Driving through Rosedale, Toronto’s tony district of CEOs and the like, our youngest, having declared that she’d like to be a socialist, sneered from the back seat as we passed the wide driveways of the lavish houses. “What’s up?” her mom asked. “They care more about cars than they do about people,” our daughter said. My wife glared my way, as if to say—what have you been telling her?

You have to be careful, as a Montrealer in Toronto, about the things you say and just how they come out. I mean I like this city, I really do—though I admire it, more than “love” it. It’s full of activity, culture and a kind of immediacy you don’t find in Montreal as much. But Toronto, unlike Montreal, is not a city where you look down most streets and say to yourself, “I could live there.” And yes, as cliché has it, the restaurants here empty early so that you can get a table most places if you’re prepared to eat after, um, nine.

But I have a lot of time for this, my adopted city, and the people who live in it, especially. They work hard—and it’s a battle here, it really is. The TTC, the public transport, is a punishment: infrequent and crowded and dirty and smelly and with stupidly narrow seats designed by some city-council money-saving klutz for Ethiopians after the famine, and not Canadians in their winter coats. I don’t want the next guy in my lap.

Which doesn’t happen at the hockey game where, it’s true, I once saw a couple of fans up high escorted out of the building for making too much noise. It really is true, all they say—all I say—about the Montreal hockey crowds being so much better and more raucous and more savvy and more fun, cheering a good play whoever makes it, even taunting their own sometimes, but knowing the game. Here if you’re a Leaf, then anything you do is alright, anything the other team does is not, which is a lot of the reason why the team has gone nowhere for forty-plus years now and, a few years back, Tie Domi, would you believe, was honoured the night Montreal was lifting Boom Boom Geoffrion’s shirt.

Hell, I was in Montreal for the game with Chicago a week ago, and even my Leaf fan companion was thrilled. He knows where he’d rather see his team play. So yeah, I was talking like this when I took one of my girls to see the ho-hum Leafs, the fans lifting out of their seats for an iced puck as if it were a breakaway. “Can you make them sit down?” asked my girl, clearly remembering the time we’d been to the theatre in London’s West End and I’d asked the woman in front of her to take her tall hat off. “Can’t do that,” I said.

And then she caught me garumphing with contempt at the empty seats, and so I explained to her that in Montreal, you see, in Montreal you’d never see the posh folk with the best seats leaving two minutes before the end of a tied match. No, not in Montreal, where good, hard-working folk and their families are the ones who keep the season going and not Toronto’s platinum corporate types who come here to make deals and do business and don’t give a toss about how even tight hockey games end because really all they want do it make sure they get their gas-guzzling SUVs out of the parking lot before the rush starts.

And then, two nights later, our daughter’s damning judgment. “They care more about cars than they do about people,” our daughter said. My wife glared my way. “That’s what Dad said at the hockey game,” our kid announced. But it’s true, I beamed at her. But to no avail. Keep yer Montreal trap shut, was the lesson.

Noah Richler’s Our Man In Toronto column appears regularly on Rover.

Photo by Barbara Stoneham