About Toronto
Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and the provincial capital of Ontario. It is located on the north-western shore of Lake Ontario. Toronto is at the heart of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) which contains 6.2 million people, and is part of a larger combined region in Southern Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe, totalling over 8.1 million residents making up approximately 25% of Canada's population. Toronto is the fifth largest city in North America.
Spawned out of post-glacial alluvial deposits and bluffs, the area was populated at different times by Iroquois and later Wynadot (Huron) peoples. The settlement by Europeans started with the French building a seldom occupied fort near today's Exhibition grounds in the mid-1700s, then grew out of a backwoods English trading post established as York in 1793 (reverting to the current name Toronto in 1834). Later in the 19th century, it grew to become the cultural and economic focus of English Canada. Owing largely to the country's liberal immigration policies starting in the 1960's, and the region's strong economy, Toronto has, in recent decades, been transformed into one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse cities in the world. More than 80 ethnic communities are represented, and over half of the city's residents were born outside Canada.
According to Forbes, Toronto is the tenth-most economically powerful city in the world and one of the fastest growing among the G7 nations, whilst PwC ranks the city as the world's second-best "metro powerhouse". Toronto was ranked twelfth in the world and fourth in the Americas in 2010 for economic innovation. Toronto is also consistently rated as one of the world's most livable cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. The cost of living in Toronto was ranked highest in Canada in 2011.
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