Doug Ford wants you to think Ontario Place isn’t worth saving. He needs to take a walk - Toronto Star

Before anybody is allowed to have an opinion on the future of Ontario Place, they should be required to walk the perimeter path.

Those who undertake this endeavour will find that reports of the death of Ontario Place have been greatly exaggerated. There are always people there and the path is one of Toronto’s great walks. Dare I say as great as Vancouver’s seawall walk?

On the east side it passes through Trillium Park, just a few years old and a wonderful place to view the downtown skyline. Then it meanders by some of the original modern buildings to the pebble beach on the west island. Despite an ornery, bureaucratic sign suggesting otherwise, good swimming can be had here.

At the western point just a little farther on, some of the best sunsets in the city can be viewed as it goes down behind the new skyline of the Etobicoke Riviera. People wander through the rest of Ontario Place, too, finding patches of grass or space in the plazas. The drive-in set up last summer in the “Echo Beach” concert area was also a big hit, as was the winter festival of lights in recent years.

Ontario Place has become an absolute refuge during the pandemic for tens of thousands of people who live in adjacent neighbourhoods like Parkdale, Liberty Village, the cluster around Fort York and beyond.

Last weekend was Ontario Place’s 50th birthday, and even as an aging gen-Xer, it’s still a vibrant part of the city. The original buildings need new, thoughtful public uses and innovative business ideas, but the well-used oasis that Ontario Place is today must be respected with a delicate touch, and the province should be working directly with the city instead of keeping us in the dark about its future.

In fact, last week at a meeting of council’s executive committee, a city staff report revealed they know barely anything about the future of this public space so integral to Toronto’s waterfront.

In March, the government of Premier Doug Ford appointed former police chief Mark Saunders as an adviser on the future of Ontario Place, paying him $700 a day to a maximum of $171,500 to “provide guidance and expert advice.” Apparently, along with being a lifelong police officer, Saunders also had time to become an expert in cultural attractions.

The exaggerated death is the result of politics, as it’s useful to say there’s not much there to save.

Original structures like the Cinesphere, the pods that float over the water and other assorted Space Age buildings are spectacular and unique to Toronto, but were allowed to become run down over the years, though the Cinesphere received a restoration in 2017.

In 2019, city council unanimously voted to “list” Ontario Place on the city’s heritage register, a designation without strong protection, saying it “remains a rare and intact Modernist expression of integrated architecture, engineering and landscape architecture that honours and incorporates the natural setting of Lake Ontario.”

In 2014, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sport’s extensive heritage study declared Ontario Place a “cultural heritage landscape of provincial significance” though the web page with the study was scrubbed when the ministry, under the Ford government, opened a bidding process to redevelop the site in 2019. Later that year the World Monument Fund put Ontario Place on its list of most at-risk cultural heritage sites.

Ontario Place is one of those sites that are both important locally and also belong to people far and wide. People across Ontario have connections to and memories of the place and it needs a second life.

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Currently, it’s surrounded to the north by parking lots, some its own and those in Exhibition Place. There’s lots of potential for something great here, but the province has to be more transparent with the city and consult with the people who will use it every day.

In this regard we have a good advocate with Mayor John Tory, who headed up a 2012 revitalization effort that, though ultimately not completed by the previous Liberal government, presented a vision of a “new public backyard” for Ontario Place. Controversially, it included a mix of residential and business uses.

Many would still object to that, but looking at those parking lots today, there’s no reason that if thoughtfully designed, and with an emphasis on real affordable units and space for artists and families, these elements couldn’t be incorporated into some parts of the site today, breathing 24-hour, four-season life into the area, as long it sticks to the “mainland” side and respects all that cultural landscape on the islands. The Ontario Line subway will, theoretically, eventually reach here, too. If the province were transparent, all of this is something we could talk about.

Take a walk around that perimeter path and see for yourself.

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Doug Ford wants you to think Ontario Place isn’t worth saving. He needs to take a walk - Toronto Star
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