ET Leave Home, a monthly travel recommendation

For February, Toronto

Paid subscribers get two extra issues a month. New this year, one of those is ET Leave Home. Each month, I’ll give you a list of recommendations for a different city. This month, we’re going to Toronto.

I wasn’t planning on writing on Toronto this month. I was going to save it for when it gets a little warmer. But then the president announced 25 percent tariffs on Canada for reasons that are either nonsensical (that is, it does not make sense to put tariffs on Canada over undocumented migration or fentanyl because 1 tariffs won’t work to curb either but also 2 neither come into the United States in anything nearing substantial numbers) or criminal (namely, economically coercing another country into annexation).

I don’t mean to make this about me, since many, many people on both sides of the border will suffer more than I will over this. But: Toronto is my favo(u)rite city in North America. We lived there from when I was one to when I was eight, so I associate it with happy childhood memories. Both my siblings were born there. The first trip Neil and I took together was to Toronto. We went back in 2023 and at the time, I wrote in this newsletter, “there is arguably no place in the world in which I am as happy to be in as uncomplicated a way as Toronto.”

What I am trying to say is that I do not have the words to articulate the shame I feel on receiving texts from friends in Toronto who are angry and afraid, or on reading that Raptors fans boo’d the US national anthem. I just have the words to try to offer what I think makes Toronto so special in the form of the following recommendations.