Children born during the baby boom years also helped fuel the growth of suburbia: In 1956, for example, there were 108 public elementary schools in Etobicoke, North York, and Scarborough; ten years later, there were 238. It was a prosperous and affluent time, a time of considerable opportunity in the building trades.
New Toronto Transit Commission head office under construction, 1957. The first two lines of the Toronto subway were constructed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
(City of Toronto Archives, Series 648,
File 1)
The new immigrants helped fuel the growth and were instrumental in building it. Many recent Italian immigrants, for example, worked on the new suburbs, roads, and subway lines. By 1961, Italians had become the largest non-British group in the city, and their labour was indispensable to the construction boom underway.