1788 Plan for Toronto Harbour, before Simcoe visited in 1792.
This week at city hall, Rob For—oh, to hell with it. Let’s talk about the weather.
Too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter might strike Canadians as the natural way of things, but you’d be surprised at how much of the world muddies through a nondescript cycle of vaguely-differentiated seasons. Not us. Toronto’s climate takes seasonal differentiation very seriously, in the kind of Presbyterian way that hold that if a little misery isn’t involved, the lesson probably won’t stick.
I think about this a lot, whenever Toronto hits another climactic nadir, which it does every few months (miserable heat / miserable cold / miserable rain / seasonal heartbreak). The hint of masochism is strong, as in all fields of local endeavour. Why would five million-odd people choose to live in such unwelcoming climes?
In a humid heat-wave like this, the city’s brick houses absorb heat until their inside walls are warm to the touch, like so many pizza ovens. Cans of soup can be opened and found pre-heated. Cats lie sprawled out on the pavement at night, long past the point of caring. If there is any substance to the theory of evolution, Torontonians will have gills by the end of the week. All of which would be fine, but for the thought that in four months it’s going to be pitch black and pelting with freezing rain, yet unable to muster up a proper snowfall.
This, inevitably, is the question I ask myself at times like this: Whose idea was it to put a city here? Sometimes the placement of cities is accidental, incremental, or lost to the shadows of time, growing from ancient sites or agrarian settlements, for whom nobody can properly be blamed.
But no, not us. On days like today, fellow Torontonians, it is helpful to remember that this miserable weather came about not by chance, but because a man stuck his finger on a map and said, “here.” This was John Graves Simcoe’s plan. Now it’s 38 degrees outside and here we all are, stuck. I blame John Graves Simcoe.
It’s true that the area had seen earlier settlements—notably, a couple of First Nations villages up along the Humber, and an isolated and ultimately abandoned French trading post along the western lakeshore. But for the most part, Toronto was a straight-up forest before 1793.
In fairness, Toronto wasn’t Simcoe’s fault alone. The governor of Upper Canada, Simcoe realized that his existing capital, the border town of Niagara-on-the-Lake (called Newark in olden times) was too close for comfort to the United States, which had only recently come into being and was still kind of cooking. His first choice for a new capital was a more defensible mid-provincial spot he called London, but Lord Dorchester, his boss in Kingston, nixed the plan. So Simcoe picked out a spot on Lake Ontario that was sheltered by a yawning peninsula, offering a natural harbour and the perfect spot for a nude beach, or maybe a red-light district. He called it York.
Perhaps Simcoe didn’t honestly know what the weather was like here before he made his call. That’s alright; everyone makes mistakes. That’s no excuse for not making good on it. After spending a full year here, why didn’t he announce that the whole thing was a botch, pull up camp, and establish a capital somewhere else? There were plenty of places that were a good distance from the American border. The interior of British Columbia is nice. So is Bermuda. Why aren’t we there?
In the event, Upper Canada’s administrators and aristocrats had to be dragged from comfortable Newark, grumbling all the way, and installed in the muddy, boggy, stumpy settlement of York, which had just been hacked out of the woods. Fat load of good it did. On one hand, Simcoe’s hunch about the border was right: When things with the Americans eventually got bad in the War of 1812, Newark was completely flattened. (If you go to Niagara today, you’ll see that much of the architecture is of an 1813 vintage.)
On the other hand, that didn’t stop the Americans from flattening York too. An army under the command of General Zebulon Pike landed in the west end, overwhelming the small local force and marching on Fort York. The British withdrew, but not before setting fire to the powder magazine. The resulting explosion didn’t halt the Americans, but it did kill Pike, making him the first man named Zebulon to get blown up while attempting to invade Toronto.
There is very little since then that cannot be blamed, for one reason or another, on John Graves Simcoe. The Christie Pits riots would not have rioted in the Christie Pits if the Christie Pits had not existed, as such. Hurricane Hazel could have been averted by not putting a city in the path of a hurricane. The waterfront would not have been such an imbroglio if we had been kept away from the lake in the first place. Imagine the improvement in the city’s fortunes had it been placed on farmland more suitable for Tim Hortons than libraries, which grow best in wooded areas.
And the weather. Most of all, I blame him for the weather. In fact, this is why, on the hottest and coldest days of the year, I propose we acknowledge Simcoe’s contribution to our daily lives, by declaring it Damn You, John Graves Simcoe Day. This is better than the existing Simcoe Day, which nobody really celebrates anyway. Let’s give it some meaning in our lives. In fact, let us name today the very first Damn You, John Graves Simcoe Day.
As you swelter on the street or shiver by the air conditioning, reading news about a city whose chief problem seems to be with the fact that it exists when its leaders seem to rather wish it didn’t, take a moment to curse the man whose fault this all is in the first place. Damn you, John Graves Simcoe. It’s hot, and they’re talking about selling the zoo. This is all your fault.
