Bay Street

Bay Street runs through downtown Toronto's financial district, lined with the headquarters of Canada's largest banks, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and major law and accounting firms, a concentration of financial power that built up gradually through the 19th and 20th centuries as Toronto consolidated its position as Canada's dominant financial centre over rivals including Montreal.

A street name that became an industry's nickname

As that concentration of financial institutions grew, "Bay Street" became widely used as shorthand for the Canadian financial industry as a whole, much the way "Wall Street" stands in for American finance, used in media coverage and everyday speech to refer to bankers, investors and the broader financial establishment regardless of whether the specific institution in question actually has an address on the street itself. The metonym has stuck for decades, making Bay Street one of the relatively few Toronto street names recognized as an industry shorthand well beyond the city's own borders.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Bay Street
• Wikipedia — Bay Street

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