Toronto's downtown core is thriving. It was never abandoned like the city centers of so many American cities, but many outlying areas had been neglected. In the past few years, that has changed for the better as they have been revitalized. Parkdale, a once-gloomy neighborhood west of the downtown core has been reclaimed by young families and gentrified, and the search for housing within reach of downtown has led to the gentrification of neighborhoods in the western and eastern parts of the city (Leslieville is the most notable recent example).
Toronto is still the Canadian city of choice for arriving immigrants; almost half of Canada's new immigrants now come to Toronto. Roughly 300,000 Hong Kong émigrés have joined Toronto's Chinese community, and there have been influxes from Somalia, Eastern Europe, India, Pakistan, and Central America. Neighborhoods around town preserve these cultures. While their influence is strong in many areas, it is perhaps most visible to a short-term visitor in the city's diverse dining options and in Toronto's many cultural festivals.
Life in Toronto sounds pretty sweet, but there's trouble under that smooth, polite surface. To understand the problems, you need to go back to 1998. That's when the Conservative provincial government -- ignoring countless petitions, protests, and public opinion -- forced through the megacity merger, making six municipalities unite under the name "Toronto." At the same time, the provincial government cut social spending. This is incredibly frustrating to most Torontonians, because the city has long been the engine of financial growth for the rest of the country (though with Alberta awash in oil money these days, that may change). The most frequent complaint heard in Toronto is that the city's municipal taxes aren't reinvested in its infrastructure, but end up being funneled to other places. What that translates into is that the city doesn't have the resources to take care of its own people. The city's homeless problem has only grown over the past several years.
In 2003, Ontario elected a Liberal government, which is still in power. Its relationship with the municipal government has been far more cordial than the previous government's, but that hasn't made Torontonians any happier. The provincial government agreed that Toronto needed to keep more of its tax revenue for itself, but it couldn't part with the great gobs of money it got from the city. So, in 2006, the City of Toronto Act was created. This allowed the municipal government to charge new and greater taxes (on things such as alcohol and land-transfer agreements), and to keep those revenues for its own coffers. Unfortunately, this has driven people and businesses out of Toronto; the surrounding Greater Toronto Area (GTA), is the main beneficiary (the GTA has its own municipal governments, and they keep the area a low-taxation haven). People in Toronto are paying more taxes than ever, yet getting fewer services than before.
Toronto managed to get over the fact that it lost the 2008 Olympics to Beijing (many locals never wanted the Games in their town, actually). At the time, some claimed that Toronto was being "strongly encouraged" to go after the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. However, the fact that Vancouver won the 2010 Winter Games quashed that dream. Unfortunately, the dream may have died a little too hard: there were some terrific plans that were drawn up to win over the International Olympic Committee (such as a public-transit link to Pearson International Airport) but there has been no movement on those fronts. However, Toronto put forward a bold new face in other ways. Suddenly it seemed like the right time to re-create its key arts institutions: Frank Gehry was tapped to design an expanded space for the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Royal Ontario Museum tore down its charming Terrace Galleries to make way for the prominent crystal galleries envisioned by Daniel Libeskind. Toronto also finally built its long-awaited opera house (the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts), which became the permanent home of the Canadian Opera Company and the National Ballet of Canada. Toronto also opened new attractions such as the Distillery District (and by "new," I mean that a complex of Victorian industrial buildings was redeveloped, not newly built), and Ireland Park, an impressive memorial to the 38,000 Irish immigrants who arrived during the Great Famine.
