What is Ontario's capital and significance?

Toronto is the capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. The city has a population of about 2.93 million within the City of Toronto and about 7 million in the Greater Toronto Area (the Census Metropolitan Area), making it the fourth-largest city in North America after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles. Toronto is on the north shore of Lake Ontario about 100 kilometres east of the Canada-US border at Niagara Falls.

Toronto has been the provincial capital since the founding of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1791. Governor John Graves Simcoe selected the site as the Town of York in 1793 to replace Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) as a more defensible capital away from the American border. The Town of York was incorporated as the City of Toronto on March 6, 1834. The 1998 amalgamation merged the former City of Toronto with five surrounding municipalities (Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, York, and East York) into the current single-tier City of Toronto.

Toronto is the principal economic, financial, and cultural centre of English-speaking Canada. Bay Street is the country's principal financial district and the second-largest in North America after Wall Street. The Toronto Stock Exchange, founded 1861, is the ninth-largest in the world by market capitalisation. The Big Five chartered banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, and CIBC) all have head offices on Bay Street. The Toronto-Waterloo Innovation Corridor is the second-largest technology cluster in North America.

Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. The 2021 census recorded that 47 per cent of residents are foreign-born, the highest proportion of any major city in the world after Dubai. Major attractions include the CN Tower (553 metres, the tallest free-standing structure in the western hemisphere when built in 1976), the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Casa Loma, Toronto Islands, and the Toronto-Pearson International Airport (the busiest in Canada). The Ontario Legislative Assembly sits at Queen's Park in Toronto. The City of Toronto is governed by a mayor (currently Olivia Chow, elected June 26, 2023, the first racialised woman mayor of Toronto) and a 25-member City Council.