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"His beef: Michael Davidson of the Kensington Patty Palace holds a stack of what he has known all his life as patties - but which authorities now have told him are meat pies" (February 18, 1985) (Credit: Toronto Public Library Digital Archives from the Toronto Star Archives, photographer Ron Bull)
"His beef: Michael Davidson of the Kensington Patty Palace holds a stack of what he has known all his life as patties - but which authorities now have told him are meat pies" (February 18, 1985) (Credit: Toronto Public Library Digital Archives from the Toronto Star Archives, photographer Ron Bull)

Toronto’s Patty Wars and CBC Short “Patty vs. Patty”

The other day, a woman behind the bar at an event told me she was in television, and had played a part in the “patty wars” documentary (the what?). I’d never heard of the “patty wars,” though I knew that Jamaican patties were a Toronto thing.

So tonight I watched CBC Short Docs “Patty vs. Patty” (2022, 18 mins), from filmmaker Chris Strikes, which “tells the story of Toronto’s bizarre 1985 ‘patty wars,’ when Jamaican-Canadian bakers went head-to-head with the federal government over the name of their beloved beef patty” (per YouTube description). Great stuff, and well done Sheron Hibbert as First Customer!

Further reading:

The Toronto Patty Wars, Jamie Bradburn’s Tales of Toronto, by Jamie Bradburn, February 20, 2021

Toronto filmmakers pay tribute to the Jamaican patty in new documentary, now., by Ramona Leito, February 23, 2022

The history of Toronto’s infamous ‘patty wars,’ blogTO, by Chris Middleton, September 2025