Ontario Premier Doug Ford looks at renderings showing how Ontario Place will look after its redevelopment in Toronto in June, 2025.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
For six years, Doug Ford has had a problem named Therme. Since the Ontario Premier agreed to hand over much of Ontario Place to that European waterpark operator, he has been plagued by a crush of allegations – chiefly, of rewriting the rules to serve a pet project and a well-connected business. He’s waved them away like a pesky swarm of flies.
He can’t so easily dismiss the Supreme Court of Canada. In a surprising move this week, the court agreed to hear a challenge of Mr. Ford’s 2023 Rebuilding Ontario Place Act. The move is the message: His aggressive, destructive, expensive remaking of this public park is no longer just weird. It may be unconstitutional.
The court, as is customary, did not explain its decision to hear the case. But the activists’ submission rests on two core claims: One, the government has tried to take Ontario Place entirely beyond the reach of provincial courts; and two, it has violated its obligation to the “public trust” on this well-loved bit of Toronto waterfront.
The Premier attempted to deflect attention Thursday with culture-war bluster, talking about parkland and complaining of “crazy lefties.” In truth, all the fuss and litigation traces back to Therme – and the province’s extraordinary efforts to clear the way for the Vienna-based conglomerate.
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Ontario Place, opened in 1968, consists mostly of two artificial islands. They housed greenspace, cultural and educational facilities and, eventually, waterslides. The Ford government agreed to hand over the West Island in a 95-year lease to Therme for relatively little money. The company plans an edifice the size of a stadium. Designed by Diamond Schmitt Architects, the building would loom over the site, demand massive earthworks and lakefill and require expensive new infrastructure.
The government has been relentless in solving these problems. Its Ontario Place plans will now cost at least $2.2-billion, much of those funds directed to the waterpark’s needs. It has announced a huge, ugly parking garage, whose main client is surely Therme.
The damage cascaded from there. Queen’s Park is moving the beloved Ontario Science Centre to the site – at least partly as a pretext for the garage. It suddenly shut down the existing Science Centre, claiming that building needed to be closed for safety reasons. That was false: The government’s own engineers explicitly did not recommend closing the building. The old Science Centre now sits empty while the institution is reduced to a husk, another casualty of the Premier’s waterpark dreams.
Back at Ontario Place, the province demolished all 14 acres of the West Island last fall, spending $40-million to hurry the work, cutting down 800 trees and razing what had become a well-used public park.
All this was possible because of the government’s Rebuilding Ontario Place Act. It applies to the province and its partners, including Therme, and aims to exempt their work from environmental, planning and heritage rules, as well as civil and criminal liability.
Elsewhere, Mr. Ford has been too fearful to change planning rules and legalize much-needed apartment buildings. For a waterpark, he took the nuclear option.
And he’s done real damage. Ontario Place is a place of global significance. Good planning would have honoured its hybrid identity as park and cultural stage. Environmental oversight would have made it harder to wreck a forest and direct raw sewage into a busy section of urban waterfront, as the province is now doing.
So Mr. Ford tore up the rulebook. He was asking for trouble, and the court may deliver a reckoning.