"In a year of rising gas prices and fallen hobbits, heiresses canoodling with hockey goons and a mayoral election that seemed to drag on forever, these 10 people rose above the fray. They turned heads, ignored convention and made us proud to call ourselves Torontians"

The selected individuals include: Nelly Furtado for Music, Derek Ballantyne for Urbanism, Bruce Kuwabara for Design, Stephen Lewis for Lifetime Achievement, David Cronenberg for Film, Ilse Treurnicht for Science, Albert Schultz for Performing Arts, Christina Zeidler for Business, Donald Johnson for Philanthropy, Stephen Alexander for Food.

The entry on Bruce Kuwabara is as follows:

“As a boy in Hamilton, the child of Japanese-Canadian parents who’d spent the war in internment camps, Bruce Kuwabara played chess and tended tropical fish. Chess, he remarked when he received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal in June, “is all about the play of forces in space and time.” Aquariums are “finite ecologies, fragile environments within which everything needs to be balanced and maintained.” Kuwabara’s boyhood hobbies have served him well. In 2006, he left his savvy, polished mark all over Toronto. Not only did the 57-year-old receive his profession’s greatest honour, he saw the completion of the National Ballet School’s new Jarvis Street headquarters and the expanded Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art (both designed in conjunction with Shirley Blumberg, one of his partners at KPMB). Like a triumphant chess move, the ballet school plays with space and time, weaving together heritage and new buildings. Similarly, the Gardiner’s new third floor knits itself seamlessly into the original museum while making neighbourly gestures to the nearby buildings. Kuwabara has a samurai among his ancestors, which may account for the incorrigible elegance of his person and his designs. Few understand better than he does that cities, like aquariums, demand subtle adjustment more often than bravura tumults. His next gift to his adopted home town will be the new headquarters for the Toronto International Film Festival, to open in 2008 at King and John. Like its creator, a courteous and gifted listener, a Kuwabara building is just what the neighbourhood needs.” – Katherine Ashenburg