Twenty-five years ago, Toronto writer Cary Fagan observed that people fleeing Toronto because of costly housing did so without regret because the city “has created no myth of itself to hold them.”
Myths can be good or bad for many reasons. One very bad Toronto myth is that the city has no myths. John Sewell’s new political autobiography—as generous, smart and awkward as the man himself—will put paid to that particular myth. For those who were there at the time, and who were for that reason young at the time, it recalls mythic stories both numerous and potent: the death in 1972 of the Spadina Expressway, the salvation of crumbling neighbourhoods where students clustered, the fruitless schemes of preening developers in pinstriped suits.
Some of these stories may shock the young of today. How many know, for example, that Toronto police publicly called Sewell a “fag” for defending gay rights—shortly after his election as mayor? They also broke in to the...
Ray Conlogue is a former arts writer for The Globe and Mail and author of The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec (Mercury Press, 1996), an analysis of the cultural and historical dimensions of Quebec’s independence movement, as well as being a translator, teacher and author of a young adult novel.
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