The Decibel - Ford and the never-ending Ontario Place saga

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

For the holidays, The Decibel is sharing their favourite stories of the year, with the producers taking you behind-the-scenes on how the episodes were made, what inspired them and all the tidbits that never made it into the original airing.***When Ontario Place first opened in 1971, it was a jewel on Toronto’s waterfront showcasing modern architecture and Ontario culture. But in the 50 years that followed, Ontario Place faced an identity crisis. The space hosted a water park and a night club to name a few. And while a few venues have stayed open much of the park closed in 2012. The Provincial government cited dwindling attendance and soaring costs.Ontario Premier Doug Ford has a new plan that he says will turn the 155-acres of land into a ‘world class’ destination. But the project is already mired in controversy, with critics saying the Premier’s plan is shrouded in secrecy and favouritism.Decibel producer Sherrill Sutherland toured Ontario place with The Globe’s architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic to learn about why so many people are fighting to keep it a public space. Plus, the Globe’s Queen’s Park reporter Jeff Gray explains the politics behind this lucrative piece of land.This episode originally aired on May 4, 2023Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Okay, so we are continuing on with our week of producer-picked episodes. So today I've got Cheryl with me. Hey, Cheryl. Hey, how's it going? It's great to have you here. And let's start with what episode you picked. Of all the episodes this year, what episode did you pick as your favorite? Okay, so my pick is a bit controversial because we did a listener survey earlier in the year

and we asked our listeners what they wanted to see more, what they want to see less of. And one of the things that came back quite a few times was less Ontario centric stories, less Toronto centric stories. And the piece I chose is an episode about a piece of land in Toronto called Ontario Place. So it's kind of the exact opposite. However, hear me out, hear me out. The reason why I chose the story about Ontario Place is that it's a story that involves a political saga that spans decades. It's also a piece of land that has plagued the provincial government for a long time, which I think that makes it interesting for

people outside of Ontario, just even for the fact just to ogle on and look at it in disdain. Watch the saga play out, yes. And also Ontario Place, I think, invokes a bit of nostalgia. So for people that were born in the 80s or the 90s, it used to be an amusement park. So, you know, it gives us like warm, fuzzy feeling. And it's nice to kind of bring people back to those kind of those kind of times when it makes us feel happy. Tell me a little bit more about the process of making this episode, because this was different than the usual episode that we made. I actually got to go out in the field, quite literally, go to Ontario Plays with our expert,

Alex Buzikovic, who is our architect critic, to kind of bring him to the space, which I think is a nice change. For one, like to have an expert on the scene to talk about the buildings is really nice. And I think also an episode like this kind of brings sound texture, which is a bit different. And I remember all the wind sounds because you guys were getting hit by the wind off the lake.

Yeah, the wind was definitely a problem. You know, what's funny is that we usually have a wind sock for our mics. And in this case, didn't have a wind sock. So I created one out of an old nylon sock. Amazing. I promise it was clean. Totally did the trick.

So that was great. But anyway, it's just so nice to kind of be out in the scene and to bring that texture of audio into our recordings. It's not something we get to do very often. It's a bit of fun. And the second bit, we had to bring in another in-house expert, Jeff Gray, to bring the context and tell us why this is news and why it's important. And then the final piece as to why I like to do this is because our audio editor, Dave Crosby,

got to have a bit of fun with the music as well. Like there's a lot of really cool, old nostalgic commercials. And so we got to play with that sound. And there's a really good part around the 11, 12 mark. It's a bit of a haunting commercial. So I would say to everyone, stay tuned to listen to that.

It's really great. Okay, yeah. Okay, so as you mentioned, this is kind of an ongoing saga of what's happening with Ontario Place here. So since we actually aired this, Cheryl, have there been any updates in this? Ah, the saga of Ontario Place, it just never ends. So yeah, we last recorded this episode in May, and there have been some things that have happened that have affected the future of Ontario Place. In July, Toronto got a new mayor, Olivia Chow. And Olivia Chow was against Ontario Place becoming this spa. So there's a thought that maybe there

would be a delay in the spa. But then in November, just recently, because the city is cash strapped, it's kind of facing a $1.5 billion deficit. They made a deal with Ontario to take over two highways, which is going to save the city a lot of money. Along with this deal, the city also accepted that the province can press ahead with the Ontario Place redevelopment. So, in other words, even though Olivia Chow to this day says she wants Ontario Place to remain a park, she said she's not going to stand in the way of the redevelopment from the province. So it's kind of full steam ahead at this point. And just this month, we saw some outcry after some trees got cut down, about 30 trees got cut down. And in fact, in the end, about 850 trees are meant to be cut down in order to make way for this mega spa.

So many trees. Yeah. So maybe, yes, in fact, the mega spa will be in our future. Well, Cheryl, thank you so much for coming in. We will hand it over to you to take us to Ontario Place. Let's go back. Okay, it doesn't make a very good sound, but it's like, it's like, it's chained, it's locked. It's got a wood, a wood door, like totally bolted shut.

And this like silo has some paint on it, but it's all chipping off now. It just is like, it's like what you would think, like a zombie apocalypse where everyone has left. Decibel producer Cheryl Sutherland is not on a movie set. She's on the grounds of Ontario Place with the Globe's architecture critic, Alex Buzikovic. Ontario Place is 155 acres on Toronto's waterfront. And over the past decade, parts of it have fallen into disrepair. And yet, once you're out on these islands, which sort of go out into the lake, you're away from the city and you've got this experience of looking out across 100 kilometers of blue water,

and it's remarkable. Even while there has been a political narrative that the place is closed and that it's falling down, people have been using it like crazy. I mean, a million and a half people, I believe, is the number who came through last year just to use the park. In just the same way that people enjoy, you know, seafront parks like Stanley Park in Vancouver,

it's really the same thing here. The lake has this sort of gravity that pulls you towards it. Ontario Place is mostly owned by the province of Ontario. And since it was built 50 years ago, it's gone through many identities. A cultural centre, an adventure park for kids, it's had a music venue, a water park, and even a nightclub. In 2012, the province shut down most of the venues. They said attendance

was way down and that keeping it open was costing the province millions of dollars every year. Now, Premier Doug Ford has plans to lease the public land to private companies, with some contracts lasting up to 95 years. And he isn't the only premier that's proposed big changes. The process of how we got here to the current state of the Ontario place redevelopment has been a long and complicated process. It started with the Liberal government under Kathleen Wynne trying to figure out what to do with this place. And I think the basic misunderstanding that was shared by that government and the current one is that it needs to be an attraction. There needs to

be something run by the private sector here that's going to generate revenue. And that is what led to the partial ruining of what was great about this place in the first place, creating the log rides, creating the water slides, filling up what had been a park with all of this stuff, with the idea of making some money. And this current government is wedded to that idea. And I think it's a very strange idea because it's a park and nobody thinks about the great provincial parks like Algonquin Park as needing to generate revenue. Nobody sees them as, you know, as one cabinet minister put it, a drain on the public purse. You know, they're public places and they serve a public purpose. And that's the sort of big misconception about this. Today, Cheryl joins Alex as he takes us on a tour of the rundown, the revived, and the important history of Ontario Place.

And then we'll hear from Queen's Park reporter Jeff Gray about the new plans for the spot and why it's politically contentious. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. The rain just started. Thanks a lot, rain. We'll manage. Being outside is part of the point of being here. Yeah. When I was, I mean, I was born, should I age myself? Yes. I was born in 1984. So I remember coming here, you know, in the nineties, uh, when it was kind of like the paddle boats and Nintendo exhibit or something. Right. Yeah. What did it mean to you when you're, did you come here when you were a kid? I came here a few times when I was a kid.

You know, growing up in Toronto and then in the suburbs, you know, we came to visit. The key experience here being a kid was being close to the water and also of the children's village. This incredible playground that was created in the 1970s by an English designer called Eric McMillan. That was sort of the ultimate adventure playground, a kind of thing that you would never build today. There was, you know, extremely dangerous water slides, you know, a forest of punching bags that you would run through and you'd sort of run into one of them and the next one would knock you over and maybe smash you headfirst into the kid next to you. But also, you know, like I bet you just have such vivid memories of those times of

like the punching bags that that sounds, I mean, dangerous and also something I would remember forever. Absolutely. Okay, we're just coming up to the end of the bridge walking on to I guess the very beginnings of Ontario Place. Right. So one of the things you can see here already is that the landscape has been shaped. The forms of the land we're standing on have been shaped very deliberately. We're on a little hill, which in landscape architecture jargon is called a berm. And that's taking us up away from the very busy street of Lakeshore Boulevard and away from the city, and establishing almost sort of a separate zone or a separate place that is the park. So the government of Ontario decided in 1969 that they needed to build something to keep up with Expo, right? The incredible success of Expo 67,

which showed Montreal as this very ambitious, forward-looking place, left some people in Toronto feeling left behind and the province feeling like it needed to step up its game. So it was part of a larger movement of trying to reanimate the waterfronts of cities which mostly had been devoted to industrial uses. And also what's interesting is this park, this land is not natural right? This was built? Everything in Ontario Place place the two large islands as well as part of the areas on the mainland were all created through fill a lot of that was filled with soil that came from the excavation of the toronto subway the blur danforth

line in the 1960s and it was used to create these new islands, together with some other technologies, including sinking a couple of ships to create this new landscape. As we're coming out into this sort of clearing near the lake, and over to our left are the buildings that were the center of the old Ontario place. One of them is the Cinesphere, the domed theater, which was the very first IMAX cinema in the world. And then there are these buildings which are now known as the pods, these set of sort of more or less rectilinear glass and steel buildings

that are standing on stilts up over the water and connected by bridges. It's this sort of fantastical thing that comes out of an architecture student's drawings, maybe, and was very rarely realized. Sort of wild, modernist fantasy of buildings dancing out over the water. And those buildings are some of the most important modern buildings in the city and some of the most important modern buildings in the country. They're in rough condition, but they are still here and are going to be rehabilitated. We're walking over towards an amusement park ride.

Yes. And the funny thing, one of the funny things about this place is that it's public and it's in disrepair, and yet it hasn't all been closed off. The old, you know, a log ride, which we're looking at here, which in most sort of public settings would be fenced off and closed, they've allowed it to just sit here. Why? Why did they do that? That's an excellent question. But it has the effect of creating this sort of slightly spooky vibe.

And it's incredible. On the other hand, it allows for this narrative that we've been hearing from the provincial government that the place is a ruin. Yeah, okay. So this log, right, which is, I really wanted to come here because it does, like you said, it's like a relic of the past. It looks abandoned because of the graffiti as well.

So there's like a bunch of just some tags happening on that too. We're walking up this hill and we're going to go into the rock. I don't know what it is. It's like a tunnel. Sure. Let's go into the fake rock tunnel. Yes. So we're moving through what is quite literally a theme park ride.

What's this hole over here? I have no idea. Can you even look in? I'm a little bit scared, a little bit spooked out. It's just like a hole. It's really dark in here. So there could be, I don't know what could be in there. So let's just walk out of here. Okay, let's keep moving. So we're walking now sort of near the shore of Lake Ontario, but it's very quiet and it's very sheltered here.

Not as windy here either. That's right. And that's because, you know, between us and the water is this berm, this little hill, which is probably about 20 meters high. And this was placed here very deliberately. Michael Hoff, the landscape architect, designed this and a series of other hills to protect these areas, the places where people are going to walk, from the worst of the weather.

So even if the wind picks up, this is going to be a comfortable place for visitors to stand. And that's not an accident. After the whole island is rebuilt, the only place where you'll have public access will be around the edges. So the wind will be coming right at you, and then right up the side of a very large building that goes up to 45 meters tall. So the sort of comfortable microclimates that are built into this site will be gone entirely. And I'm not sure that the public spaces that would be created

would actually be comfortable places to be. What's going to happen with the plans from the government right now? What are they planning to do with this space? So the plans for the West Island where we're standing right now are to create this giant indoor water park, or as they call it, a spa from a European company called Therma. And that's going to create a new building that is roughly nine acres in size. So the new spa will occupy the entire footprint of the island we're standing on now with a new building,

which means that all of the topography and essentially all of the plants will be wiped out. As we walk to our next destination, I just want to talk a little bit about how I think, at least for myself and anecdotally for my friends that live in the city, I guess like the pandemic, everyone on there is like they're like stupid little walks for their mental health. And I think that Ontario place, it really was a place to walk that was away from the city, but that was kind of beautiful.

That's exactly right. And downtown Toronto is much more populated than it was 50 years ago. So to be able to, you know, leave your apartment, especially during lockdown, walk for 15 to 20 minutes and be here sort of out on the edge of the water, you know, away from the city, but, you know, in this sort of, you know, little village of creaky modernist buildings was amazing. And I think a lot of people began to appreciate having that space and the quality of the space over the last few years. So now we're on the East Island of Ontario Place in a part of the site that's become known as Trillium Park. About six years ago, this was rebuilt as a park space, you know, with a combination of lawns and pathways and forests with indigenous

plant species. And here we are with, you know, somebody walking by, walking their dog. I can hear birds chirping up the hill. It's lovely. This piece of the site has been the busiest of all, and it is routinely packed with people, even though there is no water park there is no theme park there are no rides here the experience of being here is really just sort of hanging out in and moving through the landscape so in that way this piece of the redevelopment is it's not all bad the this part of the recipe of creating high quality parkland, which is mostly space to hang out and to walk through, is going to remain intact and will be expanded to some degree. And my big question is why that lesson wasn't carried through the rest of the site as well.

It's certainly the case that the city's government is going to have some things to say. The real question is whether Doug Ford's provincial government is going to overrule the city and just build us the water park anyway. And that is going to come down to a question of politics and who wants this, who's going to fight harder for this place. That part of the story was from Decibel producer Cheryl Sutherland. And after the break, Queen's Park reporter Jeff Gray on the politics of Ontario Place. Jeff, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So since 2012, there's been a conversation about what to do with Ontario Place.

That's when the government shut down the amusement park that was there. And then every now and then, though, we kind of hear talk about its surface again, what to do with Ontario Place. And we've been hearing about it a lot recently. So what's actually going on now? So the latest chapter in the drama is the government has selected a large Austrian spa and water park company to build a huge facility there as sort of the centerpiece of what would become the new Ontario place. They've also selected the owners of the Budweiser stage, the still operating concert stage there, their plans to renovate and enhance that space. What we revealed last week was that the government's also in talks with another group called Ontario Live that includes the owner of the former music nightclub at Exhibition Place, which is nearby.

And that's the nightclub that was a favorite of Drake's, Justin Bieber, and the former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. The owner of that operation, Zlatko Starkovsky, also provided alcohol services at Ford Fest political barbecues during that time when Rob Ford was mayor from 2010 to 2014. And the current premier, his brother, Doug Ford, was a city councillor. So that has the advocates who've been fighting the plans for Ontario Place upset. And I guess we should probably say, for people who are not in Toronto, FordFest may sound like kind of a strange thing, but it's essentially a party that the Ford family would have, open to anyone in the city that could come and enjoy a barbecue and some

drinks and stuff. But why is it a big deal that the Ontario Live, as you said, like all of this is coming out now? Why is that significant? Well, I think the government has faced again and again in different arenas, criticism for appearing to favor people either with connections to the Premier or to the PC party. He's opened the Greenbelt protected area of farmland around the city of Toronto. He's opened some of that to development, and he's been accused of doing that in a way that

favors developers with whom he either has personal relationships or who have given lots of money to the PC party. Okay, interesting. So this Austrian company, Therma, is going to be the one that's building this giant spa slash water park now at the Ontario Place grounds. Do we know how much this development is actually costing these investors? So the number they gave was $350 million for the actual facility. They've also promised to build and maintain or pay to maintain

publicly accessible parkland and a beach around their facility on the site. And I think that price tag for that was another $100 million. On the other side of it, though, the government is on the hook to build a large underground parking lot. So that's we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. The estimates we've seen and who knows if these are accurate, that you're looking at $200 million the government is spending just to prepare the site for development. So, you know, just basic sort of stuff, pipes and things to get it ready. Okay, so so not not small change here. This these are significant developments that are happening. How are these developments being received? Well, there's definitely an organized and vocal movement in Toronto opposing the plan.

And you have people who have been active on the waterfront and other issues involved who say that the city of Toronto, downtown Toronto in particular, needs more parkland. That this should be publicly accessible parkland, not hived off so that a company from somewhere else can make profits. They've pegged the entry, the sort of starting point for admission to this thing at 40 bucks for an adult. This is the spa and the water park area. The spa people. So that has people kind of concerned. And you have city planners have issued a report that's quite critical of the plan, saying that the spa is too tall, too big, that it blocks views. OK, so if a lot of people in the immediate area want that parkland, why does the government say it's going to do all this other development if people around don't necessarily want that to happen? Well, it's as the Premier said the other day,

it's Ontario Place, not Toronto Place. It is the provincial government's site. It's the vision of this government and the previous government. So people kind of forget that, but it has been sort of government policy for a long time. You know, they had a report that was actually done by John Tory

about what to do with Ontario Place. Former mayor of Toronto. They had a report that was actually done by John Tory about what to do with Ontario Place. Former mayor of Toronto. Yes. And former leader of the PC opposition at Queen's Park. And there were lots of discussions at the time about a casino, condos. The government has explicitly said it will not do either of those things and rule them out as part of this process. But for a long time, the idea was the government doesn't want to be in the amusement park business anymore. We need someone else to come in here from the private sector.

We don't want to spend any money on it, although it turns out they are spending quite a bit. And we want them to do something, quote unquote, world class, some sort of attraction for the tourism industry. That's always been the vision for that site. So Jeff, help me help me understand something here. So this is land owned by the province of Ontario, but it's it's it's land in the city of Toronto. So why doesn't why doesn't Toronto have jurisdiction here? Well, the province has all the power. I mean, cities only exist as creatures of provincial legislation. The province could turn on tomorrow and change the city of Toronto's name to whatever it wanted to Fordland. Just say, for example. I don't know.

I mean, that's not going to happen. But, you know, cities are not in the driver's seat in that relationship. So even now, as the province has committed to going through for the moment, the city's approval process going through city council committees, the planning department, writes a report, et cetera, et cetera. It could just wipe all that off. Say, for example, if we're in the middle of a mayoral election in Toronto, if the next mayor runs against Ontario Place and wins and says, I hate this thing and I want to get rid of it, the province could very easily say, that's nice. We're done with your process.

We're just going to approve this ourselves. This is our land and we have the power to issue what are called MZOs, which have been very controversial about ways to just jump over the normal process for rezoning land, approving what gets built there. They can do all that if they'd like. Okay, so even if a municipal government wants to do something different, like a province can just override it,

is that the same like throughout Canada? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, the constitution doesn't mention municipalities. It's really up to provinces to decide what to do with them. As we learned in Ontario, when Doug Ford cut the size of Toronto City Council almost in half in the middle of Toronto's election. That's right. Right after the premier won his own election in the summer of 2018.

So we've talked a lot about the politics of this. But what about the people that live in Ontario, that live in Toronto? I mean, this is land owned by the province. A lot of people are living near this site now. Wouldn't the government want to consult with the public around what these plans should be? Well, they would say they have, I think. I think your definition of consultations differs, right,

depending on which side of it you're on. But they've held public meetings and shown the renderings. You know, for the past decade, there've been various processes where people talked about what to do at Ontario Place. So yeah, I mean, there is this central tension. Who do you consult? I mean, people from Thornhill or something who want to come down for the day, maybe this is something they would like. And so governments are inevitably forced to make these kinds of choices. What does all of this say, Jeff, about how politicians approach the development and the maintenance, really, of public space? Well, there's one element is that they've convinced the spa people to pay for public parkland around the facility forever.

So that's something they point to as a benefit of this thing, especially when they're faced with people who want the whole thing to be a park. But the other issue that they've had to grapple with throughout this whole episode is this debate over what it is people want on Toronto's waterfront. Toronto's waterfront, of course, used to be just a place where there were train tracks. It was an industrial place. It was not a place for people to go. And waterfronts all over the world have been going through this transformation. Chicago is a good example, where you make your waterfront into some place that attracts people. So that's the broader goal here. purpose of Ontario Place was to showcase Ontario, and that a large foreign owned Austrian spa water park, well, it could be anywhere, it doesn't have to be in Ontario. What does it say about Toronto's waterfront to have this facility that doesn't really have any link to the province or the city?

So that's the sort of the debate there that we have this waterfront that we need to do something with. And clearly, we're not going to agree on what it is. And so do we know when will the spa and the water park be done? So Therma has said it expects to break ground on it next year, late next year. And they say it'll be ready to open as early as 2026. Wow. So not very far away, really. Yeah.

Jeff, thanks so much for talking to me today. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our interns are Wafa El-Rayis, Andrew Hines, and Tracy Thomas. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. Our Ontario