Is This Toronto || Hot News 24/7
Channel: Hot News 24/7
Date: 2018-04-25

Is This Toronto || Hot News 24/7
TORONTO — Monday morning, all we could talk about was the weather: Toronto woke up to a bright and warm day. Just a week earlier, as a nasty coda to a very long winter, an ice storm had battered and smattered the city for three days. Yards were strewn with debris and broken branches, and streets were clogged with snow and water and ice. Seven days later, and at last! — the weather turned. Toronto’s bike lanes and patios and sidewalks were full again.
By bright and warm Monday afternoon, the city’s conversation had changed, and it won’t go back to easy weather chatter anytime soon. The midday attack on pedestrians along a northern stretch of Yonge Street, the city’s main drag, was terrible and terrifying. This is the case whenever and wherever such things happen in the world today. But it’s fundamentally shocking in this city, for this city. This is not supposed to happen here. After all, this is Toronto.
With 10 dead and 15 injured by a man who — while his motives are not yet determined — clearly found inspiration in weaponizing a rental van to run down innocent civilians, the city has experienced the sort of horrifying event that we have long since accepted happens in the world, only elsewhere. Indeed, in a profoundly felt if rarely discussed way (we retain at least this part of our British heritage), that’s the point of Toronto itself: Whether it’s the Great Irish Famine in the 19th century or Syria’s civil war in the 21st, tragic events and traumatic histories happen elsewhere, and that’s why you come here, to make a life for yourself and your family in peace.
In doing so, and in accepting that you’re doing so alongside people from all over the world committed to the same idea, you contribute to and benefit from being part of a success story now in its third century and going strong — a flourishing, cosmopolitan urban center in a country committed to peace, order and good government. We argue about how we’re doing with those second and third components, but very rarely about the first. In a world brutalized and shredded by sectarian conflict, Toronto can feel at times like an urban amusement park: It’s the most ethnically diverse and pluralist city on the planet, and also, as residents and visitors alike have long both assumed and experienced, the friendliest and safest.
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