W

illa McCaffrey-Noviss had just earned her Master of Education in Counselling Psychology from the University of Toronto and was finally fulfilling her dream of beginning her own therapy practice. With a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, she used her $50 paycheck from her first ever therapy session as an independent psychotherapist to buy herself a beer at the airport, excited to turn a new leaf and start her adventure of moving to Amsterdam after nearly two years of lockdown in Toronto.

McCaffrey-Noviss had spent the lockdown as a student therapist living in her parents’ basement giving therapy sessions to people where the major theme was COVID, and how it tore families apart, something she was also experiencing in her household.

“I entered COVID as somebody in their young twenties with zero cares, and then I came out of COVID as a career professional and I kind of felt like I missed some adventurous years to living in a basement” she said from her apartment in downtown Amsterdam. It was a warm spring night and she had just arrived home from Jiu Jitsu - her newly adopted hobby.

Toronto is infamous for having one of the longest lockdowns in the world at almost 400 days since the start of the pandemic, according to a 2021 report by The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, something the city still hasn’t fully recovered from in terms of foot traffic and business closures downtown. This lack of livelihood in the city along with the introduction of remote work, and rising cost of living have resulted in the largest emigration from Toronto since 2017, according to Statistics Canada. If the exodus from Toronto continues, the city’s recovery from lockdown back into the thriving metropolis that it once was is looking farther and farther away.

“As much as we could say the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror and it's past us, it's not completely past us,” said Jane McIntyre, Principal Economist at The Conference Board of Canada in Ottawa, adding that Canada was perhaps more cautious than other countries in their approach to COVID-19. She said the food, arts, and entertainment industries are some of the last to recover because they were closed the longest.

“I didn’t even feel comfortable going for a walk or going to my grocery store,” she said, “it felt unsafe and unenjoyable. After a while it was just like why am I suffering and paying such high rent?”

Another reason Toronto became unpleasant during the pandemic was the oppressive atmosphere due to social policing, said McCaffrey-Noviss. People in Toronto normalized performative things like walking their dog alone on a path wearing a mask, she said. “There were so many things like that that just made the world feel small, and your freedom feel small... it felt very militant in a lot of ways.”

Prior to deciding to move to Amsterdam, McCaffrey-Noviss said that as soon as she could, she went traveling around Europe for three months in the summer of 2022 which opened her mind to the different approaches to COVID-19 in other countries.

“When I'm traveling, it kind of reminds me that there’s not only one way to think. It feels like in Toronto there’s a right way to think and then when COVID got added to that, there was a right way to think and behave in so many aspects of life,” she said.

One positive thing that came out of COVID-19 for a lot of people was the ability to work remotely, said McIntyre. All-of-a-sudden, people had other options than living in the city because they weren’t tied to an office, resulting in higher migration numbers, she said.

Over a ten-year period leading up to the pandemic, price growth in the housing market in cities in Ontario saw a seven to eight per cent yearly growth versus the two to three per cent growth in provinces like Nova Scotia, she said, making cities like Toronto unattainable for a lot of people.

“I think people were sort of taking a step back and saying, I just don't want to do this anymore. I can't afford it anymore,” she said, adding that the ability to work from home “really was a game changer” for a lot of people who now had the freedom to live and work from anywhere.

COVID made it possible for McCaffrey-Noviss to bring her therapy practice with her anywhere in the world which she says never would have been possible pre-COVID. “Before COVID people didn’t do online therapy” she said.

For Shushkovsky, remote work means spending her days at the beach before turning on her laptop and signing into work at 4 p.m. which she says compliments her lifestyle well.

The downside of remote work is the vacancy rates in office buildings remain high, translating into less activity downtown, said McIntyre. Now there is a discussion to turn these vacant office buildings into mixed spaces or condominiums to try and restore some of that activity, she said.

The silver lining is that immigration is also at a record high. Toronto welcomed nearly 160,000 new immigrants in 2022 according to a report by Statista, which will eventually translate into increased activity downtown, “it’s just a matter of time,” she said.