Every weekday, more than 1 million people ride the TTC subway, and roughly 2.4 million board a TTC vehicle of some kind — bus, streetcar, or subway — most standing or sitting within a few feet of a stranger they'll never speak to. Meanwhile, according to the Toronto Foundation's Vital Signs report, 37% of Torontonians — an estimated 925,000 adults — say they feel lonely at least three or four days a week, a rate about 28% higher than the rest of the country.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not really about the subway. It's about a specific instinct Toronto's professional culture, and Bay Street in particular, trains into people: lead with the pitch. Walk into a King West networking event, a Bay Street happy hour, or a MaRS Discovery District mixer, and you'll meet plenty of people who can deliver a polished 30-second summary of what they do before they've asked your name. Far fewer ask a second question about you.
The research says that instinct is backwards — and Toronto's own numbers make the case unusually well.
A City Going Back to the Office, and Back Into Rooms Together
Start with scale. The 2025 Toronto Employment Survey counted 1,623,720 jobs across the city, a record high and a 1.5% increase over the prior year — full-time employment alone grew by nearly 25,000 jobs. A meaningful share of that growth sits downtown, anchored by the financial-services sector Bay Street is built on: Canada's Big Six banks have led a wave of return-to-office mandates through 2025 and 2026, with major employers like RBC requiring staff back four days a week, a decision that rippled across the financial sector and beyond and had bank employees, by one account, jockeying for desk space.
Put plainly: after several years of hybrid work thinning out downtown Toronto, the city's professionals are back in physical rooms with each other in a way they weren't two years ago. Statistics Canada data backs this up more broadly — the share of employed Canadians commuting to work rose for a fourth consecutive year, reaching 82.6% in May 2025. More people, more often, standing in more elevators, more boardrooms, more networking events. Which makes the question of what they say to each other once they're there more consequential than it's been in years.
The Loneliest Big City in Canada
Toronto's Vital Signs data is specific in a way that generic "cities are lonely" reporting usually isn't. Beyond the headline 37% figure, the report found that the share of Toronto residents with six or more close friends dropped by nearly 30 percentage points between 2013 and 2022, and that only 33% of Toronto residents said they rarely or never feel lonely — compared to 39% across the wider Greater Toronto Area. By comparison, the same national dataset found loneliness levels of just 23% in Vancouver and 17% in Montreal, making Toronto a measurable outlier even within Canada.
This is, in behavioral-science terms, close to a natural experiment. Nicholas Epley, the University of Chicago researcher behind some of the most cited work on this exact contradiction, ran field experiments on commuter trains and buses: some riders were told to strike up a conversation with the stranger next to them, others to sit in silence. Beforehand, nearly everyone predicted the silent ride would be more pleasant. They were wrong — the group told to talk reported a significantly better commute, and in follow-up interviews, virtually none of them reported being brushed off when they tried. A separate field study of London-area train commuters found the identical pattern outside a U.S. lab entirely: people assigned to talk to a stranger reported a more positive experience and learned more than those left to ride in silence, despite predicting beforehand that solitude would feel better.
The barrier was never the other rider. It was an assumption, held by nearly everyone before they tried it, that the stranger beside them didn't want to be bothered. In a city where more close friendships have quietly disappeared over the past decade than almost anywhere else in the country, that assumption is very likely wrong more often here than the national average — which means the upside of testing it is larger here, too.
Why the Bay Street Pitch Backfires
There's a specific irony in a financial district built almost entirely around confident, rehearsed self-presentation — the analyst who can summarize a deal in one sentence, the founder who can pitch a fund in an elevator ride up to the 49th floor of CIBC Square.
Research published in Psychological Science by Irene Scopelliti and colleagues found that people who self-promote consistently overestimate how impressive it makes them look, and underestimate the annoyance it produces in the listener. That's a real exposure in an industry culture as pitch-heavy as Bay Street's, where financial services alone employs well over 100,000 people at the city's largest banks and a downtown core full of legal, consulting, and tech firms trained in the same instinct — introduce yourself with your value proposition, not with a question.
Compare that to the Harvard research led by Karen Huang and colleagues, which analyzed hundreds of live conversations, including a speed-dating dataset spanning thousands of exchanges, and found that people who asked more questions — specifically follow-up questions — were rated significantly more likable by their conversation partner. Not because the questions were especially clever. Because they signaled responsiveness: real evidence that someone was listening, in a room where most attendees are visibly waiting for their turn to talk.
In a city where nearly every attendee at a Liberty Village founder mixer or a King Street client dinner has a version of the same polished answer to "so what do you do," the differentiator was never a sharper answer. It's being the person who asks a second question about theirs.
Torontonians Already Like Each Other More Than They Think
Here's the part of the research that should take some pressure off the next Distillery District networking night. Yale researchers led by Erica Boothby documented what they call the liking gap — a well-replicated tendency for people to underestimate how much their conversation partner enjoyed talking to them, found consistently across strangers meeting in a lab, college roommates, and members of the public in workshop settings. In every case, people rated their partner as more likable than they rated themselves, meaning the anxious self-assessment happening in most first conversations is measurably wrong on both sides, most of the time.
Set that against the Vital Signs finding that a rising share of Toronto adults report having no close friends or family in the city at all. A population this uncertain about its own social standing is, statistically, walking into every new conversation underestimating how well it's landing — which means the instinct to hold back after an "awkward" first exchange at a networking event is very likely working against people more in Toronto than it would in a less isolated city.
What This Means for a Networking Room in Toronto, Specifically
None of this argues against ambition — in a downtown core this competitive, across finance, tech, and everything MaRS and the Well have brought together, people need to convey what they do and why it matters. But the sequencing Toronto's professional culture tends to default to is backwards, and the research is specific about the fix:
Treat the subway rule like a networking rule. If a stranger on Line 1 is statistically more receptive to conversation than you'd guess, the same is almost certainly true of the person standing alone near the bar at a King West mixer. The instinct to assume they'd rather not be bothered is, per the research, wrong more often than it's right — and more often here than the national average, given Toronto's loneliness numbers.
Lead every industry conversation with a question, not your title. In a city where "what do you do" often functions as a soft credential check in half the rooms you'll walk into this month, being the person who asks it first, and means it, reads as different in a way a sharper elevator line can't replicate.
Let the follow-up question do the work your pitch was trying to do. The Harvard data is specific on this: it's the second and third question, not the first, that signals real listening. In an industry as saturated with rehearsed openers as Bay Street finance and downtown tech, the follow-up is the part almost nobody else in the room is doing.
Remember the liking gap on the ride home. If a conversation felt awkward in the moment, the research says you're very likely misjudging how it landed for the other person — worth remembering in a city where, per Toronto's own data, the number of people with six or more close friends has been shrinking for a decade, and every new connection carries more weight than it used to.
The Actual Takeaway for Toronto
Bay Street didn't build its pitch-first culture by accident — a financial and professional core this dense and this competitive was always going to reward the fastest possible summary of your value. But the research on what actually makes a stranger like you, remember you, and want to talk to you again points the opposite direction: toward the question, not the pitch; toward the follow-up, not the close.
In a city where more than 900,000 adults report feeling lonely most weeks and over a million commuters pass within a few feet of each other on the TTC every single day without a word, the opportunity isn't hidden. It's standing next to you on the platform at Union.
NetworkNite runs structured, host-led events across Toronto built around exactly this — real one-on-one conversations, not another room to work with a rehearsed line. See how it works →