The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Why is Toronto's Waterfront Development So Complicated?

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Toronto has a complicated relationship with its waterfront, which is separated from downtown by the Gardiner Expressway. But groups including Waterfront Toronto, The Beltway and Hoverlink are drawing up plans to attract more people to the shores of Lake Ontario, a stretch of 2.5 km representing billions of prime real estate. A look at current and future projects along the lakefront, and what it will take to keep residents and tourists coming back. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The waterfront of Ontario's capital city. It's like a Facebook relationship. It's complicated. The city has an interest, so does the province, and the feds, and the agency Waterfront Toronto is supposed to figure out what to do with a 2.5-kilometre stretch of 2,000 acres representing billions of dollars of prime real estate. Given that many more people are going to be going down to spend time

on the waterfront over the summer, we thought we'd ask, how's it all going? Let's find out from our guests. Here's Chris Glasek, he is chief planning and design officer of Waterfront Toronto. Elana Altman, co-executive director of the Bentway, that's a repurposed public space underneath the Gardiner Expressway.

And Erica Ports, president and COO of Hoverlink, a new form of water-based transportation looking to boost tourism across the Golden Horseshoe. And it's great to see all you three here at TVO tonight for our discussion. Chris, I want to go to you first. Waterfront Toronto's mission, I gather, is to transform the waterfront. From what to what? So we are about 25 years old. We were created by all three levels of government as you are already

describing. Well with the mission of really revitalizing especially the parts of the waterfront that are former industrial brownfield land. So everything kind of east of the Redpath Sugar Factory has been declining as an industrial base and Waterfront Toronto was created to go in and figure out how to repurpose it and make it a thriving, exciting part of the rest of the city. You making any progress? We are making a lot of progress.

We've been building housing, we've been building parks, we've been building bike paths and new streets and we have some great development partners that are planning to do more. More to come on all of those things. Ilana, the bentway, a relatively new recreation space under the Gardiner Expressway. What role do you think it plays in the revitalization of the waterfront? Well, I have to say I think Chris is being a bit too modest. They've done a lot of great work and we have one of the most exciting waterfronts to be found anywhere in North America.

But we still have a big barrier to getting there and that's the Gardiner Expressway. And I think that for too long Toronto has been stuck in this binary debate where there's only two options, does it stay or does it go. We at the Bentway have asked another question which is how can it serve our city better, how can it do more? And that gave way to the redevelopment to date of about half a kilometre of space on the west end just running alongside Fort York. It's now a thriving community hub, public space, recreational area. We throw wonderful community celebrations, host incredible public art year round and

it's become a point of pride for the City of Toronto as well as a really important connection to the waterfront. I've gone skating there in the wintertime. That's right, yeah. It's cold. It's cold, but it's there in the wintertime. That's right, yeah. It's cold. It's cold, but it's a lot of fun. It actually is fun, yeah. Skating, swirling between the bends, it's really an unforgettable experience.

How long has it been there now, the bent way? We've been about seven years now. Seven years already. Yeah. And are there plans to expand it? There is. So we've been working with the City of Toronto on the development of a larger vision for the full seven kilometres.

Last year at Council they approved the Undergardener Public Ground Plan, which is a high level vision to extend the logic of the bentway and its improvements all the way across the Gardiner corridor. And within that plan the bentway is expanding as well. Three distinct new hub sites, one of which we are in design on already, a new hub site that will straddle between Danlickaway and Spadina. And just, and we should say for those who are out of town and don't know it all that well, this I think is one of the sort of rare re-imaginings of a public space that had a

lot of private money in it as well, right? That's right. I think we are very lucky around this table as Torontonians that we had some incredible civic leaders who were willing to take a leap of faith and make a historic investment into a public space below the Gardiner Expressway. The Matthews family as well as urban designer Ken Greenberg really led that effort. And sometimes I say that the Gardiner is Toronto's biggest pilot project that we've ever taken on because who knew if people would want to Spend time there who knew if things would grow there But their investment their belief in a new type of public space gave way to this brand new experiment and and Toronto has gotten on board

Erica what is hover link hover link is a hovercraft project a position to bring people between Niagara and Toronto in 30 minutes to hovercrafts, carrying 180 passengers sustainably, bikes, luggage, and really what it's meant to do is increase the level of tourism that we see between Niagara and Toronto through an attraction. Marine transit is not necessarily a novelty. It is in Ontario, but it isn't in other provinces across Canada. And so we're positioned to really support and extend the tourism seasonality in terms of being able to support the bentway as an example and make sure that we can bring people

ice skating from all parts of Ontario. It will eventually be a multimodal network but right now we're working, well that's a great question, we're working on establishing ports outside of just Niagara and Toronto across all of the Great Lakes so that we can provide marine transit. Marine is green. It's sustainable. We're coming out of the gates with utilizing a biodiesel. And what that means is we're reducing carbon emissions and noxious substances out of the

air. Who owns it? So that's a great question. Private investors, Canadian and U. and US investors are currently the owners. Our founder is Chris Morgan. He dreamt this up about 10 years ago in a pub in the UK with family that was involved in hovercraft piloting navigation. We've never had this here in Ontario before, a hovercraft that takes people from A to B? No. So we had a hovercraft in Mimico years ago. It was a very small scale one.

It was actually quite successful until the TTC car went in. We've had hydrofoils. They cannot competently run on Lake Ontario 365 days a year. They're very much about a six month marine transit opportunity. They're also a really uncomfortable experience. Hovercraft glide across the water. We got video of this.

We do have video. Sheldon, let's bring this up if we can. Describe what we're seeing here. Yeah, so what you're seeing right now is a hovercraft that transits between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. This is a smaller version of the craft that we're positioned to bring between Niagara and Toronto.

Right now, she's actually hovering about a meter above, and so it's similar or akin to riding on a train or an airplane in terms of level of comfort, similar seats. Inside you're going to have video and so what we can establish is we can highlight certain tourism entities on both sides of the lake so that people that are visiting have a good and strong understanding of what's available to them to visit on either side of Niagara or Toronto. And what's really cool about that is they've moved about 30 million passengers without any incidents so they're super safe they're very comfortable climate controlled and you can bring a bike on board if you like or luggage.

How much do those things cost? They're not cheap. That's what I figured. They're not cheap and certainly that's probably one of our biggest challenges to date is the terrorists have impacted our ability to manufacture in the US so we're looking at ways to manufacture here in Canada. We have amazing shipbuilders right here in the province of Ontario. And so Hoverlink is now taking a step back to say, how can we work with the partners

that we've established here in Ontario to actually build these crafts here? Give me a number. Give me a number. Approximately 18 million USD. 18 million apiece? Apiece. Wow. Wow. Yes.

Not for the faint of heart. Not for the faint of heart. Okay, good. Chris, let me get your view on, and maybe, I don't know, the rest of our program tonight is all about the spa. We focus on the spa. Is the spa part of your world that you need to worry about? The spa, the Thurman Spa, is actually an Ontario place.

It is not an active file for us. The province is really taking the lead on that. I think from our point of view, if the spa is successful at bringing lots of people to the waterfront, that would be a positive thing in terms of animating other aspects of the waterfront. We were talking earlier about that becoming a almost an anchor point on a system of water taxis around the harbor that would connect up all the different destinations both on the kind of main shoreline and around the islands so we could start to create an integrated

transit network that brings commuters from farther away and helps people move around the harbor reducing congestion on city streets. But per se does the does Waterfront Toronto have a position on whether the spa ought to go ahead or not? Well I think what we have said is through our design review panel we gave some commentary. The plans were adjusted to address some of those issues and we have stayed supportive of the provinces overall effort to revitalize the island because remember the spa project includes a whole upgrade to all of the public realm much of which is in a pretty severely degraded state and with those improvements I think Ontario Place is

going to become a really wonderful destination again. Do the people behind the bent way have a view on the advisability of the spa? I mean like Chris I think that we are interested in a network of public spaces that help to promote better circulation across the waterfront, more activities that bring people down year round. We have great skating facilities, but if we start to invest in more winter amenities

in the West End and across the waterfront, that's only going to help tourism. That's only gonna help tourism. That's only gonna be another draw for locals. So we're, we like you, are really focused on the public realm redevelopment and how we can ensure that it's connective and well considered. Erica, you got a view on the spa?

I think anything that brings additional tourism, it can be a positive thing. And I think as long as they take some of the advisement from Waterfront Toronto and the stakeholders of the waterfront it can become a great place. As Chris has alluded to there's many different activations that are going to come to the waterfront. There's about 15 billion dollars worth of investment coming to Toronto's waterfront. We need more brand activations. We need a reason to come to Toronto. We need to elevate our opportunity for tourism in the city.

It's remained stagnant for a number of years. About 26.5 million people come here year over year. We have an opportunity to grow that as an iconic waterfront destination. And what we need is to make our waterfront alive. Chris, I want to ask you about something called Play Park. Yes. Because there's still a lot of people who think that the city of Toronto ends at the Gardiner Expressway and there's kind of nothing south of the Gardiner Expressway.

And the notion of building a park where people would go play south of the Gardiner is going to, you know, for some people seem passing strange. I was down there actually not too long ago and I took some pictures of the model. Here we go. Do you want to take us through these pictures, Chris, and just let us know sort of what you got in mind? Yeah, I'd be happy to. Just to put this in context, so this sits within a much larger project

that we're building right now, which is called the Portland's Flood Protection Project. So we have actually moved the mouth of the Don River about a half a kilometer south of its existing location in order to flood protect and naturalize a river that was put into a concrete channel. When we did that plan, we set aside a site as part of that for a major play park.

There are a couple of these that have now been built in the world and they really are a whole new way of looking about getting kids back into nature off their computer screens and onto some really challenging pieces of play equipment. We should just say that's the location there. So we're sort of halfway between the Don Valley Parkway in the east and Yonge Street in the west.

That's right and you can see that red splotch is just a little bit north of a slip there which is roughly where the new River Mouth will be emptying or actually already is emptying since the plug has come out. Here you see some of the very inventive pieces of play equipment that are being proposed. These are interactive pieces of play equipment. In order to use them, kids need to partner up to make the pumps work, to make the water features work. They have to work together.

It really gets kids playing in a whole different way. Where these have been built, kids will spend hours and hours and hours here and their parents play with them. This is not like the playgrounds that you and I grew up with. How far along is this? So the design work is well along. This is a philanthropic project that we hope to raise money for. How much? The project in total is about $75 million.

The City of Toronto is already budgeting money for the pavilion, which would provide washrooms, food services, and an education space. And do you think it'll be done by what year? Well, it's a little hard to say because we haven't raised the money yet. So, you know, if we could raise the money in a year, we could have it built in about three years time. And is this expectation that you'll raise money from all levels of government for this? Well, the hope was to raise money from philanthropists

so that government didn't have to carry the full freight of this. It's not a cheap project to do. The model I mentioned, not physical model, the prototype, is in the gathering place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That project was paid for completely with philanthropy, about $450 million worth, largest philanthropic gift for public space in the history of the United States. And the play park was the very center of the entire proposal.

Had the Matthews's got any money left to give to this? Matthews has been incredibly generous. But what they've started is a real belief in the importance of public and private partnership and private agency for our public realm. And I think projects like the Bentway, projects like Play Park, they're going to need many different sources, many different levels of buy-in, but we all have to be committed

to our city if we want things to change and we want to be a world-class city. Could the hovercraft fit in one of those slips in there and could this be another spot on the itinerary? So we have looked at various opportunities along the waterfront and there are other spots where we can position what we call a landing pad or a hover pad. They're much like a floating dock and what's unique about that is we call it like a little mini bus stop of sorts. And so we could position landing pads all along the waterfront and the whole concept

of Toronto's waterfront is to open it up to all Ontarians. And so we're really hoping to bring people from Oshawa, people from Niagara, people from Hamilton and provide that opportunity to come into downtown Toronto. A lot of us in the Niagara region that live there have avoided Toronto now for the last several years because of the congestion. Too difficult, unpredictable, and yet many of us loved coming to the city years ago. We would come in for dinner, theatre events, whatever was going on, a baseball game. No longer is that something that you just say, yeah, let's go.

You think, hmm, six hours there and back of driving, we're going to pass tonight, we're going to stay home on the couch. We want to get people up and going. We can accommodate bikes. And so what that means is sustainable transit is critical. It's critical to provide that infrastructure and we can do that all along the waterfront. Got a price point? So that's a great question. I often get asked that.

We're going to be doing some state of preference surveys over the next year to really understand what's people's willingness to pay. So we have to balance, obviously we are not subsidized by the government. And so in part we have to make sure that we can operationalize this, make sure it's profitable, but also make sure it's affordable so that we see a mode shift. This is a new way of traveling for a lot of people in Ontario. If you live in British Columbia, you think nothing of hopping on a ferry and transiting across the water. This will be a new

way for a lot of people. We need to help people understand what it's like. So we'll have free events, bring a friend for free, we'll have family passes. We will be partnering with major tourism entities. Alana and I were just talking about a partnership potentially with the Bentway. We've had conversations with Distillery District as an example, Harbourfront Centre, the Shaw Festival. How can we partner with all of these amazing tourism entities to offer attractions that can be pulled together within a half an hour? The one thing I didn't realize is, and you know, I assume this was kind of like a Vaporetto

that just sort of comes to the edge of a dock, but the thing you showed in the video, that goes right up on the land. Yes. Is that the plan for Toronto and Niagara as well? So in Niagara we have greenfield space, we have 18 acres that should now shovel ready. We've been really busy over the last couple of years ensuring that we were prepared to operationalize this. So there it actually comes up and on to land. In Toronto we come about an inch or two over a freeboard and that is on a

landing pad. It's almost like a floating dock, similarly used in places like British Columbia. And so what we're doing is we're taking a technology that's tried, tested and proven and we're just adapting it. What that does is it allows us to go into any marina without deep water dredging and no environmental impacts. We don't create wake or wash and we can function 365 days a year. These crafts have been approved across Lake Ontario pretty much no matter what the weather is, unless there's about 40 knot gusts of wind, which is about 75 kilometers an hour. That may ground us, but outside of that,

we can crest over an eight foot wave. Gotcha. We gotta talk about the elephant in the room, kids. And the elephant in the room is the Gardiner Expressway, because I know you've built a beautiful space underneath the Gardiner, but it has obviously occurred to you at some point that you probably could do more and better

if that highway weren't even there at all. What's your view on what should be done with that? Well, I'm an urbanist at heart, so I'm never going to advocate for highways first. But as I said earlier, I really do think that we have to stop thinking about this as an either or. What the Benway has proven is that this highway can continue to serve its mobility function above and be a point of connection, a public space, a point of pride for the city of Toronto below. And as cities grow and change and we we densify,

that's an important attitude to take to the Gardiner Expressway, but it's just an important attitude to have because we're not going to have the luxury of tabula rasa sites, of you know being able to tear things down in the service of building something new. So how we embed our values as a city today into infrastructure that was built in the 50s and 60s, that's something we have to be asking ourselves for the gardener and beyond. One of the things that I am really excited about is we work with infrastructure reuse projects all across the globe. The High Line in New York, Waterloo Greenway in Austin.

And most of those cities have waited till that structure came to the end of its natural life as a mobility structure before they've reinvested. So it's now it was a train track and now it's a public park. What we're doing in Toronto is we're actually saying, we can have both. We don't have to turn our backs on our mobility needs to have public space. We can find ways to combine those things.

And as a result, Toronto is actually really leading the world globally in terms of thinking about hybrid infrastructure. And what I hope is that it's not just about the structures that we're reinvesting in, it's about how we're building new infrastructure now. Chris, the Gardner, what would you do? Well we actually did an environmental assessment for exactly what to do with it several years ago. And the conclusion that we finally arrived at

was on the east end, rather than try to eliminate it, rebuild it, but in a different location. So shift it north, up close to the rail corridor that's already there. And what that does by the Keating Channel is it frees up about 20 acres of land for redevelopment and it allows the Keating Channel, which is this relic of kind of early 20th century engineering focused approach to nature, to be reimagined as a great urban canal.

And so that's the vision we have for it with development on each side, restaurants, cafes, clubs, entertainment, with a beautiful waterway in the center, boats going up and down. That depends on rebuilding the Gardner North, which we call the hybrid option. And we are very hopeful that that hybrid option is what will be pursued in the New Deal, where the Gardner upload has been given to the province. We really hope that they'll be able to follow through and deliver on that shift because once that's done, and I think you see this elsewhere on the waterfront, with the amount of development that's happened the Gardner is starting to

disappear. And if we build this the way we're talking about, the Gardner will disappear from that area too and it'll unlock this great waterfront asset that right now looks very sad. It has highway columns coming right down into it and seems a bit miserable. But it doesn't have to be miserable. It could be a fantastic urban canal. Think the Chicago River. Chicago River is a fantastic, very powerful urban

environment. That's the kind of vision we have for that Keating Channel. Could be our own version of that. But planning all the great public space first. Chicago didn't do that. They've had to retrofit it. They've done a remarkable job. The Riverwalk is one of the most fabulous pieces

of urban intervention that I think I've ever seen. But we're planning it from the very beginning. That hybrid option you just mentioned for moving to Gardiner, how long is it? A kilometer? Not even? About. A little bit less.

A little less than a kilometer? How much would that cost? Well, I haven't looked at the price tag in a while. And with all the costs escalation that's happened, it's a little hard to say. But I think it was around a billion or so dollars. I was just going to say, I think it's a billion. Yeah.

But it may be more than that by now. But something has to be done. It can't just be left. So there is no option that says don't invest in it. Like all the other segments of the gardener that are being rebuilt, it is also at the end of its life. So something has to be done with it. So let's spend a little extra and move it How Ilana for you? We're trying to figure out a new waterfront here that includes

housing parkland amenities cultural attractions stuff to do private business public space The ratio of all of those things to one another matters a lot. Are we getting that right? Well, we're having a really important conversation in the city about housing.

We're in a crisis. There's no doubt about that. We have to build more housing. But if we are only talking about delivering units, then we're not having the right conversation because you need to build affordable neighborhoods. Within a five to ten minute walk of the Bentway Phase One site, there are a hundred thousand people who live in high-rise dense neighborhoods. That is a city in and of itself and you know you start to think about how that multiplies across the larger extent of the

Gardner. It's a huge population and those people who are living in high-rise buildings, they need access to public space. They need social infrastructure. They need recreational amenities. So we really see the work that we're doing as complementing the push for housing and ensuring that we're creating complete communities. And we see it every day at the bentway.

It is people's backyard park. People come, they walk their dogs. They have baby showers. They teach their kids how to ride bikes. And that's what makes it amazing, is that the community meets there, especially during COVID. It was a lifeline to all of those people

living in the area. But a lot of people found it during that period of time and continue to still make it part of their daily routine. Erica, as you look at it, is it coming together in the way it should be? I think everything takes a little bit longer than you initially think it's going to. But now it's coming together. Now that we have established agreements on both sides of the lake, they're very long-term agreements, and so it allows us to really establish the network

and see the mode shift, which will take a couple of years. So I do believe it's coming together now. We feel the momentum. Certainly tariffs have impacted us, as I had said earlier, but what we're seeing the momentum around, and just to parlay onto the conversation around affordable housing is, we enable affordable housing.

We enable people to live in St. Catharines, live in the Niagara region, more affordable housing, and yet work in downtown Toronto with a 30-minute commute instead of three hours. And so we enable various different things that improve the quality of life of all Ontarians and I really truly believe that this will become a legacy project. When?

When. So we're probably two to three years out at this point in time. The manufacturing piece is our largest hurdle and in part the T-word or double T word of tariffs and Trump have certainly impacted our business. We're looking at various ways around that at this point. Gotcha. Let me put the same question to you about how you get the balance right. Parkland, housing, amenities, etc. etc. Transit, I mean the list goes on. How do you know whether you're getting the balance right? Well, I think when you look at what we're doing on Aquamen Minising, which used

to be called Villiers Island, we've set aside a huge amount of land for parks. But I think it's going to be the right amount, because we've created a true river valley park system on either side of this new canal, or new river channel. And that is going to serve not only the approximately 15,000 people who will move into Aquamen Minising once the development happens, but it will serve the future neighborhoods of the Port Lands as well.

So we're adding about 60 acres of parkland, much of which is going to open this summer, and a second phase will open next summer. And we expect that a lot of people will go once this park is open. It's anticipated there'll be about a million people using this parkland and that's not including the play park that we talked about earlier that piece is funded and nearly nearly finished and will come online. Parks also help spur development we saw that happen with the Pan Am Athletes Village we built Corktown Common and it actually increased the real estate values there

and made it an even more attractive place to build. I know what you're saying but of course we all remember sidewalk labs and we remember what a disaster that turned out to be and people are I think a lot of people are spooked by that precedent and they're not as confident as you would like them to be that this is all going to work out in the end to which you say what? Well I think what we've done is we've gone back to our first principle so what we're doing now is very much like we did at West Onlands which has been hugely successful that includes a Canary District the Pan Am Athletes Village that was all master planned by Waterfront

Toronto and has turned out to be I think a terrific neighborhood. Same with the East Bayfront which we've been building out it's not finished yet you may have noticed the Aqua Luna condo is almost finishing. There there's bronze condominium with these beautiful curved glass windows and beautiful balconies. That's part of a whole new community. Between the two of them that's about 17,000 new people who've moved to the waterfront. It's a very desirable place to live so I think the housing model is working and to the point Alana made about affordability we are targeting 30% affordability for all of our projects. So the former Sidewalk Lab site, the Keyside site, will have 30%

affordable housing. We're working very closely with CMHC and with the City Housing Agency on that and we're confident that that's going to come along. The biggest question is going to be how fast can it get done given the new market that we are all living in. But we are, we believe, poised to start one of the first affordable housing buildings quite soon. So hopefully you'll see ground break there. Chris, I have one last question for you. How's your mother-in-law?

She's great. She was up in Ottawa for the throne speech. I was just going to say, do you want to tell people who your mother-in-law is? Sure. My mother-in-law is Adrienne Clarkson, former governor general. I haven't spoken to her since she went there, but I imagine she had a very interesting time sitting with all of those other folks. Do you have to call her Your Excellency? No, I just call her Popo because that is the Chinese term for mother's mother.

And as everyone knows, she is of Hong Kong origin, and so my kids call her Popo, so we all call her Popo. Outstanding. Give her our best. I will. Elada Altman from the Bentway, we thank you for coming in today. Chris Glasek from Waterfront, Ontario, Erica Portz from Hoverlink.

Looking forward to seeing that up and going. $18 million a pop? $18 million a pop. Oh my goodness. Not bad. Good luck. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Steve. Thank you.