Things To Do in Toronto Canada

Multicultural Neighbourhoods and the Toronto Table

Toronto is one of the most ethnically diverse large cities in the world, with over half its population born outside Canada and communities from every major country represented in sufficient numbers to sustain authentic culinary and cultural institutions. Kensington Market is a dense, pedestrian-scale neighbourhood of Caribbean, South American, Middle Eastern, and Asian vendors whose collective intensity produces one of the most genuinely multicultural street-level experiences in North America. Chinatown on Spadina Avenue, Little Italy on College Street, Little Portugal on Dundas West, the Tamil neighbourhood of Scarborough, and the Greek community of Danforth Avenue each carry distinct food cultures that make Toronto's restaurant landscape exceptionally varied. This multicultural richness is not a marketing description but an accurate account of the city's daily social reality.

Film, Arts and the Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), held for ten days in September, is the most attended film festival in the world and the most influential in determining which films receive Oscar consideration, because its audience of international buyers, critics, and industry professionals is large and commercially sophisticated enough to make a strong TIFF reception a significant predictor of awards success. The city's permanent cultural infrastructure includes the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), which holds significant collections of Canadian art and European old masters in Frank Gehry's 2008 renovation of the original building. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) holds one of the most comprehensive natural history and world culture collections in North America in a building that was controversially extended with the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal in 2007.

Business, Finance and the Canadian Economy

Toronto's financial district, centered on Bay Street and the cluster of towers between King and Front Streets, is the most concentrated expression of the city's economic ambition and worth walking through for its public art, the underground PATH network, and the contrast between the 1920s Beaux-Arts banking halls and the glass towers that surround them. The Toronto Stock Exchange building on Bay Street, now converted to mixed use, retains its 1937 Art Deco facade — one of the finest surviving examples of the style in Canada. The MaRS Discovery District, in repurposed heritage buildings on College Street, is one of the largest urban innovation hubs in the world and operates public programming including talks and exhibitions accessible to non-members. The Toronto International Film Festival in September, the most commercially significant film festival in the world after Cannes, transforms the Entertainment District for ten days with premieres, industry events, and public screenings that make it the most visible single event in the city's annual cultural calendar.

Sport: Basketball, Ice Hockey and Baseball

Toronto is the only Canadian city in the NBA, and the Raptors' 2019 NBA Championship produced a civic celebration that demonstrated the depth of basketball's hold on a multicultural city whose immigrant communities had adopted the sport as their own. The Scotiabank Arena in the downtown core is shared between the Raptors and the Maple Leafs, the most historically significant franchise in professional ice hockey and one of the original six NHL teams. The Blue Jays at the Rogers Center provide Major League Baseball, making Toronto one of a handful of cities globally with representation at the highest level of three major professional sports. The Rogers Cup tennis tournament, part of the ATP and WTA Masters series, alternates between Toronto and Montreal annually.

Architecture, Public Space and the Changing Waterfront

Toronto has invested significantly in its public realm and architectural ambition over the past two decades, and the results are most visible on the waterfront, where the former industrial port lands are being transformed into a new mixed-use district at a scale and pace that has made it one of the most discussed urban development projects in North America. The Bentway, a linear park and public space built under the elevated Gardiner Expressway, operates as an outdoor performance venue, skating rink, and community space in what was previously dead infrastructure. The CN Tower, at 553 metres once the world's tallest free-standing structure, defines the downtown skyline and houses a revolving restaurant and glass floor observation deck that give the most complete aerial view of the city available from any accessible structure. The PATH system, an underground network of tunnels connecting over 30 kilometres of shopping, food, and transit infrastructure beneath the downtown core, is the largest underground shopping complex in the world and a genuinely useful pedestrian network for the city's office workers in winter. The Distillery District, a restored Victorian industrial complex in the east end that now houses galleries, restaurants, and studios in the most complete surviving collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America, hosts the annual Toronto Christmas Market, one of the most attended seasonal events in the city. The Evergreen Brick Works, a former industrial quarry and brickyard north of the city center converted into an environmental and community center, hosts one of the best farmers' markets in the city on Saturday mornings and is the most visible example of Toronto's approach to industrial heritage as a public asset. The network of ravines running through the city, some 300 kilometres of natural valleys cutting through the urban fabric, forms the most distinctive natural feature of a city that is otherwise flat and grid-planned, and the trails within them are used year-round by walkers and cyclists who treat them as a parallel green city within the built one.