The Globe and Mail

The minute after the $350-million Maple Leaf Square project was unveiled a couple of weeks ago, some media doomsayers began the ritual wailing about Toronto's inner-city shoreline. Yet again, so the story went, private-sector interests were reinforcing the "wall" between the city and Lake Ontario. Another piece of derelict waterfront property that could be turned into flowering public parkland was doomed to burial under another looming residential development. This popular view of things now going on south of Toronto's densely built-up financial district is, in my view, both wrong and wrong-headed. The bay-front towers that started going up there 30 years ago, and continue to rise, do not constitute a "wall." They are home to thousands of people in what was once a wasteland.