Canada’s financial hub is also home to a host of innovative environmental projects. Felicity Cousins takes a tour of tomorrow’s Toronto.
Jump on a street car in Toronto and you are transported from one side of the world to another, in a few smooth stops. From the riotously colourful China Town to Little Portugal and leafy Victorian Cabbagetown, Toronto’s neighbourhoods are bursting with different cultures. The city has shaken off its old conservative values and embraced positive change.
Along the main thoroughfares (Bay Street, King Street, Yonge Street and Queen Street), where business travellers will spend most of their time, street cars shed their daily load of commuters into towers of dark reflective glass and, despite the financial crisis, it’s clearly business as usual. From finance to pharmaceuticals, IT to medical conferences, Toronto is at work.
Canada is the UK’s 11th-largest market, with exports reaching £3.3 billion in 2007, and Toronto is its financial hub. This is reflected in the hotels in the city centre, which include all the major players – Sheraton, Le Méridien, Intercontinental, Hilton, Four Seasons, Park Hyatt (a 394-room Hyatt Regency is due to open in January) and Fairmont.
And high up in the sheltered roof garden of Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel, there is an amazing view. In the distance, Lake Ontario is a hazy blue backdrop to the city’s skyline, with the second-tallest building in the world (the CN Tower) rocketing into the white sky. But I am looking at something a little closer, on the roof of the hotel: beehives, and a few bees looking a little dopey in the autumn air.
Melanie Coates, the head of the hotel’s green team, explains: “This garden was built around ten years ago, so even then the hotel was quite forward-thinking in terms of its green activity.”
The five restaurants and four lounges in the hotel have always used the fresh produce from the garden – mint, basil, coriander, and lavender – but the bees were new for 2008, and the first harvest has produced 310lbs of honey. We taste the honey in a delicious dessert later at Epic restaurant, and you can have tours of this unique roof garden from May to September (there’s not much to see during the snowy winter months).
Coates also explains that the hotel runs a package called “shop with the chef”, where guests can go to the market with Epic’s Ryan Gustafson, point out their favourite local ingredients and are later presented with a menu based on their choice.
In many ways, the Fairmont represents what the whole city is striving to be. Away from Canada’s largest hotel kitchen and down a long corridor, there are carpenters fixing furniture, engineers and electricians, plumbers and an enormous laundry room using giant steam-run machines. It’s one gigantic, self-sufficient creature.
Jump two blocks north on Bay Street (past the site where the Trump International Hotel and Tower is being built), to the roof of City Hall. Laid out in neat boxes is a Green Roof Demonstration project, which involves the creation of green spaces on top of man-made structures.
The City Hall green roofs project covers 650 sqm, and different types of flora are being tested for their insulation value – eventually all new-builds in the city will have to have green roofs. You can have tours of the project depending on the availability of security staff (call Access Toronto on +41 6338 0338 to check).
Lawson Oates, director of Toronto Environment Office, is based in City Hall and is passionate about making Toronto green. He recently spoke in Tokyo about the sustainable cooling of buildings using green roofs and agriculture in urban settings, and runs the Live Green Toronto campaign.
“You have to change the way people think and this is done through education,” he says. “Hotels in the city are taking a lot of initiative and we want the message to be for all businesses in Toronto, that you can do things yourself – you don’t have to wait for the government to do things.”
Oates believes that we’ve already changed the climate with the damage we have all done, but that we can work towards a positive outcome. “What we need to do now is accept that the climate has changed forever, adapt to what we have left, and take steps to reduce our carbon footprint.”
So what does this mean for business travel? Fairmont’s Melanie Coates is in favour of being realistic about our options. “Business travel is absolutely necessary. Everyone thought video-conferencing would work, but absolutely nothing beats meeting face-to-face,” she says.
“However, there is a choice. You can choose to be more aware and consumers have the power to ask for what they want. A hotel will always give the guest what they want so if all the guests are saying no to plastic water bottles and no to washing the sheets every night, then a hotel will do this. It’s just a question of getting out of old practices.”
Another City Hall initiative is encouraging Toronto residents to eat locally produced food. For example, Toronto imports apples from New Zealand, which gives an apple pie a huge carbon footprint. The Toronto Food Charter promotes local food and initiates local food procurement. Lawson Oates says: “We are trying to promote urban gardens and some restaurants buy their products from within a 100-mile radius”.
One such restaurant is Jamie Kennedy’s at the Gardiner Museum, near the upmarket Bloor Street (where you will also find the stunning Royal Ontario Museum and the delightful Bata Shoe Museum). Kennedy works with the community, much like Jamie Oliver in the UK, to promote local produce and sustainable eating and ingredients. Lunch at his restaurant includes fresh plates of beet salad, tender duck confit with puy lentils and house-cured bacon. The sommelier serves wine from the VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance), which is stamped with exactly where the wine is from, so you know for sure that it is local.
Another green roof can be found at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (MTCC), which has over 55,740 sqm of exhibit and meeting space, including 64 meeting rooms, a 1,330-seat theatre and two ballrooms.
The MTCC has been recognised for being among the first to utilise Toronto’s Deep Water Cooling system. This system takes water from the lake around the Toronto Islands and passes it through a heat exchanger, which cools the water without using fossil fuels, and can provide air conditioning for the 51 buildings on its system. Oates says: “We are looking to expand and stretch this resource.”
I take a cab down to the lake shore with Louisa Mursell of Bike Train, which helps people take their bikes on the train with maps to explore the Niagara region (see box). On the way, she puts the city’s green spaces into perspective for me. There are 1,500 parks and 8,000 hectares of parkland, as well as five golf courses. The city is so bike-friendly that over 400,000 adult cyclists make their way along the 187km of bike paths (or 380km if you include shared road and bike paths). “I like to describe Toronto as the city within a park,” she says.
Mursell has brought me out to one of the city’s oldest green spaces. The Leslie Street Spit, 5km long, was originally built to protect the outer harbour, but over the last 40 years it has been transformed into an amazing wildlife reserve.
During the week the spit is closed to the public as it is still a work in progress, but over the weekends you are free to cycle in and out of its secluded bays and have the chance to see snowy owls, turtles, snakes, otters, beavers and coyotes.
From the beach in this peaceful wilderness you can look back to the city lights as Toronto settles down for dinner – it’s another reminder that the city is very good at respecting its environment, while continuing business as usual.
For more details see torontotourism.com, ontariotravel.net, toronto.ca/livegreen.
Niagara falls
You can’t visit Toronto without succumbing to the lure of Niagara Falls, just an hour and a half by road, or two hours by train with rail company VIA.
Once here, you have several options. You can jump on and off the National Park shuttle bus to visit the ready-made attractions along the Niagara river, like the beautiful butterfly conservatory or the dramatic Whirlpool Aero Car dangling over a ravine, or you can venture into the wine country. Bike Train provides routes so you can spend a full day cycling around the area.
If you’re feeling less energetic, though, you can spend a pleasant day wandering from one attraction to another. The central Table Rock complex has restaurants (Elements on the Falls has a breathtaking view), gift shops and Niagara “experiences”. I took the Journey Behind the Falls, where you can feel the icy spray and the thunder of the water fills your ears.
But a simple walk along the main strip towards the falls, watching the play of light and the rainbow in the spray, will be awesome enough for most.
See niagaraparks.com, biketrain.ca.
GETTING THERE
Air Transat serves Toronto directly from Gatwick four times a week, from Manchester twice weekly and from Glasgow once a week. From Heathrow, Air Canada flies to Toronto three times a day, and BA has two flights per day.
