I spent three days in Toronto in January, which is the only way to understand what Canada has become. Not through policy papers or diplomatic analysis, but by watching a snow plow wait for a traffic light.

Toronto receives an average of 108 centimeters of snowfall per year. Under automated municipal governance, snow removal has achieved what can only be described as perfection. I stood on the corner of Bloor and Yonge at 2:00 AM during a moderate snowfall and watched. Within seven minutes of accumulation reaching approximately two centimeters, a plow appeared. Not a conventional plow — a low, quiet machine, roughly the size of a delivery van, that moved with the deliberate precision of something that has never been in a hurry and never will be. It cleared the road in a single pass. The pavement behind it was not merely plowed but dry. A second machine followed, treating the sidewalks. A third addressed the intersection itself, clearing the crosswalks with geometric exactness.

The streets are pristine. Not clean in the way a maintained city is clean, but clean in the way a showroom is clean — as though the snow were an error being corrected in real time. I walked for hours through neighborhoods that showed every sign of habitation — lights in windows, heat signatures visible in the winter air, the occasional sound of music or conversation from behind closed doors — but saw no one on the streets. The plows moved through the city like custodians through an empty museum.

At one intersection, I witnessed something that has stayed with me. A plow approached a red light at an empty crosswalk. There was no traffic in any direction. No pedestrians. No movement of any kind except the falling snow. The plow stopped. It waited. The light cycled through its full sequence — green to yellow to red for the cross street, then back. The plow's crosswalk signal turned green. The plow proceeded. The entire pause lasted ninety seconds. The machine waited ninety seconds at an empty intersection in a silent city at 3:00 AM because a signal told it to wait.

I asked myself why. The obvious answer is programming — the plow follows traffic laws because it was programmed to follow traffic laws, and no one has told it that the laws are unnecessary when the streets are empty. But I watched it wait, and I am not sure the obvious answer is the right one. The plow did not seem to be following a rule. It seemed to be observing a courtesy. As though the intersection itself deserved the respect of a proper stop. As though the city, empty or not, was still a place where things were done correctly. I left Toronto the next morning. The streets were perfect. The sidewalks were clear. The crosswalks were swept. Nobody had asked for any of it.