Richmond Street Methodist Church, Toronto, 1867
On this date in 1867 Toronto became the capital of Ontario.
I haven’t found the source yet, but I know for sure Frye once dryly observed of “Toronto the Good” during the 1930s: “A good place to mind your own damn business.”
On the other hand, Toronto at its best seems, for Frye, to be a touchstone for the cosmopolitan society Canada appears determined to become. From “Canadian Culture Today”:
When I first came to Toronto, in 1929, it was a homogeneous Scotch-Irish town, dominated by the Orange Order, and greatly derided by the rest of Canada for its smugness, its snobbery, and its sterility. The public food in restaurants and hotels was of very indifferent quality, as it is in all right-thinking Anglo-Saxon communities. After the war, Toronto took in immigrants to the extent of nearly a quarter of its population, and large Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Central European, West Indian communities grew up within it. The public food improved dramatically. More important, these communities all seemed to find their own place in the larger community with a minimum of violence and tension, preserving in their own cultures and yet taking part in the total one. It has seemed to me that this very relaxed absorption of minorities, where there is no concerted effort at a “melting pot,” has something to do with what the Queen symbolizes, the separation of the head of state from the head of government. Because Canada was founded by two peoples, nobody could ever know what a hundred per cent Canadian was, and hence the decentralizing rhythm that is so essential to culture had room to expand. (CW 12, 518)