Toronto Star

Here in an Irish pub on the trendy rue Montorgueil, my friends and I have gathered to share a last drink. After seven years in Paris, I am moving back to my native Toronto. In only a few days, in a similar bar on College Street, I will be asked, sincerely or out of courtesy, why I have renounced life in Paris to come to "dreary" Toronto. And yet for my friends here — most of them young expatriates from the U.K., Canada and the U.S. — no such explanations are needed. On the contrary, they spend my farewell evening sheepishly justifying their own reasons for staying behind and repeating the refrain: "You are right to go." Like them, I feel that life will be better in Toronto, not because I have better friends or a better job there, but because the city itself will allow things to happen. Why this sentiment should be so strong, especially when set against Paris, one of the world's most envied and prestigious cities, has much to do with the very aspect of Toronto that shames many Torontonians: its physical landscape.