A Look Back at the Suburbs of Toronto

When Rob Ford became Toronto’s mayor in 2010, pundits explained that the rise of the brash populist—who believed that bike lanes and light rail lines amounted to a “war on the car”—was the revenge of the suburbs on the cosmopolitan city. “Ford Nation is made up of thousands and thousands of ordinary Torontonians, suburban Torontonians, who, like the mayor they so admire, see the city as little more than a place they drive through on the way somewhere else,” wrote Christopher Hume in the Toronto Star in 2013.

Leaving aside the fraught legacy of Ford, who died in 2016, the notion of a “suburban” big-city mayor seems like a paradox outside of Toronto. What makes it possible there is the city’s unusual political structure. Several of Toronto’s inner suburbs are now part of the city, having been amalgamated with it into a single megacity in 1998. So the kind of urban/suburban divide that characterizes most metropolitan regions in the U.S. is felt within the boundaries of Toronto itself. Former satellites like Etobicoke (Ford’s home base) and Scarborough are still thought of culturally distinct from downtown and the city’s more urban neighborhoods.