This year's Art Toronto, Canada's largest art fair, has taken on the character of a rallying point for the country's art community. The 27th edition, running until 1 November at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, arrives as Canadian artists and galleries contend with a trade war with the United States, inflation and rising costs, and the fair has answered with an emphatic emphasis on home-grown work.

Visitors are greeted by an installation by the late Lynn Donoghue, whose 1996 work Untitled (Watching), the first of her Caribou Tarp series to be shown publicly, is installed on a pile of dirt. The fair's new director, Emily Jean Alexander, told The Art Newspaper that the event is down only 5 percent in capacity compared with previous years, with 105 exhibitors, 80 percent of them Canadian, including a first-time commercial gallery from New Brunswick.

The fair's gala preview on 29 October brought a headline announcement: the federal and provincial governments will each provide C$50 million towards a new wing at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, designed by Hariri Pontarini Architects. In a video marking the occasion, Diana Fox Carney, Canada's first lady, declared that the world needs more Canada.

Elsewhere on the fair floor, Toronto's Nicholas Metivier Gallery is showing two new photographs by Edward Burtynsky from his forthcoming project Mining: For the Future, while Douglas Scholes presents a large beeswax sculpture and Karine Giboulo a whimsical environment titled Joy is a Resistant Bacteria (The Living Room). The Nia Centre for the Arts, a Toronto hub for Black artists, also has a booth, underscoring the fair's stated aim of building a stronger and more sustainable domestic ecosystem.