Canada is about to embrace the world when it hosts the FIFA World Cup. Thousands of tourists are expected to descend on Toronto. I pity them.
The city used to be compared to the guy you wanted your daughter to date: Clean and safe. We may have been a tad boring, but everyone loved us. We were polite. Not anymore. Toronto's become the filthy, dangerous place where you can't even get on a streetcar or subway without finding someone doing drugs or sleeping off a hangover across three seats. No one cares and no one bothers to do anything about it, least of all Mayor Olivia Chow. My property taxes have gone up more than 18% since she became mayor. And the city is a dump.
I had a friend visiting from the U.K. recently. I was embarrassed to show her the city I once loved. It's scruffy and unsafe. In the course of two weeks, our experiences would put anyone off visiting.
On an early morning trip to a grocery store, my friend was approached by someone we're both convinced was intent on a distraction theft. They wanted money for TTC fare, which would have required my friend to open her wallet. She politely declined.
A Glimmer of Good
Oh, it wasn't all bad. We took in the Blue Jays game where Daulton Varsho ended the Jays' drought with a walk-off grand slam. We enjoyed a splendid Toronto Symphony concert, the Neil Diamond musical at the Princess of Wales Theatre (fantastic!) and an opera (great). We took the bus to the Stratford Festival and drove to Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Thanks to nightmarish traffic and demonstrators blocking roads on both trips, we spent five hours getting to and from those must-see tourist towns.
No Country for Old People
On our way home from one event, we were approached by two overly refreshed young men who insisted on invading our personal space to demand we be their grandmas. I don't know what gave them the idea that getting in the faces of two older women on a dark street late at night would be cute or funny. If we needed more grandchildren, we wouldn't pick them.
The TTC is a disaster. It's no country for old people. Streetcars don't go where they're supposed to. The subway is disrupted more than it's running. My friend and I are arthritic. We can get around walking, but climbing stairs is painful. Elevators and escalators are frequently out of order.
We took the Queen Streetcar home from the Art Gallery of Ontario, only to have a young woman having a psychotic episode sit down across from us. After her harassment of other passengers reached unacceptable levels, a guy ushered us off the streetcar. The driver, separated from passengers in a closed cabin, either didn't know or didn't care what was going on.
On a subway train, a group of feral-looking young men were defiantly vaping, as if challenging anyone in civil society to complain. Civil society being just that – civil – we stared at our feet and pretended it wasn't happening. No one enforces any rules. What do the people formerly known as ticket collectors now do? Everyone uses credit cards or Presto. There are no tickets to collect. The former ticket collectors stand around entrances to the subway drinking coffee because their collective agreement says they don't have to enforce fare payment.
The city I chose to live in decades ago was a place where people treated everyone with respect and where public transit wasn't used for drug rehab or a homeless shelter. Where protestors didn't shut down streets at will.
So welcome to the new Toronto, soccer fans. Not the place you'd like your daughter – or your granny – to visit without an armed guard.
