Last week at Bloor and Bay I saw a bedraggled man pick himself up off the sidewalk and nonchalantly jab a needle into his toes. I had to assume this was because the veins in his arms were so shot up that they didn’t work any more.

The sheer normalcy of this reminded me that Toronto is now a world-class city in something our child-like view of ourselves has a hard-time computing. All summer, I saw men sleeping across three seats in a subway car and women with everything they own in two plastic bags. They’re not only in the ravine behind the tennis club, and on the sidewalk outside Tim Hortons, their needles change hands as unselfconsciously as a Presto tap.

Read on…