I am a native Torontonian. But, when I last visited my birthplace, I was amazed at how apparently pretentious, selfish and self-consumed ‘capitalists’. Torontonians have become. This was my observation just walking on the streets of downtown Toronto, compared to other Canadian cities like Montreal and Ottawa.

Where’s is Toronto’s former progressive spirit? Certainly, not in the do-nothing NDP cadre, that has presided over Toronto’s decline.

Toronto’s big problem is that its “amalgamated” urban dwellers, totally lack solidarity to defend their collective interest as an urban community. Toronto’s many communities have been its strength though a vital diversity. That was affirmed in the former Metropolitan Toronto “mini-federation”. But, when those communities mutate into selfish cliques that simply co-exist without any synergy in the forcibly created Toronto Megacity Blob, “the whole” begins to crumble. A lack of municipal solidarity in Toronto allows constituent communities to be pitted against each another, while the political looters of public funds, (in the name of dubiously created municipal tenders) conduct “business as usual”.

Over the years, it is this apparent worsening attitude that has caused Toronto to be ignored by successive federal government, on matters of vitally needed public funding. Toronto has become taken for granted, and Torontonians have no one else to blame but themselves. Torontonians have been too self-consumed to pay attention to defending ‘Toronto’.

Take for example, the greenbelt that used to exist around Toronto. Torontonians allowed the politicians to manoeuvre that Greenbelt to be destroyed by a foreign-owned and operated toll road: 407. The greed that came with the 407 is evident by the commercial areas under the power lines, that in the rest of Canada, have been regarded as an area only for open space.

In Ottawa, there would have been a riot before we allowed our Greenbelt to be destroyed like the Greenbelt in Toronto.

Torontonians these days basically don’t give a “f--k”.

Toronto politicians are the true representatives of Toronto’s “Brave New World”. These jaded apparatchik are too busy trying to serve their masters in Big Business cliques who bankroll their campaigns, to apparently be concerned about affirming the survival of “Toronto the Good”.

Torontonians today, by and large, lack the pride and “politeness” to each other, they used to have into the 80’s. The new Torontonian tends to be angry, alienated, and apparently, self-consumed with their venal “lifestyles“. It is no wonder they voted for Ford, in the last election, and a group of city councillors, who similarly lack a civic vision of Toronto.

Why should Stephen Harper care about what goes on in Toronto, if Torontonians themselves don’t give a damn?

If the Prime Minister and his government has money, why not spend in elsewhere, like on Calgary, or on bombing up innocent civilians in some Middle East country?

Arguably, a mayor like Rob Ford, could have never have gotten elected in the Toronto that existed into the 1980’s. This is a Toronto, long before the mega city disaster, where economic disparity in the city was far less. Back in the 1970’s, Toronto had been highly regarded as a forward-thinking 21^st century city. Now, the new parochial mayor of the Toronto mega city is seeking to use the failed experiments of privatization in the United States, which has made American cities like Chicago, get even worse -- as a civilized civic society.

The above video captures the kind of pride that Torontonians used to have. Torontonians are too busy caught up in the crass materialistic related pursuit of financial survival to be concerned about the affirmation of the quality of-living in Toronto, for themselves and their fellow Torontonian.

Jack Diamond established his fourfold criteria for urban beauty, a list that somewhat amazingly, wasn't challenged at any point during a recent Walrus-organized debate. Was it really that air-tight? After using Paris, Venice, and St. Petersburg as examples, he stipulated the following:

1. Human-made forms should be "planned and designed together" in an effort to create "dramatic vistas" and that enhance each component part.

2. Beautiful cities don't just "have a relationship to their major geographical features, but they celebrate them, whether canals, rivers or oceans."

3. Most were built at time "when an architecture of human scale and refined detail was prevalent."

4. Beautiful cities "have the fiscal and constitutional powers to spend as they choose."

How does Toronto stack up when it comes to these criteria? For Diamond the city's chief characteristic, its low density sprawl, disqualifies it from the get-go. Worse still, we lack the constitutional self-determination required to remedy what ails us. He damningly explained: "The city is a supplicant, begging for crumbs at the provincial and federal tables, where those governments dine scrumptiously off the proceeds of its urban vassals." .