Toronto, the Belfast of Canada: The Orange Order and the Shaping of Municipal Culture by William J. Smyth (review)

Toronto earned its label 'the Belfast of Canada' because of the similar Protestant, British, and monarchical values purported in both cities. William Smyth's study aims to examine just how applicable this description was by charting the history of Toronto's Orange Order from its inception to the 1950s. Relying on an unprecedented level of demographic and statistical data, Smyth provides a comprehensive examination of how the Orange Order dominated public life in Toronto and Belfast. In the monograph's first two chapters, Smyth establishes Toronto and Belfast's demographic and cultural similarities in the nineteenth century. In doing so, Smyth challenges a body of scholarship that has been hesitant to embrace Toronto's 'Belfast of Canada' label because of the title's association with violence and religious strife.

Despite the label's negative connotations, Smyth makes a compelling case for how the Orange Order and Protestantism influenced civic life in both Belfast and Toronto, often to the detriment of their Catholic populations. Throughout chapters 3 to 5, Smyth challenges the common perception of the Orange Order as an organisation made up of exclusively Irish immigrants who indulged in 'unruly behaviour' (p. 99). He points to the numerous Orangemen who did not fit this characterisation. Many Orangemen worked for the city as clerical workers, firefighters, policemen, and received preferential treatment over Catholics for city contracts. Orange Order leaders did not advocate for religious violence, but rather stressed respectability to their members. Many lodges contained a strict dress code. Members used the Orange Order to climb Toronto's social ladder and advance their careers. Smyth further dispels the Orange Order's 'unruly Irish immigrant' narrative by examining the surprising number of Scottish and English Canadians who also participated in the Orange Order. These members ignored ethnic differences in favour of a common Protestantism in order to similarly advance their careers and social standing in Toronto. Thus, Smyth's study paints a nuanced portrait of Toronto's Orange Order that acknowledges the multi-ethnic and respectable portions of the lodge's history.

The final two chapters examine the decline of the Orange Order. Economic depression in the 1930s 'tested the fraternal organisation's ability to provide access to employment and welfare assistance' that its Protestant members historically relied on (p. 221). As a result, membership declined nearly fifty per cent. Toronto's changing nature during the post-war period did little to improve the Orange Order's fortunes. Smyth argues that Toronto's civic culture shifted from one of explicit Protestant supremacy and British values to an identity based on cosmopolitanism oriented towards the United States. Thus, Toronto's mayor was denounced by Protestants and Catholics alike when he expressed pro-British sentiments in a 1954 speech. By the 1950s, the Orange Order's grip on civic life in Toronto had come to an end. The wealth of demographic and statistical analysis over such a wide timeframe makes Toronto, the Belfast of Canada an important read for scholars of Protestantism and the Irish in Ontario.