After all Torontonians have been through during the Rob Ford years, the city is emerging in great shape.
The Economist named Toronto the fourth best city in the world in which to live. In the world.
Real estate continues to hold its value. And while this poses a huge challenge for first-time home buyers, we've seen the alternative south of the border and who would opt for that housing collapse.
Buildings are popping up — downtown and uptown and in suburban towns from Oakville to Clarington — at an almost unprecedented and furious pace.
Film and movie shoots are robust and growing in Hollywood north.
At the soft opening of the Motecito restaurant at the north end of the TIFF festival towers on Adelaide this week, restaurateur Tom Bitove pointed to the attraction: within a square kilometre, thousands of people are moving into four condo towers and looking for public space to mingle outside of their tiny dwellings.
Toronto is hot. Downtown is hotter.
On Friday, enthusiastic crowds outside city hall marked the official kickoff to the 2015 Pan Am Games. It's not the Olympics that Toronto feels it deserves, but it's the first such major international sporting event the city has hosted. Crawl before you walk, T.dot.
Union Station is being remodelled. The fast train to the airport is reportedly on budget and on time.
Metrolinx has just been told by the province to speed up expenditure of some $12 billion in transit improvements over the next decade. A month earlier, transit builders were biting off their nails, fretting that a Tim Hudak government at Queen's Park might scuttle the whole plan.
Just about everywhere you turn, there is activity — chaos and congestion and traffic nightmare caused by the ripping up of the entire city, it seems — but, again, who wants the alternative of rusting cranes and empty lots. Traffic congestion is one sign of progress and economic growth. Who wants to live in a sleepy town where you are the only car driving in to work at rush hour?
All this is happening in spite of the hole that exists at the civic head and heart of the metropolis.
One can almost feel the pull away from the Rob Ford debacle and toward a future marked by civic amnesia about the failed experiment of the past four years.
This week, when the Nanos opinion poll reported John Tory had vaulted into the lead to become mayor of Toronto, with Olivia Chow second and Ford a distant third at 19 per cent, didn't you feel/hear the collective sigh? If a second polling firm confirms those results, smiles will break out. Torontonians, left to right of the political spectrum, are discovering they have choices and options that do not include the most miserable magistrate in modern times.
Imagine, if you can, thousands of volunteers stage a successful execution of a global event that brought thousands of people spending millions of dollars in your town. Now, you don't particularly have an affinity for the visitors, but, y'know, Toronto is an international city with a reputation for openness and inclusion, so as head honcho you have to do the hospitality thing.
As all of city council rise to salute the volunteers, what would you do as mayor of Toronto? You'd stand and honour their work. You would — unless you were the mistake of a mayor.
So, in spite of who wears the chain of office, piling embarrassment upon disappointment upon disgust, Toronto remains a special place.
We've taken our time reclaiming the waterfront, but look what's happened. This week, Corktown Common, a new park, opened in West Don Lands, a once-forgotten area enjoying a rebirth as home to the athletes' village for the Pan Ams and a future community after the game.
Instead of turning our noses up at the lands around Redpath and the hulking steel trawlers docked next to the city, we now debate the value of artistic and expensive umbrellas that define a popular park and beach named, of course, Sugar Beach.
The rebirth started with an unlikely trio — then-mayor Mel Lastman, premier Mike Harris and prime minister Jean Chrétien — not one of them a celebrated urbanite or connoisseur of city living. But they listened to enough advocates to realize the importance of the waterfront as the front porch to Canada's calling card city to the world.
And the investments are paying off.
You know Toronto is maturing when lame and lamentable proposals from the brother of the current mayor find no footing on the waterfront — not because Councillors Adam Vaughan and Pam McConnell rise up in opposition, but because the citizens nip it in the bud.
Watch for a similar development on Eglinton Ave.
Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca
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