TORONTO — The psychology of Toronto has changed, along with its demography and economy, or perhaps because of both. Gone is the swaggering confidence, replaced by grumbling. The city that desperately wanted to be "world-class" thinks itself slipping.

The contrasts are startling. Toronto has become a sprawling metropolis in which stunning private affluence stands beside a deteriorating public infrastructure. It is a city where the cracks are showing.

Just as Memphis and St. Louis didn't care about New York when it slumped, so Saskatoon and Fredericton don't care about Toronto's problems. They've got their own and anyway, for them, Toronto remains too big for its britches. Sympathy outside the province is as rare as a Stanley Cup for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Such is the fate of big cities everywhere.

Toronto's problems are compounded by the federal Conservatives' abiding suspicion of the city, with its business moguls, its polyglot ethnic groups that voted largely Liberal, its trendy culturalistas.

"Toronto" increasingly is a misnomer. The amalgamated city sprawls so far that the experience of those living in a downtown condominium is far removed from the suburbanite in Scarborough. The entire urban area outside the downtown core is pockmarked by dozens of ethnic enclaves that have very little to do with each other or the broad city.

Some of these areas are working splendidly; others are deeply troubled. The crime in those neighbourhoods - in which families have disintegrated or never formed, people will not tell the police what they know about criminal activity out of fear or alienation, education levels and ambitions are low, and drugs are rampant - stains the entire city.

What, ask people in other neighbourhoods, is happening to "our" city?

Thirty years ago, Toronto basked in Peter Ustinov's quip about it being like New York run by the Swiss. The "city that works," gushed U.S. publications. Toronto still shines next to Buffalo, Cleveland or Detroit. Whatever the city's social ills, you wouldn't trade them for Brooklyn's or South Los Angeles's any day.

Moreover - and this is part of the physical disconnect - the city is opening, or has opened, a string of glittering cultural centres. Condo towers are sprouting everywhere. Luxury hotels are spreading. A Rolls-Royce dealer offers a 2008 model at $362,000. Fancy restaurants are jammed.

The affluent, in other words, are living the dream of conspicuous consumption. This is, after all, the home of the bank presidents and their ilk who make fabulous amounts of money. There also remains tons of "old" money passed from generation to generation. Many of the exceedingly affluent, to their credit, give generously to the city's hospitals, universities and cultural institutions.

Philanthropy, however, cannot paper over the cracks in the city's physical infrastructure. For some decades now, Toronto has been fading. Comparisons with European cities are invidious. Put the Toronto subway system against, say, that of Madrid, and Torontonians will weep. The Toronto Transit Commission, and Union Station, are looking old and shabby.

The province has announced grand plans to upgrade the TTC and surface transportation in the region. We shall see.

The quiet grousing in Toronto comes from across the political spectrum. Many explain that the city's government is dysfunctional: a weak mayoralty system with a multiplicity of councillors. Others point to widespread inefficiency in delivering basic public services, and still others to systematic underfinancing.

Every year, massive amounts of money are quietly siphoned from Ontario taxpayers to more easterly parts of Canada through the federal tax and transfer system. At Queen's Park, health care gobbles up more and more of the provincial budget; its share will be more than 50 per cent in the not-too-distant future.

Ottawa forks over a small share of the federal excise tax on gasoline, and is offering more for settling immigrants. But that money is clearly insufficient. Ottawa admits more and more immigrants, then downloads most of the costs onto municipalities -- Toronto, with 43 per cent of the country's immigrants, being the prime example.