“Go west”, swells the camp chorus and the sensitive traveller’s response in the current climate tends to be “not bloody likely”. You know that any visit to America will be a fraught one, from the intrusive interviews in the queue for check-in at your departure airport, through the detailed immigration form to fill in over the ocean, to the suspicious interrogation, fingerprinting and retina scan on arrival in the land of the scared witless.

Which is where Canada comes into its own. For the last four years that other massive, sprawling ex-colony over the water has become, by comparison, so much more homely and welcoming than its neighbour to the south. With the emergence of a budget airline, Zoom, with comfortable aircraft and (usually anathema to a budget carrier) a decent free meal service, it is apparent that America’s loss will be Canada’s gain.

It might be pushing it to suggest that, with a 6½-hour-long flight from Glasgow, Toronto is an ideal weekend city-break, but reasonable fares (as well as all those hours saved on airport hostility) and far lower hotel rates than in New York suggest it is a viable alternative as a transatlantic destination.

For the wary, Toronto also offers a far more comfortable introduction to a North American metropolis. Sure, it’s massive and cosmopolitan, with daunting silvery towers of skyscrapers. But duck below that skyline and you’ll find a city of homely neighbourhoods, European in some parts, very British in others, mostly taking the best aspects of North American energy and adaptability and rejecting the commercial aggression you’ll find below the 49th parallel.

The city’s visitor-friendly areas reflect its history of immigration, although the ethnic borders are beginning to blur at the margins. Little Portugal in the west retains a certain amount of old-country integrity while the Corso Italia to the north is packed to the olive-barrel with authentic trattorie. What is impressive, though, is that so much of central Toronto remains devoted to leafy residential streets, with kids on their bikes and the locals trimming their hedges.

Leave the glass-and-steel monoliths of the downtown and you are immediately in the enticing neighbourhoods of Chinatown and Kensington Market.

The city has refurbished the old tramlines and the trollies now ply up and down Spadina Avenue, lined with Chinatown’s untidy regiment of Oriental restaurants, enough of them to keep prices at a bare minimum. The competition, not to mention the availability of every kind of exotic vegetable, fish and spice, ensures that quality is invariably excellent.

Kensington Market is where the judicious shopper can find CDs, books, T-shirts and Canadiana at prices that suggest the Canadian dollar has become one of the world’s soft currencies.

More upscale shoppers will find all the usual labels elsewhere (the once-bohemian enclave of Yorkville has become home to bijou designer boutiques and pretentiously pricy galleries) although in some cases they might have to disappear underground.

Toronto, by climatic necessity, has pursued the Canadian urban policy of siting vast stretches of the city in underground malls and walkways to ensure that business is unaffected when it is -10C up top and there’s a foot of snow blocking the shop-fronts.

But to see it at its best, go outside the winter months, for Toronto is a city that rewards those who just walk around. Sights such as the CN Tower or the bizarre mock-Gothic horror film mansion Casa Loma (its garish tastelessness provided by Scottish stonemasons who should have been ashamed of themselves) belie the image of a city of architectural innovation.

Toronto’s commitment to bold new edifices means that Frank Gehry has designed the new Art Gallery of Ontario which opens in 2008, while Daniel Libeskind’s Royal Ontario Museum is already promising to be as striking a construction as Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao.

For the naturally spectacular you have to make the obligatory two-hour trip out of town. Those who dare to vent a weary yawn at the sight of Niagara Falls just don’t deserve to be there. Regardless of the rather tawdry development clustering around, there is something powerfully enthralling about watching that broad column of water endlessly plummeting.

If you approach from the railway station you are presented with the substantial hors d’oeuvre of the American falls, a tidy curtain of water falling neatly onto the rocks below. By contrast the Canadian falls are a tempestuous crescent, enshrouded in a permanent cloud of spray. At night they are floodlit green, red and purple. One of the best viewpoints is from the Crazy Sushi Japanese restaurant, gazing at the point where gravity grabs the flow while you munch tempura.

New York is a six-hour drive away, but first you would have to confront those mirror-shaded security sorts, the swirl pattern of your index finger and the flecks on your retina. Maybe it’s best just to head back to Toronto where the Queen is on the $20 bill, and all’s right with the world.

Details: Zoom airlines (www.flyzoom.com, 0870 240 0055) flies direct from Glasgow to Toronto from £240 return. The Royal York hotel (00 1 416 368 2511) has double rooms from £75. The Bond Place hotel (00 1 416 362 6061) is in central Toronto and has doubles from £49.50. In Niagara, River Road has countless B&Bs within walking distance of the Falls. Glen Mhor (00 1 905 354 2600) has doubles with breakfast at £44. In Niagara-on-the-Lake, Brockamour Manor (00 1 905 468 5527, www.brockamour.com) has doubles from £66

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