Last year, Statistics Canada revealed that roughly one out of every two Torontonians was born in another country, rendering the word “minority” nonsensical. Torontonians greeted this news with pleasure, bordering on smugness. We’re proud of our vast and varied range of cultural festivals, our global restaurants and our improbably harmonious diversity. People all over the world kill each other over ethnic and religious differences. Here, we intermarry and even fetishize our mixed nationalities in ever-lengthening hyphenated chains. When our children inevitably ask us, “What am I? Canadian or what?” the answer sounds like a punchline: “You’re Afro-Hungarian-Indo-Jewish-Canadian, honey. Daddy’s a lapsed Buddhist, and Mommy’s decidedly agnostic.”

The StatsCan revelation also spurred something of an identity crisis. We’re everything, so in a sense we’re nothing. What holds this city together? Heterogeneity, our most defined collective characteristic, has traditionally been the glue. Toronto is a success story not because of government-mandated multiculturalism, but because we have manipulated that mandate: within a generation or two, we tend to assimilate. That’s been our path for the past few decades. The proliferation of ethnic enclaves, however, suggests it might not be our future. While self-contained immigrant communities are vital to newcomers adjusting to Toronto, they can also delay integration and create rifts between communities.

When the city learned about Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year-old allegedly killed by her father and brother for refusing to wear a head scarf, Toronto’s unbridled embrace of pluralism suddenly seemed naive. Are we so enamoured of the idea of diversity that we don’t speak up against values that contradict our own? Here’s our unvarnished look at the changing face of Toronto, for better and worse:

• Girl, Interrupted: Aqsa Parvez had a choice: wear a hijab to please her devout family or take it off and be like her friends. She paid for her decision with her life, and her father and brother were charged with murder. Is this the price of multiculturalism?

• The Prince of Little Mogadishu: He escaped Somalia’s bloodbath, ran with a Toronto gang and spent time in jail. But he never stopped writing music that was often political, always hummable. How K’naan became rap royalty

• What Fifth Graders Want: At the east-end’s Crescent Town, which has four times more immigrants than the average Toronto public school, 90 per cent of the kids speak a first language other than English. Inside Toronto’s mini-United Nations

• Sickness and the City: Doctors at the city’s main health clinic for new immigrants are experts at diagnosing tropical diseases that were once exotic to Toronto. How we’re avoiding another SARS

• Lives of the Rich and Not So Famous: The biggest mansions in the Bridle Path are home to elite families from around the world. Meet the new establishment