Though there are many beautiful places to visit in Canada, no other city comes close to Toronto in terms of sightseeing and grandeur. Toronto is easily the most populated city in Canada and is the capital of the province of Ontario. Toronto, with two and a half million citizens, ranks in at number five in the most populated cities in North America. If you include the Golden Horseshoe (the region of Southern Ontario that Toronto is a part of), you’ve got a whopping eight million people that call the Greater Toronto Area home! This is a quarter of Canada’s entire population contained within earshot of America’s Great Lakes.
Toronto commands a very large cache in the global financial sphere and for good reason. The Toronto Stock Exchange is one of the ten largest stock exchanges in the world. The “Big Five” banks of Canada all call Toronto home and Bay Street, in the Financial District, is known the world over for having some of the most important brokerage firms on the face of the planet. With such wealth, it is little wonder that Toronto is one of the most expensive cities to live in within Canada. This high cost does have an upside, though, as Toronto is one of the safest cities in North America when it comes to crime rates. Much of this has to do with the city’s stringent policies regarding gun laws but, regardless, the low incidence of crime is even more remarkable when one considers how diverse the population of Toronto is. No one nationality is dominant in Toronto, though people of European descent (British, Irish, and the like) make up just over half of the population. Nearly a quarter of Toronto is made up of Chinese and South Asian people, and the fact of the matter is that Toronto is incredibly diverse and there is no real “majority”. This is made even more evident when one sees how multilingual the city is; though English is the dominant language, there are enough French, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, and many more foreign tongues that the emergency services are able to respond to over one hundred and fifty languages!
Toronto is about more than just business and multiculturalism, though. Tourists who visit Toronto consistently marvel at the amazing sights contained within this busy burg. The Toronto Zoo, for instance, is one of the largest in the world and contains nearly five hundred different animal species and over five thousand different creatures! The much loved neighborhood of Yorkville attracts visitors from around the world for its very prestigious upscale boutiques and restaurants. For those with slightly less discerning tastes, the Toronto Easton Centre offers people of more modest means an incredible shopping experience and, as a result, has become Toronto’s most popular tourist spot, attracting an astonishing fifty two million visitors a year! With all the perks of big cities and hardly any of the crime, pollution, or crowding, it is little wonder that people from all over the world adore and cherish Toronto. If you have yet to visit this Canadian wonderland, do yourself a favor and take a pilgrimage to the happiest place on Earth (north of Disney World, that is).