January is a chilly month in Toronto. Extremely cold—the kind that keeps people underground in the PATH system, which connects half of downtown through climate-controlled tunnels, empties the waterfront, and has historically led travel writers to kindly characterize the city as a summer destination. For a long time, Toronto’s tourism pitch has been honestly limited by the fact that the city is truly great from May to October and more harder to promote during the months on either side. Fundamentally, the current endeavor is an effort to alter that equation.
The infrastructure argument’s most apparent component is the Pearson LIFT initiative. In addition to serving over 175 destinations worldwide, Toronto Pearson now handles over 30 million international passengers a year, which puts a strain on the airport’s current terminal layout. The LIFT plan calls for growing toward the capacity needed for a true global aviation hub, modernizing infrastructure, and increasing terminal space. The airport-to-downtown trip is more competitive with the transfer experience at airports in Amsterdam, Singapore, or Zurich thanks to the UP Express train, which travels from Pearson to Union Station in thirty minutes. Toronto increasingly compares itself to these cities rather than just other Canadian cities.
Toronto’s pitch has changed, therefore the competitive framing is important. The city no longer claims to be the largest city in Canada and the fourth-largest metro area in North America. It describes itself as a global metropolis that competes with cities on other continents for large conventions, international events, headquarters relocations, and foreign visitors. The most obvious manifestation of that goal at the moment is the FIFA World Cup. It is precisely the kind of mega-event that destination marketing strategies are built around: hosting World Cup matches and the fan festivals that accompany them, attracting foreign tourists who might not have otherwise chosen Canada, packing hotels in June and July, and creating the kind of worldwide broadcast visibility that a city cannot purchase. Toronto is making deliberate use of it.
The more difficult issue—what occurs after the airport and the major event—is addressed by the Destination Toronto Master Plan. With the correct infrastructure and headline events, it is possible to attract large numbers of foreign visitors. Something different is needed to entice them to stay longer, return, and pick Toronto over rival locations in the winter: the kind of street-level density and neighborhood activity that makes a city engaging to stroll around, regardless of the events planned for that specific weekend. The Master Plan emphasizes pedestrian areas, ongoing cultural events, and using the city’s varied neighborhoods as destination attractions in and of itself rather than just as a setting for conferences or sporting events.
The way Toronto views its own cultural resources is actually fascinating. Built over decades, the Toronto International Film Festival is the most publicly attended film festival in the world. It attracts international industry figures, the media, and film aficionados for ten days every September, surpassing Cannes in terms of attendance. It is a year-round anchor event that regularly attracts attention from around the world, not only during the summer.
Even though it is almost fifty years old, the CN Tower is still one of the few truly iconic examples of vertical architecture in the world. This type of building offers a city a distinctive silhouette and a reason to be featured on a billboard. Although these are not brand-new resources, the Master Plan’s strategy is to use them as anchors for the kind of long-term programming that keeps tourists in the city instead of just crossing off a single monument and heading out.
It would be exaggerating to say that the current approach completely solves the winter difficulty, which hasn’t been resolved yet. Through festival infrastructure, such as Igloofest and Montréal en Lumière, cities like Montreal have created compelling winter tourism products that draw people outside in temperatures that would otherwise deter them. Although Toronto has been creating its own winter programming, there is still a significant difference between what the city offers in February and peak summer. The FIFA World Cup platform, Pearson’s infrastructure investment, and the neighborhood-focused Master Plan are all moving in the right path. The goal of being a year-round destination is realistic. There is still work to be done to get there.
