World Class Clash

The city sent out a media release just now about how this weekend's Celebrate Toronto Street Festival crammed one million people "curb-to-curb" on Yonge.

Funny how in yesterday's Star, writer Sharda Prashad discusses that even our mayor admits Montreal has a higher profile than Toronto on the international scene.

To put tourist dollars in Toronto pockets, Miller told the Star's Donovan Vincent, "we have to be systematic about it ... Montreal does it, they're very smart about it. Things like this soccer tournament (the FIFA under-20 World Cup planned for next year) will go a long way to giving Toronto a strong name around the world."

Tourism Toront last year invested $4 million and apparently thousands of surveys to come up with "Toronto Unlimited," which many people thought was a waste and not really saying much about the city. The slogan was the result of the Toronto Branding Project, where "the goal was to create a single Toronto brand and to develop a fresh new way of communicating the city's strong and dynamic identity to the rest of the world."

So if we can attract a million folks to come out and check out live performances and Summerlicious, are we going in a step in the right direction? Or are we tooting our horn a tad bit early that we're a "world class city" when the ROM and AGO, for example, continue to be a construction dust cloud?