Canadian Beauty
Toronto. At first glance, the undulating silhouette of the concrete, steel and glass giants looks like a huge wave and one instantly thinks: Manhattan.
Wrong. We’re in Canada. The biggest city in the country looks like New York, Boston or Chicago from far off – but somehow it is different, more low-key. The film industry has certainly taken advantage of the look-alike skyline.
When we think we’re looking at an American city on TV or at the movies, often we’re actually looking at Toronto. Due to the favorable exchange rate, lower prices and generous government support for the film industry,
Toronto has earned itself the nickname “Hollywood North.” An entire city earning its living as a stand-in. Rising proudly on Front Street is a classical five-story Victorian house, a relic of a bygone era. We’re on the fifth floor, in offices with cathedral-height ceilings, at a firm called Spatial View.
The company was actually founded in Dresden, Germany, as the Gesellschaft für Raumbildsysteme (Corporation for Spatial Imaging Systems). While operating under this very Germanic name, the company went bankrupt, despite owning several promising patents involving 3-D imaging with computer monitors.
The company promptly moved to Toronto, renamed itself and started to blossom. A contract with DreamWorks has just been finalized – only one of many new clients from Hollywood. “We really belong someplace like Silicon Valley, New York or Shanghai,” says head developer Wolfgang Opel, “but we’d need a lot more money for that.”
He praises the tax breaks, good universities and unlimited resources available. Opel relaxes behind his large desk and lets the numbers do the talking. He’s a computer whiz who thinks digital. First he describes the hardware, then he dismantles a cell phone, giving a lecture in the process. Next is the laptop.
He passes its transparent hard drive across the table and talks about the software he is developing, which divides masses of pixels into two packets: one for the left eye, one for the right. It’s the technician talking, calm and objective.
Get him talking about Canada, though, and he begins to wax eloquent. “Openness is king here.” The standard of living is great, he says; there’s care for the elderly, national health insurance and unemployment benefits, though cuts loom on the horizon. And for a city of its size, Toronto has a very low crime rate.
There are hardly any handguns in circulation, as you need a license to carry one. Despite its hustle and bustle, Toronto does come across as friendlier than the gray big cities in the U.S. It’s greener and has more trees for squirrels to cavort in. The city has generated lots of buzz through a series of attention-grabbing architectural projects.
The Daniel Libeskinddesigned Royal Ontario Museum has just opened. Like a huge axe made of aluminum and glass, it splits in two an old, revered granite building, generating revulsion and fascination in equal measure. The Art Gallery of Ontario, a thick wall of glass designed by Frank Gehry, is slated to follow in November. It is Gehry’s first project in Canada – astoundingly, as he is a native of Toronto. Norman Foster designed the Leslie Dean School of Pharmacy, which opened in 2006.
In the evenings it lights up in beautiful hues of red and blue. Then there’s Will Alsop’s Sharp Center of Design, a box in the sky perched on brightly colored steel beams: a bit pop, perhaps, but timeless. Toronto likes to stand out. “We can do it better.” That’s what counts in Canada. Not necessarily taller and more expensive, but more stylish and significant. Millions of square feet of office space are under construction, and apartment blocks are springing up everywhere. For decades, Toronto has been North America’s fastest-growing city.
Its streets are awash with color. People of every imaginable ethnicity all hurry along, chattering in a babel of languages. This is a society of immigrants.
Half of all Canadians were born elsewhere, and the lion’s share of newcomers arrive in Toronto first. The city counts 2.5 million inhabitants, eight million including the suburbs. According to UN studies, no other place on earth is home to so many people who hail from distant countries.
Europe’s population may be aging, but Canada is a young country, and Toronto even younger. Its brand-new citizens start families and have lots of children. Society here is “more open,” according to newly minted Canadian Wolfgang Opel. More open than what? “The U.S.” Comparisons with Canada’s “big brother” to the south are inevitable, but in recent years Canada has shifted into the fast lane.
Much of it is due to companies, like Amorfix, that are becoming important players in the global marketplace. Not corporate behemoths, but nimble start-ups. George Adams founded the life science firm together with another scientist. It is his fifth start-up. “I sell them every five years or so,” says the biologistturned- businessman. Previous buyers have included DuPont, Pfizer and Biogen. Amorfix sold a blood test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to the British Department of Health. “Until now there hasn’t been a test that’s a hundred-percent certain.”
One in four diagnoses was wrong. Now doctors can be sure earlier on and can adjust their treatments accordingly. Canada is a land of resources.
After Russia, it is the second-largest country on earth, sparsely settled and open for immigration. It is a country with more fresh water than any other, it has the most trees, huge tracts of arable land, unspoiled natural beauty and vast mineral resources in a world that craves them.
Canada has oil: the country’s reserves are estimated to be the world’s second largest. All the statistics point to one unavoidable conclusion: here lies the future. That future might resemble the headquarters of Algorithmics in Chinatown, formerly a textile district. Shades of its illustrious past give the old warehouse a distinctive charm.
Warhol lithographs hang on the cafeteria walls, the basement houses fitness studios, the roof deck enjoys a stunning view of the city, overflowing fruit bowls are everywhere. Three hundred people earn their living here. “We are a mecca for mathematicians,” says Katherine Faichnie. Algorithmics advises banks on risk management, and supplies software.
It has offices in every large city, and numbers 80 of the world’s 100 largest banks among its clientele, not to mention various investment funds, insurance companies, even governments. Faichnie’s team comes from Pakistan, China, India, the U.S. and three eastern European countries, “All of them Canadian citizens.”
Young people come to Toronto “because stuff is happening here.” Math prodigies flock to Algorithmics because they hate rigid working hours as much as they do suits and ties.
They wear eccentric clothes, headphones blaring jazz or heavy metal. “We come up with unconventional ideas here, real innovations,” says Faichnie. Two buildings down, in the old warehouse next door, is where Ron Dembo has his office.
Tall and lean, appearing much younger than his years, Dembo used to be a math professor at Yale University before moving here and founding Algorithmics. Since selling the company, though, he doesn’t need to work anymore. “Now I can do what I really want.” And that is saving the environment, an issue of all-consuming importance in Canada. Dembo helps cities, firms and private individuals reduce their carbon footprint, or else compensate for it through ecological projects.
His new, nonprofit company is called Zerofootprint. Its goal: to reduce humanity’s environmental impact. Every individual leaves traces behind that alter the world. And that includes Toronto. “But you can easily get misled in this city; just look at all the natural beauty.” And that is key to understanding Canada. He starts describing the route to his farm.
On the way, golf courses fly past. In the province of Ontario alone, whose capital is Toronto, there are 876 of them. In Cottage County, city dwellers have bought up farms by the tens of thousands. On weekends they head out here, anxious to relax. Many of the restaurants are top-notch, the village boutiques, upmarket.
Cottage County, which extends hundreds of miles northwards towards Lake Huron, is reminiscent of the Côte d’Azur. Dembo grows soybeans on his farm; he has a small vegetable and herb garden, and apple trees. It is an idyllic weekend retreat, a house with five doors opening to the outside. Squirrels frolic everywhere. The neighboring farm is in view, less than half a mile away. Such stillness, a rare sense of absolute peace.
Then a cell phone rings somewhere, and the illusion is shattered. Further northeast lies Algonquin National Park. One look at the gigantic mixed forest, and it’s clear this wasn’t planted. It’s been here forever. Buck, doe and beaver are frequent sights, and so are raccoon. In the early morning, fallow deer approach to within 10 yards of the cottage on the shore of the Lake of Bay. Buck and doe stand watching, hardly moving a muscle.
Standing. Waiting. Nothing happens. A few minutes later they disappear quietly into the thicket. But not everyone can be a trapper. Onward to Montreal. The city sits on an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway. One thing is clear from the outset: hardly anyone here rushes into the office with coffee cup in hand – people savor their coffee sitting down.
Stroll as opposed to scurry. The people appear almost Mediterranean, call themselves “ latins,” the northernmost southerners dress à la parisienne. Old buildings are everywhere, and the old city center even has cobblestones. The language, Québécois, sounds more French than French itself, and is strangely eccentric.
For example, “the car” is le char, which roughly translates as “one-horse carriage.” Not l’automobil or la voiture, but simply le char, as in the days of the horse-drawn buggy. Montreal’s residents have a twofold need to distinguish themselves. They emphasize their differences with Toronto, and they highlight their uniquely French character within the anglophone New World. The city is packed with restaurants. Have money, will eat – and eat well.
“We’ve got style here,” says Jean-Denis Côté, maître d’ at the top-class Laurie Raphaël restaurant. But then he says what everybody says, be they from Toronto or Montreal: “You have to take a drive in the countryside.” Canada, above all else, is the great outdoors. “Life in the cities is so comfortable because the surrounding environment is still intact.” But the real Canada is the forests, the rivers and lakes, the land of silence and magical moments.
Source: BMW Magazine