Andrea Horwath
Andrea Horwath, is a Canadian politician and community development coordinator, the Leader of the Official Opposition in Ontario and Leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. She is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, representing the riding of Hamilton Centre, was chosen as the party's leader at its 2009 leadership convention, she is the first woman to lead the Ontario New Democratic Party, one of only three women to serve as leader of a political party with representation in the provincial legislature. Horwath was born and raised in Hamilton and has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Labour Studies from McMaster University, she worked part-time as a waitress to pay her way through university. Her father Andrew, an ethnic Hungarian, had immigrated to Canada from Slovakia, worked on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company plant in Oakville, Ontario, her mother, Diane, is of Irish descent. She worked with the Hamilton labour movement for several years and providing literacy, numeracy and ESL training for workers.
She subsequently got involved in the cooperative housing movement in Welland, became a community development coordinator for Hamilton's McQuesten Legal & Community Services, providing public legal education to groups working with tenants, injured workers and people with disabilities. In 1996 Horwath earned a certificate of achievement in anti-racism training, was an organizer of Hamilton's Days of Action campaign against provincial government cutbacks announced by Mike Harris; that year she received the Woman of the Year Award in Public Affairs from the Hamilton Status of Women Committee, in recognition of her work in the community. She dedicated her time and efforts toward the field of social housing, was subsequently awarded the Graham Emslie Award for Community Development in Housing by the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, she lives in Hamilton with her son Julian. In a March 2011 interview with the Toronto Star, she spoke publicly for the first time about the breakup of her longtime relationship with Julian's father, Hamilton businessman Ben Leonetti.
Horwath had met Ben Leonetti in her university years, when she was working part-time as a waitress and he was a jazz musician. The two lived together for 25 years without getting married and split up in 2010. In the Canadian federal election of 1997, she was the NDP candidate against incumbent Liberal Stan Keyes in the riding of Hamilton West. Although unsuccessful, her second-place finish was a significant improvement on previous NDP efforts in the riding, gave her an increased level of prominence in the city. In 1997, she was elected to Hamilton City Council for Ward Two, outpolling two incumbents who had represented the area for more than 20 years, she emerged as a prominent voice for the political left in the city, was re-elected to council in 2000 and 2003. During her three terms as city councillor, she chaired the solid-waste-management committee and the municipal non-profit housing corporation. Horwath was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in a 2004 by-election in the then-extant provincial riding of Hamilton East, defeating Liberal candidate Ralph Agostino to succeed the deceased Liberal member Dominic Agostino, Ralph's brother.
Winning 63.6 per cent of the vote, up from the NDP's 29.4 per cent in that riding six months earlier, her landslide victory boosted the NDP's seat count over the threshold for official party status in the legislature, helped give the federal New Democratic Party a bounce in Hamilton that would continue into the federal election shortly thereafter. In the 2007 election, Horwath ran in the new riding of Hamilton Centre, due to redistricting that divided her former Hamilton East riding between Hamilton Centre and the new riding of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. Horwath's new Hamilton Centre riding included half of her former riding as well as a portion of the former Hamilton West riding where she had run federally in 1997, it included her entire former city council ward. In the leadup to the campaign, Horwath was expected to face Hamilton West Liberal incumbent Judy Marsales. However, Marsales opted not to run for another term, Horwath defeated Liberal candidate Steve Ruddick on election day. On November 7, 2008, Horwath launched her campaign to win the party's leadership.
The leadership election was held March 6–8, 2009. Horwath led on the first two ballots, won on the third ballot with 60.4% of the vote defeating Peter Tabuns, Gilles Bisson and Michael Prue. The 2011 provincial election saw a rise in support for the NDP under Horwath's leadership; the party won more than 20% of the popular vote for the first time since 1995 and doubled its seats to elect 17 members of the legislature. The election resulted in the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty being reduced to a minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power. In April 2012, Horwath passed a leadership review at the party's convention with 76% support. In the 2014 provincial election, the NDP was able to maintain its seat count of 21 at dissolution despite the loss of three seats in Toronto, but lost the balance of power when the Liberals took a majority win in the election. Horwath has faced criticism from some party members and progressives for running a populist campaign which they described as right-wing.
Despite criticism of her leadership from some quarters, Horwath received a increased level of support, 77%, at the party's post-election convention held on November 15. Horwath ran in her third election as NDP leader against the Liberal government led by Kathleen Wynne and a Progressive
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the most populous city in Canada, with a population of 2,731,571 in 2016. Current to 2016, the Toronto census metropolitan area, of which the majority is within the Greater Toronto Area, held a population of 5,928,040, making it Canada's most populous CMA. Toronto is the anchor of an urban agglomeration, known as the Golden Horseshoe in Southern Ontario, located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A global city, Toronto is a centre of business, finance and culture, is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world. People have travelled through and inhabited the Toronto area, situated on a broad sloping plateau interspersed with rivers, deep ravines, urban forest, for more than 10,000 years. After the broadly disputed Toronto Purchase, when the Mississauga surrendered the area to the British Crown, the British established the town of York in 1793 and designated it as the capital of Upper Canada. During the War of 1812, the town was the site of the Battle of York and suffered heavy damage by United States troops.
York was incorporated in 1834 as the city of Toronto. It was designated as the capital of the province of Ontario in 1867 during Canadian Confederation; the city proper has since expanded past its original borders through both annexation and amalgamation to its current area of 630.2 km2. The diverse population of Toronto reflects its current and historical role as an important destination for immigrants to Canada. More than 50 percent of residents belong to a visible minority population group, over 200 distinct ethnic origins are represented among its inhabitants. While the majority of Torontonians speak English as their primary language, over 160 languages are spoken in the city. Toronto is a prominent centre for music, motion picture production, television production, is home to the headquarters of Canada's major national broadcast networks and media outlets, its varied cultural institutions, which include numerous museums and galleries and public events, entertainment districts, national historic sites, sports activities, attract over 25 million tourists each year.
Toronto is known for its many skyscrapers and high-rise buildings, in particular the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere, the CN Tower. The city is home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, the headquarters of Canada's five largest banks, the headquarters of many large Canadian and multinational corporations, its economy is diversified with strengths in technology, financial services, life sciences, arts, business services, environmental innovation, food services, tourism. When Europeans first arrived at the site of present-day Toronto, the vicinity was inhabited by the Iroquois, who had displaced the Wyandot people, occupants of the region for centuries before c. 1500. The name Toronto is derived from the Iroquoian word tkaronto, meaning "place where trees stand in the water"; this refers to the northern end of what is now Lake Simcoe, where the Huron had planted tree saplings to corral fish. However, the word "Toronto", meaning "plenty" appears in a 1632 French lexicon of the Huron language, an Iroquoian language.
It appears on French maps referring to various locations, including Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe, several rivers. A portage route from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron running through this point, known as the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail, led to widespread use of the name. In the 1660s, the Iroquois established two villages within what is today Toronto, Ganatsekwyagon on the banks of the Rouge River and Teiaiagon on the banks of the Humber River. By 1701, the Mississauga had displaced the Iroquois, who abandoned the Toronto area at the end of the Beaver Wars, with most returning to their base in present-day New York. French traders abandoned it in 1759 during the Seven Years' War; the British defeated the French and their indigenous allies in the war, the area became part of the British colony of Quebec in 1763. During the American Revolutionary War, an influx of British settlers came here as United Empire Loyalists fled for the British-controlled lands north of Lake Ontario; the Crown granted them land to compensate for their losses in the Thirteen Colonies.
The new province of Upper Canada was being needed a capital. In 1787, the British Lord Dorchester arranged for the Toronto Purchase with the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation, thereby securing more than a quarter of a million acres of land in the Toronto area. Dorchester intended the location to be named Toronto. In 1793, Governor John Graves Simcoe established the town of York on the Toronto Purchase lands, naming it after Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. Simcoe decided to move the Upper Canada capital from Newark to York, believing that the new site would be less vulnerable to attack by the United States; the York garrison was constructed at the entrance of the town's natural harbour, sheltered by a long sand-bar peninsula. The town's settlement formed at the eastern end of the harbour behind the peninsula, near the present-day intersection of Parliament Street and Front Street. In 1813, as part of the War of 1812, the Battle of York ended in the town's capture and plunder by United States forces.
The surrender of the town was negotiated by John Strachan. American soldiers destroyed much of the garrison and set fire to the parliament buildings during their five-day occupation; because of the sacking of York, British troops retaliated in the war with the Burning of Wa
Blue-collar worker
A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled manufacturing, sanitation, custodial work, textile manufacturing, power plant operations, commercial fishing, pest control, food processing, oil field work, waste disposal, recycling, plumbing, mechanic, warehousing, technical installation, many other types of physical work. Blue-collar work involves something being physically built or maintained. In contrast, the white-collar worker performs work in an office environment and may involve sitting at a computer or desk. A third type of work is a service worker whose labor is related to customer interaction, sales or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend white, or pink industry categorizations. Blue-collar work is paid hourly wage-labor, although some professionals may be paid by the project or salaried. There is a wide range of payscales for such work depending upon field of experience; the term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper.
The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms. Industrial and manual workers wear durable canvas or cotton clothing that may be soiled during the course of their work. Navy and light blue colors conceal potential dirt or grease on the worker's clothing, helping him or her to appear cleaner. For the same reason, blue is a popular color for boilersuits; some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it. The popularity of the colour blue among manual labourers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments; the blue collar/white collar colour scheme has socio-economic class connotations. However, this distinction has become blurred with the increasing importance of skilled labour, the relative increase in low-paying white-collar jobs. Since many blue-collar jobs consist of manual labor, educational requirements for workers are lower than those of white-collar workers.
Only a high school diploma is required, many of the skills required for blue-collar jobs will be learned by the employee while working. In higher level jobs, vocational training or apprenticeships may be required, for workers such as electricians and plumbers, state-certification is necessary. With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy. Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages; this offshoring has pushed agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries. In the United States, blue collar and service occupations refer to jobs in precision production and repair occupations. In the United States, an area known as the Rust Belt comprising the Northeast and Midwest, including Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly. With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like Cleveland, Ohio.
Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment and urban blight. Due to many blue-collar jobs involving manual labor and unskilled workers, automation poses a threat of unemployment for blue-collar workers. One study from the MIT Technology Review estimates that 83% of jobs that make less than $20 per hour are threatened by automation; some examples of technology that threaten workers are self-driving cars and automated cleaning devices, which could place blue-collar workers such as truck drivers or janitors out of work. Others have suggested that technological advancement will not lead to blue-collar job unemployment, but rather shifts in the types of work that blue-collar workers do; some foresee computer coding as becoming the blue-collar job of the future. Proponents of this idea view coding as a skill that can be learned through vocational training, suggest that more coders will be needed in a technologically advancing world. Others see future of blue-collar work as humans and computers working together to improve efficiency.
Such jobs would consist of labeling. Blue-collar workers have played a large role in electoral politics. In the 2016 United States Presidential election, many attributed Donald Trump's victories in the states of Ohio and Michigan to blue-collar workers, who overwhelmingly favored Trump over opponent Hillary Clinton. Among white-working class citizens, Trump won 64% of the votes, compared to only 32% for Clinton; this was the largest margin of victory among this group of voters for any presidential candidate since 1980. Many attributed Trump's success among this bloc of voters to his opposition of international trade deals and environmental regulations, two of the largest threats to blue-collar employment. Opponents of this view believe Trump's success with this bloc had more to do with an anti-immigrant and nationalist platform that supports deportation and discourages investment in higher education. "Blue-collar" can be
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions about existence, values, reason and language. Such questions are posed as problems to be studied or resolved; the term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation. Classic philosophical questions include: Is it possible to know anything and to prove it? What is most real? Philosophers pose more practical and concrete questions such as: Is there a best way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust? Do humans have free will? "philosophy" encompassed any body of knowledge. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy and physics. For example, Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy became classified as a book of physics. In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize.
In the modern era, some investigations that were traditionally part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology and economics. Other investigations related to art, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy. For example, is beauty objective or subjective? Are there many scientific methods or just one? Is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy? Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of science. Traditionally, the term "philosophy" referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, natural science and politics. Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy is classified in the 2000s as a book of physics. In the first part of the first book of his Academics, Cicero introduced the division of philosophy into logic and ethics. Metaphysical philosophy was the study of existence, God, logic and other abstract objects; this division has changed.
Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences astronomy, chemistry and cosmology. Moral philosophy still includes value theory. Metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today. Colin McGinn and others claim. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, while Talbot Brewer argued that "progress" is the wrong standard by which to judge philosophical activity. In one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as "how are we to live" and "what is the nature of reality". A broad and impartial conception of philosophy finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality and life in all world civilizations. Western philosophy is the philosophical tradition of the Western world and dates to Pre-Socratic thinkers who were active in Ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE such as Thales and Pythagoras who practiced a "love of wisdom" and were termed physiologoi.
Socrates was a influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom. Western philosophy can be divided into three eras: Ancient, Medieval philosophy, Modern philosophy; the Ancient era was dominated by Greek philosophical schools which arose out of the various pupils of Socrates, such as Plato, who founded the Platonic Academy and his student Aristotle, founding the Peripatetic school, who were both influential in Western tradition. Other traditions include Cynicism, Greek Skepticism and Epicureanism. Important topics covered by the Greeks included metaphysics, the nature of the well-lived life, the possibility of knowledge and the nature of reason. With the rise of the Roman empire, Greek philosophy was increasingly discussed in Latin by Romans such as Cicero and Seneca. Medieval philosophy is the period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and was dominated by the ris
National Collegiate Athletic Association
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a non-profit organization which regulates athletes of 1,268 North American institutions and conferences. It organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, helps more than 480,000 college student-athletes who compete annually in college sports; the organization is headquartered in Indiana. In its 2016–17 fiscal year the NCAA took in $1.06 billion in revenue, over 82% of, generated by the Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. In August 1973, the current three-division system of Division I, Division II, Division III was adopted by the NCAA membership in a special convention. Under NCAA rules, Division I and Division II schools can offer scholarships to athletes for playing a sport. Division III schools may not offer any athletic scholarships. Larger schools compete in Division I and smaller schools in II and III. Division I football was further divided into I-A and I-AA in 1978. Subsequently, the term "Division I-AAA" was added to delineate Division I schools which do not field a football program at all, but that term is no longer used by the NCAA.
In 2006, Divisions I-A and I-AA were renamed the Football Bowl Subdivision and Football Championship Subdivision. Controversially, the NCAA caps the benefits that collegiate athletes can receive from their schools. There is a consensus among economists that these caps for men's basketball and football players benefit the athletes' schools at the expense of athletes. Intercollegiate sports began in the US in 1852 when crews from Harvard and Yale universities met in a challenge race in the sport of rowing; as rowing remained the preeminent sport in the country into the late-1800s, many of the initial debates about collegiate athletic eligibility and purpose were settled through organizations like the Rowing Association of American Colleges and the Intercollegiate Rowing Association. As other sports emerged, notably football and basketball, many of these same concepts and standards were adopted. Football, in particular, began to emerge as a marquee sport, but the rules of the game itself were in constant flux and had to be adapted for each contest.
The NCAA dates its formation to two White House conferences convened by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century in response to repeated injuries and deaths in college football which had "prompted many college and universities to discontinue the sport." Following those White House meetings and the reforms which had resulted, Chancellor Henry MacCracken of New York University organized a meeting of 13 colleges and universities to initiate changes in football playing rules. The IAAUS was established on March 31, 1906, took its present name, the NCAA, in 1910. For several years, the NCAA was a discussion group and rules-making body, but in 1921, the first NCAA national championship was conducted: the National Collegiate Track and Field Championships. More rules committees were formed and more championships were created, including a basketball championship in 1939. A series of crises brought the NCAA to a crossroads after World War II; the "Sanity Code" – adopted to establish guidelines for recruiting and financial aid – failed to curb abuses.
Postseason football games were multiplying with little control, member schools were concerned about how the new medium of television would affect football attendance. The complexity of those problems and the growth in membership and championships demonstrated the need for full-time professional leadership. Walter Byers a part-time executive assistant, was named executive director in 1951, a national headquarters was established in Kansas City, Missouri in 1952. Byers wasted no time placing his stamp on the Association. A program to control live television of football games was approved, the annual Convention delegated enforcement powers to the Association's Council, legislation was adopted governing postseason bowl games; as college athletics grew, the scope of the nation's athletics programs diverged, forcing the NCAA to create a structure that recognized varying levels of emphasis. In 1973, the Association's membership was divided into three legislative and competitive divisions – I, II, III.
Five years in 1978, Division I members voted to create subdivisions I-A and I-AA in football. Until the 1980s, the association did not offer women's athletics. Instead, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, with nearly 1000 member schools, governed women's collegiate sports in the United States; the AIAW was in a vulnerable position. Following a one-year overlap in which both organizations staged women's championships, the AIAW discontinued operation, most member schools continued their women's athletics programs under the governance of the NCAA. By 1982 all divisions of the NCAA offered national championship events for women's athletics. A year in 1983, the 75th Convention approved an expansion to plan women's athletic program services and pushed for a women's championship program. By the 1980s, televised college football had become a larger source of income for the NCAA. In September 1981, the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia Athletic Association filed suit against the NCAA in district court in Oklahoma.
The plaintiffs stated that the NCAA's football tel
Religion
Religion is a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, worldviews, sanctified places, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. However, there is no scholarly consensus over what constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith, a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, commemoration or veneration, festivals, trances, funerary services, matrimonial services, prayer, art, public service, or other aspects of human culture. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, symbols and holy places, that aim to give a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the origin of life, the universe, other things.
Traditionally, faith, in addition to reason, has been considered a source of religious beliefs. There are an estimated 10,000 distinct religions worldwide, but about 84% of the world's population is affiliated with one of the five largest religion groups, namely Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or forms of folk religion; the religiously unaffiliated demographic includes those who do not identify with any particular religion and agnostics. While the religiously unaffiliated have grown globally, many of the religiously unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs; the study of religion encompasses a wide variety of academic disciplines, including theology, comparative religion and social scientific studies. Theories of religion offer various explanations for the origins and workings of religion, including the ontological foundations of religious being and belief. Religion is derived from the ultimate origins of which are obscure. One possible interpretation traced to Cicero, connects lego read, i.e. re with lego in the sense of choose, go over again or consider carefully.
The definition of religio by Cicero is cultum deorum, "the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods." Julius Caesar used religio to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term religio on elephants in that they venerate the sun and the moon. Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligare bind, connect from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re + ligare or to reconnect, made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation given by Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28; the medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: "we hear of the'religion' of the Golden Fleece, of a knight'of the religion of Avys'". In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religio was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts. In general, religio referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors and towards God.
Religio was most used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions such as hesitation, anxiety, fear. The term was closely related to other terms like scrupulus which meant "very precisely" and some Roman authors related the term superstitio, which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame, to religio at times; when religio came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious things were separated from worldly things, was not used before the 1500s; the concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities. In the ancient Greece, the Greek term threskeia was loosely translated into Latin as religio in late antiquity; the term was sparsely used in classical Greece but became more used in the writings of Josephus in the first century CE. It was used in mundane contexts and could mean multiple things from respectful fear to excessive or harmfully distracting practices of others.
It was contrasted with the Greek word deisidaimonia which meant too much fear. The modern concept of religion, as an abstraction that entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines, is a recent invention in the English language; such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to events such the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and globalization in the age of exploration, which involved contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages. Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures. Others argue that using religion on non-western cultures distorts what people believe; the concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, others did not have a word or a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the peopl
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in the colony of Upper Canada. Controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed the present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution; as a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges, which differ in character and history, each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs. It has two satellite campuses in Mississauga; the university is ranked as the best Canadian university, according to various major publications. Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for influential movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School; the university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, was the site of the first practical electron microscope, the development of deep learning, multi-touch technology, the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1, the development of the theory of NP-completeness.
By a significant margin, it receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university. It is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with long and storied ties to gridiron football and ice hockey. The earliest recorded college football game was played in the University of Toronto's University College in the 1860s; the university's Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre serving cultural and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex. The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, four foreign leaders, fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court; as of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.
The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. As an Oxford-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States; the Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York, the colonial capital. On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming "from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University... for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature... to continue for to be called King's College." The granting of the charter was the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college's first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen's Park.
Under Strachan's stewardship, King's College was a religious institution aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy's control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of Upper Canada voted to rename King's College as the University of Toronto and severed the school's ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War, the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps, which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866; the Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.
Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843, medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887, when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile, the university continued to confer medical degrees; the university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888, when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884. A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library, but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades, a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges, including Strachan's Trinity College in 1904; the university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968.
The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada's first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry, founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean, was Canada's first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toro
