This week at city hall, Rob For- oh, to hell with it. Let’s talk about the weather.
Canadians are big on seasonal differentiation. A surprising amount of the world muddles through a nondescript cycle of vaguely-differentiated seasons, but not us. Toronto takes marking the seasons very seriously, in that Presbyterian way that holds 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 cold / miserable heat / miserable rain / cold miserable rain). The hint of masochism is strong. Why else 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 hallways are warm to the touch, radiating inwards like so many pizza ovens. Cans of soup can be opened and discovered to be pre-heated. Cats lie sprawled outside on the pavement at night, long past the point of caring. If there was any substance to the theory of evolution, Torontonians would have gills by the end of the week. I could even deal with this, but in four months it’s going to be pitch black and pelting with freezing rain, yet unable to muster up a proper snowfall.
Here’s the question I always 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.
Not Toronto. On days like today, let us remember that we’re under this weather because, long ago, a man planted his finger on a map and said, “here.” That was John Graves Simcoe. Today, it’s 38 degrees outside and 3,800 degrees inside and here we all are, stuck. It is John Graves Simcoe’s fault.
It’s true that the area had seen earlier settlements – 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.
Now, Toronto wasn’t Simcoe’s fault alone. The governor of Upper Canada, Sincoe felt that his existing capital, the border town of Niagara-on-the-Lake – called Newark at the time – was perilously 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 spot in the middle of the province, which he’d optimisically named “London,” but his boss in Kingston, Lord Dorchester, 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. The locals called it “Toronto.” 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 fixing them. 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 far from the American border. The interior of British Columbia is nice. So is Bermuda. Why aren’t we there?
Simcoe persisted. 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 literally just been hacked out of the woods.
As it turned out, Simcoe’s hunch about the border was right. When things with the Americans eventually got bad in the War of 1812, Newark got completely flattened. (If you go to Niagara today, you’ll see that much of the architecture is of an 1813 vintage.) The catch was, it didn’t stop the Americans from flattening York too. An army under the command of one General Zebulon Pike landed in the west end, overwhelmed the small local force and marched on Fort York. The British withdrew, setting fire to the powder magazine as they left. The enormous explosion that followed 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.
At any rate, 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 happened if the Christie Pits had not existed. 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 it was still trees.
And the weather. Most of all, I blame John Graves Simcoe for the weather. 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 Fuck You, John Graves Simcoe Day. This is better than the existing Simcoe Day, which contains no obscenities and nobody really celebrates anyway. Let’s give it some meaning in our lives. In fact, let us name today the very first Fuck 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.
This piece was originally published in the Toronto Standard.