People began to occupy the Toronto region shortly after the last ice age. Thousands of years later, in the 17th century, these indigenous peoples opened trade with the French, who subsequently established trading posts in Toronto in the 18th century. Toronto passed to British control in 1763, and the creation of an urban community began 30 years later when colonial officials built Fort York and laid out a town site. That community, ‘York,' became the capital of the province of Upper Canada (now Ontario). It also grew as an important commercial centre, and, in 1834, with 9,250 residents, it was incorporated as the ‘City of Toronto.' The population continued to expand: when Canada became a country in 1867, the city was home to 50,000 souls. By 1901, 208,000 people lived here.
A great shift in the spirit of the community began with the numerous waves of immigrants after 1945. By 2001, Toronto had become one of the most multicultural cities on the planet, where 152 languages and dialects were spoken in an atmosphere of comparative harmony. According to that year's census, more than half of Toronto's 2.5 million residents were born outside Canada, and a million people belonged to visible minorities. These post-war decades also saw the compact city of 1945 burst its boundaries like other North American cities to consume some of Canada's best farmland, both within Toronto's ultimate 632-square-kilometre boundary, and far beyond into the bedroom communities of Ontario's ‘Golden Horseshoe.'
Today's Toronto is a large and complex urban centre. Like any similarly large city it faces important challenges and competing opinions on how to face them. At the same time, Toronto continues to flourish as a tremendously exciting city, embracing a strong and prospering economy, rich cultural underpinnings, and retaining its long heritage as a comparatively safe, orderly, and inclusive community, where working and living conditions are among the very best to be had on the planet.
(some information courtesy of Toronto Archives)
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