I thought this would have been posted already, but it turns out there are plans for lighting up the tower: (ETA: Oh, never mind, I came to this already existing thread first, but there is a thread already talking about this. Never mind. )
Come Canada Day, CN Tower will once again light up the night
TheStar.com
May 30, 2007 04:30 AM
Debra Black
Staff Reporter
Shanghai has one. So do New York, Paris and London. And now so will Toronto come Canada Day.
Like the Shanghai Tower, Empire State Building and London Eye, the CN Tower will also be ablaze at night with light and colour.
Toronto's internationally known landmark and the world's tallest freestanding tower is to be outfitted with 1,330 brilliant LED lights that will shoot up the elevator shaft, over the "bubble" and straight to the mast.
"We were conspicuously not lit at night," said Jack Robinson, chief operating officer of the CN Tower, in a phone interview with the Star. "The reason for lighting it is to celebrate Canada's national tower and national icon ... We want to have the tower as a beacon for the city of Toronto and Canada."
The 553-metre CN Tower, which has 2 million visitors a year, was once ablaze with lights, beginning when it first opened. But 10 years ago the incandescent lights, the size of washing machines, were permanently dimmed because they were expensive and inefficient to repair. The tower remained barely visible in the night sky with only enough lighting for airplanes.
But now thanks to these new energy-saving computer-programmed LEDs, the tower will be seen in all its glory and most importantly will be energy-efficient, using 10 per cent less energy than current lighting and 60 per cent less than when the tower was last fully lit in the 1990s, Robinson said.
The new lights, programmed from a desktop computer, will all be in place on the tower by early June and testing is to begin sometime after that.
CN Tower officials say that they still must decide whether the tower will be lit up all night long, but that during spring and fall bird migration season the lights will be off.