Anne Marie Lorusso, sales representative

Image credit: Apiary by Scott Conarroe; Bee from iStockPhoto

Last summer, the Fairmont Royal York impressed the locavore crowd by installing three beehives on its iconic roof. The bees were happy up there with the hotel’s thriving herb and veggie gardens, so management doubled the size of its royal family this month with the addition of three more queens. Their 120,000 servants should produce more than 600 pounds of honey by September—the sticky stuff will appear in everything from cakes to soups to pedicures.

—Karon Liu

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=30

This is what we know now: on September 26, 2002, Maher Arar, en route to Montreal, was detained by the FBI at JFK airport on suspected links to al-Qaeda. From there he was transferred to a Syrian jail, where he was locked in a coffin-like underground cell, interrogated and beaten with ragged electrical wire. Almost a year later, he was released, without explanation, and returned to Canada.

In the time since, a Canadian commission decided the RCMP had given false information about Arar to the CIA, and the top cop resigned. More spectacularly, a group of Toronto lawyers, led by the fearless Julian Falconer, won Arar an $11.5‑mil­lion settlement from the Canadian government—an unprecedented amount for a human-rights violation.

The settlement stunned U.S. lawmakers, who have refused to apologize for their country’s role in Arar’s ordeal. In the States, he’s still on the terrorism watch list, and his American attorneys have yet to win a round in his civil case there. But with the Obama administration comes a new Department of Justice, a pledge of transparency, and the possibility that Arar and other wrongfully accused people will finally see officials held responsible.

—Alec Scott

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=26

In a year when Air Canada left a record number of people stranded at Christmas without apologies (or baggage), Porter’s smooth operation proved that civilized air travel isn’t extinct. Three years into the airline’s tenure at the island airport, we’re ready to swap our protests for praise—what’s a little noise pollution? While most airlines have sunk to new lows in cheapery (pay-per-view movies on WestJet), Porter understands we might need a few perks to distract us from the reality that we are being belted to a 30-tonne aircraft flying 25,000 feet in the air with 70 strangers of unknown mental-health status. Passengers are pleasantly lulled into a sense of well-being first in the swish lounge, with complimentary Wi‑Fi and cappuccino, then onboard, with free in-flight booze (props for VQA wines) and smiling flight attendants sporting pillbox hats at charmingly oblique angles. And the best part: flights get to their destinations when they’re supposed to.

—Rachel Heinrichs

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=23

A trash plant in Woodbridge (the first of its kind in North America) is turning garbage into power

It’s a brilliantly simple idea: take something we have too much of and turn it into something that’s in desperately short supply. The Dongara Pellet Plant, at highways 407 and 27, is already chewing through 100,000 tonnes of York Region’s trash per year (it has the capacity to take on twice that) and pumping out nifty energy pellets that initial tests indicate burn cleaner than coal. Here’s how it works.—Karon Liu

Image credit: Ken Ogawa

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=21

To some Torontonians, the CN Tower is the world’s tallest invisible free-standing structure. To others, it’s a visual punchline for Freudian jokes about our city’s long-standing inferiority complex. But forget about all those soon-to-be-built taller things: the CN Tower is, today, inarguably the world’s tallest free-standing nightlight. Since the introduction of LED lights, its dull grey casing has become a nightly screen for the glowing sky play of red and blue and green. Now, finally, the tower is our rightful beacon, unexpectedly lit up, even ethereal.

—Randy Boyagoda

Toronto Life Magazine

http://www.torontolife.com/features/50-reasons-love-toronto-right-now/?pageno=13