Once among the dullest cities on the planet, and for a few years during the 1970s and 80s, among the most self-proud. Toronto has become a great city by taking in more than a million immigrants in the last two decades and becoming multicultural and multiracial without becoming violent. In the 1980s, the global economy kicked the city so hard that it forgot about being world class, and its citizens became kinder and more cosmopolitan. It is now-and without dispute-the largest safe city in the world, it has a thousand small, often exotic neighbourhoods, and outside of its financial district, appears to be a deciduous forest when you fly over it in a plane. Toronto is currently under siege by right wing suburbanites wanting to rid it of immigrants or any other kind of complex human textures, and left wing anti-smoking and safety zealots overeager to supervise the city’s uniquely liberal quality of life.