Support
search
search

Toronto at 3 AM

In this city’s quietest hour, the people who are awake are awake for a reason. From international student security guards to crisis line volunteers, from DJs building fun in an unfun city to palliative care doctors making house calls—stories of the people who are up while the rest of the city sleeps.

Toronto at 3 AM

Short Feature by Max Mertens

Building Fun in a Notoriously Unfun City

With artists getting international recognition and partygoers eager to make up for lost time, the only thing standing between Toronto and a vibrant nightlife scene is Toronto.
Perspective by Emma Healey

Death in the Small Hours

In the middle of the night, palliative care doctor Joshua Wales drives across the city, making house calls to people during the most emotionally complex, vulnerable moments of their lives.

Short Feature by Lygia Navarro

The Night Watchmen

In the booming private security industry, the biggest problem is finding enough guards. Then came a new source of low-wage employees—international students.

Feature by Alexandra Kimball

The Brutish Lives and Hideous Deaths of Toronto Rats

Rats are cunning, ravenous, daring, disgusting. They stand in for everything squalid and dysfunctional about urban life and we will never be rid of them.

Feature by Inori Roy

A Voice on the End of the Line

For the last sixty years, crisis hotlines have been the emergency rooms of the mental health world. But remote work has transformed the already challenging overnight shift into a deeply lonely one.
Essay by Sarah Ratchford

Leaving the Party

Walking late at night, free from the noise of the day and the demands and threats of men, I can finally hear my own thoughts.
Perspective by Lisa MacIntosh

Maybe I’ll See Raymond

For years, I walked the city doing street outreach overnight—handing out socks, listening to people’s stories, always scanning the crowd for a familiar face.

Announcements

The Local Journalism Fellowship 2023

Now in its fourth year, the program provides training and mentorship to aspiring and emerging journalists from communities underrepresented in Canadian media. Applications are now open.

From the Archives: Public Education Stories

Local Journalism Matters.

We're able to produce impactful, award-winning journalism thanks to the generous support of readers. By supporting The Local, you're contributing to a new kind of journalism—in-depth, non-profit, from corners of Toronto too often overlooked.

Support
Recent issues
Spring 2024

Art + Money

Can you make art and still make a living in Toronto? Stories about international students-turned-popstars, indie filmmakers, radical visual artists, Indigenous painters, and the rest of the playwrights, gallery workers, cultural critics and workers keeping Toronto arts alive.
Winter 2024

The Aging City

Toronto is getting old. Today there are more people over 65 than under 15, and by 2041 it’s estimated that one in five Torontonians will be a senior citizen. In our new ongoing series, we examine life in an aging city—with stories about home care, transit, seniors who wander, LGBTQ2S+ discrimination, and more.
Fall 2023

The Finch West Issue

From a wide-angle look at the region’s sorry transit history to an intimate ride-along on the 36 bus, from an examination of the pandemic's legacy in northwest Toronto to a profile of a forgotten workers’ housing co-op in Rexdale—stories from Finch West on the verge of a massive transformation.