Front Burner - Marineland’s scandalous decline

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

At its peak, Marineland was the second most popular tourist destination in Ontario’s Niagara region after the falls. Visitors could get up close and personal with beluga whales, dolphins and orcas, and watch them perform in elaborate shows. Throw in a side of rollercoasters and other exhibits and you had a family friendly attraction built to last.But for years, the park has been mired in controversy and allegations of animal abuse. Business has declined to the point that the park is now closed to the public. However, several animals including 30 beluga whales remain trapped there. Marineland says it needs money or a new home for the whales, or else they might have to kill them.Liam Casey of the Canadian Press has been covering this story for years. He lays out what could happen to the whales, and what it all means for other parks like Marineland.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

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and a digital business library full of on-demand resources. Benefit together with Chambers Plan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everyone, it's Jamie. I just wanted to take a moment to thank some of the people who have been writing in to David, a teacher in Calgary who'd love to hear more stories said in non-Western countries. He suggested coverage of the ongoing conflicts in Sudan and the Congo as an example.

David, thank you so much for this feedback. We really, really appreciate it. If you have any suggestions for us, please email Frontburner at cbler. at cbc.ca.ca, and while you are at it, please give us a follow wherever you get your podcast. It is the best way to make sure that you don't miss an episode that you want to hear. Okay, here's today's episode. So if you watched any amount of Canadian TV in the 90s or 2000s, you probably remember this jingle. Everyone loves Marina.

At its peak, Marine Land was a second most popular tourist destination in Ontario's Niagara region after the falls. Visitors could get up close and personal with beluga whales, dolphins, and orcas, and watch them perform in elaborate shows. Throw in a side of roller coasters and other exhibits and you had a family-friendly attraction.

But for years, the park has been mired in controversy and allegations of animal abuse. Business has declined to the point that the park is now closed to the public. However, several animals, including 30 beluga whales, remain trapped there. Marine land says it needs money or a new home for the whales or else they might have to kill them. Liam Casey of the Canadian press has been reporting on the highs and mostly lows of marine land for the better part of 14 years. It's a story that seems to refuse to go away. So I have him here to talk with me about what is going on with these whales.

how marine land ended up in this position and what it means for other parks like it. Liam, hey, it is great to have you on Frontburner. Hey, Jamie, thank you so much for having me on. So I just want to say that you have been covering marine land for over a decade, going back to when you and I worked together at the Toronto Star, we were sitting, I think, beside each other when you were working on this, right? Yeah, my memory is that we were, we sat, to each other, and we're both doing different internships.

And one day, Graham Arley, the city editor that both you and I loved came up. And assigning a story, it was coming off a recent A1 story written by our court supporter, Peter Small, who wrote about SeaWorld winning a court decision against Maryland to get one of their killer whales back. this killer whale named Akika. And so Ram asked me to, he gave me a week and said, you know, head down there and kind of tell a bigger story about Akaa and marine land and what's kind of happening down there. So that kind of started the whole thing.

Yeah, and I feel like it consumed basically everything else we talked about for that entire year. Hey. I remember one of your earliest pieces was about John Holler, right? The man that founded and built marine land in the early 60s and made it one of the biggest tourist attractions in the Niagara region. So maybe let's start there. Who is he? How did he come to create one of the most controversial theme parks in the country? So John Oller came over from Slovenia back in the 50s and part of his life. until that point was in a circus act and he came over here and had the idea that he would like to kind of continue that in Canada. He started with a seal I believe named Jeff and they started doing kind of like local shows when he was able to kind of train this seal and it started

so it started like very kind of humble beginnings but it kept kind of growing. He kept growing the business, buying up more and more kind of property. So marine land sits right now on the large piece of land about a kilometer from the falls. So very close to sort of tourist kind of central there. And so you bought up kind of plots of land kind of over the years, kept expanding, kept expanding, kept investing in the business, you know, more and more animals, both like land and marine mammals. Next to this place, this is the most popular spot in Niagara Falls. He just kind of turned it into sort of the most popular kind of zoo aquarium in the country for a long time. Fair for me to say that in like the 90s, 2000s, maybe we're talking about the Free Willy kind of era, right, the movie Free Willy.

We started to see more protesting against the park. Yeah, so there's like, so there's been. There's also been a long history of protesters there. It really started to pick up, this is before my time, but it seemed to really start to pick up kind of related to Free Willy. And, you know, that particular whale named Keiko was actually at Greenland for a period of time. A few years back, children all over the world

fell in love with the star of the movie Free Willy. You remember it. The killer whale cruelly kept in terrible conditions and a street kid's attempts to free him. You know, so the story of Keiko was that Keiko's kind of moved around from several different parks, including a notorious marine mammal park in Mexico, and sort of there was this ground swell to, you know, get Keiko out of there.

They ended up doing it kind of in between the waters, Norway and Iceland, and, you know, Keiko managed to kind of live for, you know, a little more than a year, but eventually died. evening, we got the heartbreaking news from Norway tonight. Kako, the Orca whale, known to millions as the star of the free-willing movies, is dead. He died this afternoon in Norwegian coastal waters following the sudden onset of pneumonia. Around that time, a bunch of protests kind of started to pick up at Molyland. You know, a lot of people just didn't believe that, like, killer whales or belugas should be kept in captivity.

Those protests kept up for decades. I remember, you know, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about is this guy, this whistleblower, that you talk to as part of your series, Phil Demers, right? And tell me more about what he alleged about the way that Marine land itself was caring for these lives. larger sea mammals, right? Not just whales, but also walruses, right? Yeah. So Phil Demers was, he became sort of a central whistleblower for our work at the scar. And he was there for about 12 years from 2000 until 2012. And he was a whale trainer involved with kind of all aspects of different marine mammals there. He developed as unusual bond that this walrus named Smushy that would just follow him kind of like everywhere.

I would walk her between the stadium and the, uh, and the, uh, and the aquarium and just walk her in, you know, broad daylight while the park open, people are watching me walk this walrus and this walrus would follow me, you know, down the, the asphalt into the aquarium. And then we put my arm around her and watched the show and people would lose their mind because they couldn't believe this man just walked in with a baby walrus. You know, these are really fond memories. And he describes it as sort of like he was somehow imprinted as her kind of walrus mom. on Smooshy, who was young when Sushy came to the park.

So he left in 2012 sick of all the problems that the park was having with water at the time. In May of 2012, I got a phone call from someone who said that there was a lawyer who was talking to somebody who had worked at marine land and thought this person had some issues with marine land and wondered if I wanted to talk to them. It was really difficult. And finally, in the end, he decided he would talk to us. us. And that was Phil de Mears, the first whistleblower. And the star colleague Linda Diebel managed to get Bill to go on the record and kind of talk about his time there, as well as interviewing a bunch of other people. And I was kind of there helping Linda a bit in the

background. In the end, we were working with 15 whistleblowers. And it was their feeling that problems that had existed with the water, not being able to get the levels right, had caused health problems in the animals, and also short staffing had caused problems. And they were trying to figure out how to deal with the water. They had problems with that there's this part of the system back then was this ozone system that would help kind of purify the water. And so this was affecting the pools where the walruses, seals, sea lions, and dolphins were housed.

There were several different pools that were kind of all connected. And that system was failing. happened is that there was a lot of skin and water problems among the dolphins, seals and sea lions. We had a story about Larry the Harbor Seal who went blind because of the water. They were, you know, people at Lina and were doing kind of like whatever they can to try to protect the whale, sea lions, and dolphins, you know, and then some of these seals and sea lions spent weeks kind of out of the water in what they would call like dry dock or in these areas where they just wouldn't come into contact with the water.

So Bill ended up kind of quitting, going kind of public. He sort of has since become kind of the face of, you know, the kind of trainer turned outspoken critic of the park. Yeah. And am I right to say that Marine Land actually ended up suing him for trying to steal Smushy, the Wal-Riv? Yeah. So about, say, it would have been.

thanks, I believe it was Thanksgiving weekend of 2012, so the same period of time where Linda launched her original series of stories and then I came on board to help with a bunch of follow-up stories. The protested that year on Thanksgiving, which was an annual kind of protest, they usually protested the start of the season of Greenland, which was in May and then the end of the season at New Zealand, which was Thanksgiving weekend. This isn't with a very large protestant. hundreds of people were there. And at one point, the protesters just, like, barged right into the park.

Come on, shut it down, shut it down. Yeah. So they said, they alleged that, they being Greenland alleged, Bill broke into the park, so they sued him for trespassing and also for plotting to steal a walrus. So Bill denied this completely He said he was never in the park and certainly was never

thoughting to steal a walrus that can weigh, you know, I think a ton like a thousand kilograms or something and so then he countersued for defamation and abuse of process and Leeland at this time

had kind of sued they had sued a bunch of other people who had spoken to us and were threatening to sue other people And they eventually sued us at the Starolo that came after this particular lawsuit. You know, after all these whistleblowers and all this attention, the SPCA, the Ontario government, get involved, right? They moved to, yeah, overhaul animal welfare laws in the province in 2019. The Canadian government passes a build-a-band whales and dolphins in captivity, right?

And just what did all of this mean for marine land as a business and the animals still being kept? So, yeah, so the real kind of law that affected Greenland came in 2019 when the federal government passed, you know, what people were calling the free willy bill. It will do what many scientists have told us must be done. Protect these extraordinarily evolved, sentient creatures from a captivity that amounts to animal cruelty. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So it banned cetacean captivity, which is kind of, you know, whales and dolphins. Marine Land was kind of grandfathered in for a lot of the loss. Like the province kind of banned killer whale captivity. At that point, they only had the one killer whale, Kiska, who would, you know, kind of swim alone for, I think about 11 years.

But they also forbade breeding, which did have an effect on Maryland. Rhineland had to separate its males and female belugas. And that, you know, according to a story that I wrote this morning from a new whistleblower kind of, you know, said there's some issues with separating those whales. And it also banned exporting and importing cetaceans. So this is where kind of it comes into the news of recent days. For small business owners, there's strength in numbers. Chambers Plan Employee Benefits brings together 32,000 businesses across Canada in a pooled benefits plan designed to help keep premiums manageable.

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With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at BDC. slash financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. As much as I do love this journey down memory lane, just tell me what the latest news is. Okay, so the latest news is the federal government, the fisheries minister, Joanne Thompson, denied marine lands permit request to export the whales to Chimlong, a massive kind of aquarium in China. Whales do not belong in tanks and captivity for entertainment purposes, and that really was at the center of the decision. And she basically said it's because it wasn't consistent with this 2019 law that banned captivity and forbade breeding.

And another thing that that law did, it also made it illegal for these whales to entertain humans. So she basically said, well, we're not going to move those whales to China because they don't have the same laws that we do. The whales would be subject to entertainment and also subject to breeding. In response, Marineland sent them, this was minister to minister, a letter two days later. Now, Marine Land says euthanizing the whales will be a direct consequence of the minister's decision to deny those export permits. And it essentially said, we are broke. We're going to be out of money any minute now. And we can't feed or care for the whales. anymore. So if you don't float us some emergency funding within, I think it was four days,

we're going to kill all the balugas, which then kind of set off a firestorms sort of around the world that there was this threat to euthanize like all these belugas, you know, not for health reasons or anything else, just because they were supposedly running out of money. So part of that 2019 law gives the minister this power to weigh in on importing or exporting and with the vague language that it has to be done in the best interest of the animal. And so, Liam, like, where are we right now when it comes to the potential fate of all of these belugas? So that's like the million dollar question that I'm still trying to answer kind of every day. As far as I know this morning the whales are still alive.

Most people I've talked to don't believe the euthanasia is a credible threat just because of the logistics to do it. This is not kind of an easy thing to do, generally speaking, even for a very sick whale. I think also very difficult maybe to convince the veterinarians and the whale trainers

and the workers there to follow through with this. However, I've covered Marine Land for 14 years and he keeps telling myself to expect the unexpected with Marine Land and... I mean, I understand the park's not open to the public right now, right? Like, you can't go to Marine. Correct.

Yeah. So, like, what other options could there be? So I think Chim Long was the obvious option because it is big and it's relatively new. and marine, kind of the marine park industry is rising in China. But the government's saying that they're not going to allow them to go. So I guess, like, where does that leave them? I think it depends who you ask.

But Marine Line says they're left with no options. And that's why they have their finger on the nuclear option of euthanasia. They say there's nowhere they can go. They can, you know, they did. move five belugas down to Mystic Aquarium, which is this aquarium in Connecticut, that was in 2020, you know, but there's just no place that could

take, like 30 blugas is a lot. Well, can they split them up? I think they could split them up. Yep. I think it might, they might want to keep them in family pods. There are families among these 30 blugas. Why can't we put them back in the wild? Like,

I just finished watching ironically, finished watching free willy the other week, with my five-year-old, you know, that whale goes back to the ocean. Why can't we do that? I think everybody involved seems to say that that is just not an option. About half of the belugas are born in captivity, so they've never, like, had to hunt down a wild fish, for example, or something like that.

This woman who spoke to me today, Christy, who published a Christy Burgess, she told me a story about her last year. There's been some problems with people breaking into marine land. and thinking it's abandoned, but they still have, you know, animals there. So, so she told me a story about them breaking in, some people breaking in last year. So they stole a fish out of the fish pond, a carp and dumped it into the beluga pool. And it just terrified all the belugas. They didn't really know what the heck to do with this thing.

So that's, I think, is an example of what challenges might be faced by the belugas if they were put into the ocean. You know, they're coming from this kind of pool environment. so it's unclear how physiologically they might handle the ocean, you know, and all the different kind of organisms and bacteria and stuff like that that might be near to them. I understand that there's a good chunk of marine lands belugas that require medicine and medical treatment to help with their health. So that might be another thing they would lose if they were just to be released into the

wild. It's really sad, this whole tale. It's really sad. for these whales, yeah. Yeah, there's no great option right now. Like every, but there's like, there's no winners in this situation. Everyone's kind of a loser. Like all levels of government, marine land, whales, like, it's, it's not a good situation.

You mentioned before that this marine park in China, you mentioned before that this marine park in China on the rise. I understand sea world in the U.S. is still going strong, for example. And I know so much of our conversation today has been focused on just marine land. But like, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts here. All these years later, why you think marine parks have continued to stick around and even thrive in other parts of the world like this? Well, I think it just goes back to the aspect of, you know, going to a zoo and what you may or may not like about a zoo. You know, there is the kind of spectacle of of seeing an animal that you've never seen before, you know, like you go to Maryland and we went there a couple of years ago before they banned me.

And, you know, it is kind of impressive to see these animals like up close. Like what does, you know, a beluga that, you know, could weigh birds of 2,000 pounds like, you know, and you can get within spitting distance of these animals, you know. And in the old days, you could, you could feed them. You can get food and feed the balloons. There is these sort of, I guess, you know, immersive experiences that you can get in the middle of Canada, you know, in the middle of Ontario that otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it. And I think that that kind of goes a long way.

I think especially when you go as a family and you're experiencing some of these things, especially of the child, like it's just kind of, you know, wonderment to seeing these animals. And I think that I think that reverberates with a lot of people. You know, I think more and more in places like Canada, there's people that, you know, see situation like Greenland and kind of feel the opposite. They sort of feel sad. You know, and I think that has, you know, the government, governments have passed laws kind of banning this. And, you know, there wasn't really much of an outcry against banning it, you know, so it's, The shift is kind of, we've seen the whole shift kind of happen in Canada.

And, um, I think places like China are sort of, uh, you know, they haven't had marine parks around for decades and decades, you know, so, and these are like new, like, you see pictures of Jim Long, you see pictures of C-World, like these are, you know, they look kind of impressive. They don't look run down like some places, you know, um, there are, there's also a whole bunch of other stuff at these places, like rides and things like that, you know, so I'm like, so you're all the publicly traded company, they're big company, they have all the reason financially to keep that business kind of running too, you know? Yeah, makes sense for sure.

Liam, thank you so much for this. We didn't even get to the tale of how you got banned from mainland, which I think we should say for another day, but I really appreciate this. Thanks, Jamie. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.