Unpublished Newswire

When it’s done, the building will barely register as new. The three-storey apartment complex will settle onto a leafy street as if it had always been there – faced in brick, its twin balconies nudging toward the sidewalk.But inside, this project in an older Toronto neighbourhood will express radical ambition. Its design unmakes more than half a century of North American assumptions about fire safety, architecture and how to build cities. Designed by Toronto’s Office Ou, the six-unit building will only have a single staircase, not two as Canadian building codes usually require.

Despite widespread concern about declining levels of trust, Canadian analytics firm Environics finds that overall levels of trust in many of the institutional pillars of this country's democracy — elections, the prime minister, Parliament, the Supreme Court — have been relatively stable over the last 10 to 15 years.