Be grateful that Toronto isn’t York
Rick Laprairie, a retired Toronto land planner who collects maps, was in the news this past weekend for establishing a new, firm earliest known use of the word “Toronto.” Mr. Laprairie has been studying the evolution of this shibboleth so sacred to all Canadians, and a hunch led him to a map explicitly dated 1678 and made by cartographer Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin, who lived in New France between 1671 and 1694. (Franquelin then went back to Old France to work for the military engineer Vauban, European civilization’s alltime supreme authority on fortifications.) The map is one more piece of information that confirms the modern standard account of the evolution of “Toronto.” As place names sometimes do, it has ... um, migrated a little.
On Franquelin’s map, you see, there is a body of water labelled “Tarontos Lac,” and it is pretty obviously Lake Simcoe. The accepted theory today is that the original “Toronto” was the channel between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching, called “tkaronto,” or “place where trees stand in the water” in the Mohawk language. In the 19th century there were all kinds of Toronto-theories flying around, and some antiquarians were misled by a lexicon identifying “toronto” as a Huron term for “plenty.” But the “tkaronto” hypothesis has won out. I suspect this is partly because it is — unlike many accounts of Aboriginal place-names in Canada — satisfyingly, decisively specific. You can go look at the place where the trees stand in the water: they’re still doing that.
By the time of Franquelin, “Tkaronto” had already become “Taronto,” a generic name for the highway between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario. The Humber River was called the Toronto River by the French before Gen. John Graves Simcoe and the British got hold of everything. The word, in turn, became attached to a trading settlement at the southern end of the trail — a pretty crummy place, by all accounts, but one destined for bigger things as part of a global seafaring empire.
The miracle is that it held on to the name. Simcoe insisted that “Toronto,” on being anointed as the site of the new capital of Upper Canada in 1793, be dubbed “York” in honour of Prince Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York and second son of George III. This Duke of York is the “Grand Old Duke of York” from the satirical verse about military futility. He was also commander-inchief of the British armies that helped to chase Napoleon out of Europe twice, and is thought to deserve genuine credit for this, so be careful who you write insulting rhymes about.
Simcoe dubbed Toronto “York” just because he was sucking up to a very identifiable future boss, and for no other reason. The people of Toronto seem to have understood this and resented it. In the decades to come, it was occasionally observed that there were something like a dozen other places in Upper Canada called “York.” Moreover, Simcoe’s “Little York,” as it was often called, seems to have presented an increasingly embarrassing parallel with the Americans’ bustling New York.
In 1834, when the Legislative Council of Upper Canada decided that the capital needed to be formally incorporated as a city, the citizenry remembered that they belonged to “Toronto” and appealed to the council to have the more musical old name restored. Over four decades their annoyance had not receded. Diehards who wanted York to remain York for imperial-grandeur reasons were outvoted, and Toronto’s formal Act of Incorporation observes that “it is desirable, for avoiding inconvenience and confusion, to designate the Capital of the Province by a name which will better distinguish it.” The appellation “Toronto,” of course, had actually been nicked from a spot some way off, but the white settlers had mislaid that information, and didn’t check with anyone who would know better.
It goes without saying that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I wonder how sure we can be that Toronto’s rebellion against Yorkishness was without importance. Toronto has, within my lifetime, become the supreme conurbation of the Dominion, with no remaining rival. Its dominance of Canadian culture and media, and its control of the commanding heights of finance and trade, have done nothing but grow.
Meanwhile, one notices — or fails to notice — that poor London, Ontario, stuck loyally by its own Simcoegiven name. It also suffers from near-total political and cultural neglect by the rest of Confederation, and even by its own province. Is this a coincidence? You cannot even mention “London, Ontario” outside southeast Ontario without having to specify that it is (at best!) the second London — the bogus London, the imitation. Is it yet too late for “Londoners” to retrieve a dignified, distinctive, Indigenous name for the place in which they dwell? Or, if necessary, do as Toronto did, and borrow one from nearby?