speaking Canada has them. However some of the “greats” depicted English and Jewish minority life in Montreal, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Mordechai Richler. Prairie literature has had a strong impact on Canadian writing.Margaret Atwood can be said to be the Queen of female, English-language Canadian writers. She lives in Toronto but is not necessarily “of” Toronto. One of her most popular novels is about a liberated woman who has sex with a bear in the bush. It is not so clear that Margaret Atwood all that much even likes Toronto.Ethnics, You Won't See Yourselves in Our MirrorWhen I was a child, the top two Canadian comedians were Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster, a comedy team. They made it all the way to the Ed Sullivan show, virtually unprecedented for Canadian entertainers. They were residents of Toronto and stars on the English-speaking CBC.They were Jewish. However one didn't speak much of such things in Canada. Wayne and Shuster were not Jerry Lewis. They didn't speak of it either.Jews were not very popular in Canada but there wasn't much ethnic content in general. Large-scale non-British immigration to Canada's cities had begun on the Prairies in the 1890's but didn't reach the cities of Ontario until the 1950's. Toronto and Ontario culture did not have the drive and expressiveness brought to American culture by Jews, Italians and other “white ethnics”. Canada had only a tiny black population until the 1960's. There wasn't any Canadian Sammy Davis Junior, in Toronto or anywhere.Ethnic culture just hasn't made it to the “mainstream” all that much in Toronto or elsewhere in Canada.To a large extent, Toronto and Ontario culture just didn't have the energy.No Search for A Uniform English-Canadian CultureAmerican culture, based in New York City and California, has plentiful commercial resources and cultural input from so many groups. New York City and California can afford to be dominant. This is in a country where nationalism is very strong and there is great pride in being the world's cultural superpower, not just its military and economic one.It's not like that in Canada. Without the very strong cultural centralizing forces, Canada's distinct provinces and regions are free to go their own cultural way, obviously within the bounds of the Canadian constitution and Canadian laws. Canada has an official doctrine of multiculturalism. It doesn't go all that far but it does give a little scope for ethnic groups to do their own thing.So Americans, I hope you don't mind if we share New York City and California with you. There is nothing wrong with Toronto or the rest of Ontario but they just aren't the same!Martin Levine

Singapore is an amazing city, one I'm very glad to have lived here for the past two years. There are a few things US and other cities should look to Singapore for:Urban boundaries to growth are good. Singapore works in part because it's dense, but it's dense because it doesn't have a choice. Cities that aren't on islands can emulate this by setting urban growth boundaries or green spaces as Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, BC have done. The challenge is doing this early enough to make a difference. Vancouver put up their Agricultural Land Reserve in 1973 and their Green Zone in 1996. This is part of what Vancouver has done right. By comparison, southern Ontario's Green Belt was established in 2005, long after massive sprawl spread outward from Toronto making it better late than never, I suppose. It's too late for Phoenix, Los Angeles and most US cities, but other strategies for urban densification are available.Making it possible for the less wealthy to live and eat in the city makes good economic sense. Singapore has a huge percentage of its populace living in what would be considered governmental housing, their Housing Development Board flats. These are typically ten to twelve story apartment blocks. Singaporeans are allowed to take out 99 year leases on their units which appreciate in value, so they have lower cost housing with pride of ownership and asset growth, while allowing relocation easily if strategic infrastructure such as an MRT station needs to be built instead. Hawker centres and wet markets were established by the government with low cost rental for stalls and high standards of cleanliness enforced. Singapore has a reputation for being a very expensive city, but housing and food for locals can be very inexpensive. That said, they have imported roughly 2 million guest workers, a large proportion of whom are labourers who live in dormitories, sometimes in shift-bed dormitories. This temporary work force is necessary for the amount of construction and reconstruction they do constantly within their borders.Public transit and density go hand-in-hand profitably. Until very recently, no MRT (subway) line was allowed to be started unless it had a business case showing a profit. This was possible because of the density of the city. However, it's become such a primary form of movement that a couple of lines have been approved with no profits because it's a strategic investment. The arguments occurring in Toronto about light-rail that actually serves larger portions of Toronto vs subways which are much more expensive and can't serve most Torontonians don't happen in Singapore because they are irrelevant. Singapore is dense and growing more dense, so heavy investments in transit make complete fiscal sense.Tree cover makes economic sense. For over fifty years, Singapore has had a specific policy of maximizing greenery in the city. This has led to Singapore having more varieties of trees on its tiny island than in the continental United States by one count. It means there are green walls, and trees along roads and shade. The air is cleaner, and walkways and at least the lower parts of buildings are sheltered from the elements. It's a much more beautiful city than most of its Asian neighbours.Preserving and linking waterfront access for all is good. Pathways open to everyone line the rivers and East Coast Parkway waterfront of Singapore. Singaporeans congregate on them -- mostly early in the morning or after dark -- to exercise, stroll, dine or just watch people walk by. Vancouver knows this lesson as well, having had explicit urban planning policies and regulations requiring developers to pay for extension of the Seawall when they build near the water. Sydney, as a counter example, has chopped up their waterfront resource drastically, making following the water impossible, and even getting to the water occasionally tortuous. Toronto has wasted decades with an only partially linked, and as a result underused, Martin Goodman Trail along the water.Encouraging ethnic and religious mingling is good - Singapore has more latitude than most in this regard, but they have explicit requirements that each HDB building have the same ratio of ethnicities as Singapore as a whole. This prevents ghettoization, makes radicalization difficult and increases acceptance among ethnicities and religions. The banlieus of Paris and the increasing number of monocultural immigrant subdivisions in Toronto and Vancouver just aren't possible in Singapore, so the integration challenges faced in those countries don't exist. Historical ethnic neighbourhoods still manage to exist in Singapore despite this, with focal points like Mustafa's anchoring Little India for example. It's less clear to me how western democracies could effectively create the same results without the degree of social control allowed the government in Singapore.These are the major points that occur to me in a few minutes. Thanks for asking!Like my content? Help it spread via Patreon. Get confidential consulting via OnFrontiers. Email me if you’d like me to write for you.