Why Toronto

A uniting has to start someplace, led by some people, at some time. The letter claims this is the place. This page is the case — every claim with a receipt.

The world already lives here

Toronto’s official motto is Diversity Our Strength, and the numbers make it literal. Nearly half the city — 46.6%, 1.29 million people — was born outside Canada, roughly double the national share (2021 Census, Statistics Canada). More than half — 55.7% — identify as members of a visible-minority group, with no single group anywhere near a majority: this is a city of minorities, which is another way of saying a city where everyone belongs the same way (City of Toronto census backgrounder). More than 180 languages and dialects are spoken here. And when a 2016 BBC analysis went looking for the most diverse city in the world — weighing not just foreign-born share but the full range of origins — it ranked Toronto first, counting some 230 nationalities (BBC “More or Less,” 2016). This is not trivia. It means the world’s problems can be discussed here by the people who lived them, face to face, in high trust — and that anything solved here has a diaspora ready to carry it home.

Among Toronto’s arrivals are people who fled everything to get here — freedom fighters, journalists, human-rights advocates, civil-liberties defenders — and people who have lived inside nearly every governance, health, school and disaster-response system on earth. Everyone in this city descends from someone who wanted a better life. Most of this city left somewhere that broke its heart. That is a qualification no other credential replaces.

A city built for learning

Toronto’s public library is, by its own audited count, the biggest and busiest public library system in North America: 100 branches and more than 46 million visits a year (Toronto Public Library). Much of the research on this site was written at its desks — free, warm, open to anyone.

The universities clear the same bar. The University of Toronto just placed fourth in the world for research output — second among public universities, in the same tier as Harvard and Stanford (NTU World University Rankings, 2026) — and ranks first in Canada and 21st overall in the Times Higher Education 2026 table. And it does not stand alone: York University, Toronto Metropolitan University, OCAD University and the Université de l’Ontario français, alongside Seneca, Humber, George Brown and Centennial colleges, fill this city with hundreds of thousands of students drawn from every corner of the planet. A city that wants to review, adapt and apply the world’s best ideas could not ask for better equipment.

A city that can build what it decides

Toronto is Canada’s largest technology hub and the third largest in North America (City of Toronto), home to a world-class AI research community and the headquarters of the country’s biggest banks. It knows how to run complex systems: its hospitals, universities, agencies and transit do it every day — Union Station alone is Canada’s busiest multi-modal transit hub, serving some 65 million passengers a year (our transit research). The capacity to execute a decided plan is already here. What has been missing is the deciding.

On whose land

Toronto — a name commonly traced to the Mohawk Tkaronto, “where there are trees standing in the water” — is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. The city stands on land of the Toronto Purchase, Treaty 13 — read the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation’s own account of that treaty, whose unfinished business is recent enough that Canada settled the Toronto Purchase claim only in 2010. The region is also governed by the Dish With One Spoon wampum — a covenant grounded in Indigenous law between the Anishinaabek, the Haudenosaunee and allied nations to share and care for one place together; Talking Treaties’ guide for Torontonians is the place to start learning it.

Sit with what that means for this project: a city trying to learn how to decide its future together is not inventing something new on this land. It is arriving — late — at a practice the first peoples here put into law centuries ago. Any real uniting of Toronto includes First Nations, Inuit and Métis neighbours as partners on their own terms, and starts by learning what was already agreed.

The moment

On October 26, 2026, Ontario votes everywhere at once — 2,289 races across 414 directly-electing municipalities and their school boards, 3,180 seats in a single day (our research) — and with the municipal votes in British Columbia, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island and Quebec’s provincial election, more than three in four Canadians live somewhere with a scheduled election this fall. It is Toronto’s last municipal election before 2030. If a city were ever going to practice deciding its own future out loud, on the record, the calendar will not offer a better opening this decade.

So: the world’s people, a library and universities to learn with, institutions that can execute, the oldest sharing covenant on the continent, and a once-a-decade opening on the calendar. If not Toronto, then where? If not us, then who? If not now, then when?