European company Therme plans to build a spa and waterpark at Ontario Place. Former MP and Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan is now making the case for the project after publicly opposing the sale of the lease.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Therme, the European waterpark company that is taking up space on Toronto’s waterfront and on the agenda of Ontario Premier Doug Ford, has a new pitchman: Adam Vaughan.
The company recently announced that Mr. Vaughan, a former MP and downtown Toronto city councillor, has joined its staff. It’s also preparing to announce new design details for its project – a stadium-sized indoor waterpark for which the government clear-cut and demolished a 14-acre island.
So I invited Mr. Vaughan, a long-time centre-left gadfly, waterfront advocate and foe of Mr. Ford, to make the case for Therme.
Wearing a navy suit, a crisp blue shirt and a Timex with a red canvas band, Mr. Vaughan seemed largely at home in the corporate aerie of Therme’s office at the TD Centre. But what emerged in our interview was Vaughan the politician: hectoring, blustering, filibustering.
And, in this case, selling smoke.
“This builds on the legacy of Ontario Place,” he said of the Therme project. “It provides a chance for people to dip their toe in the water . . . and also adds a year-round indoor facility.”
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That’s the same bogus sales pitch Therme used six years ago, when then-MP Mr. Vaughan was opposing the project and its 99-year lease. (“Selling this off as real estate is apparently Doug Ford’s only trick,” he said at a rally in 2019 that is now on YouTube.)
The truth is that the 14-acre West Island of Ontario Place was a de facto public park for almost a decade. It was a gorgeous and historic, if neglected, landscape. Then the government razed it to the ground. Now Therme is poised to take over, add a massive private building, and construct 16 acres of so-called “public space” by filling in some of Lake Ontario and putting trees on a rooftop.
Nothing substantive has changed. Therme is still sucking up large quantities of the government’s $2.237-billion expenditure on Ontario Place. (This number will certainly grow.) Its payments to the government are worth just $163-million in today’s dollars plus a comparable amount in property-management services.
Therme demands 1,600 parking spaces, which will now blight the city-owned Exhibition Place with garages. The Ford government closed the Ontario Science Centre under false pretenses and is moving it here, almost certainly to provide an excuse for the parking.
In our meeting, Mr. Vaughan disputed every one of those claims. He did not, however, provide any evidence for his company’s point of view. He chose instead to keep talking, and talking, and talking, in the apparent belief that I would concede some points to quiet him down. (It almost worked.)
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Mr. Vaughan pulled out a copy of the Ontario Auditor-General’s report on Ontario Place, annotated with three colours of highlighter, to rebut the idea that Therme is being subsidized. His point, repeated six times: The province is spending $2.237-billion on Ontario Place, but most of it isn’t for Therme. “Only $60-million is direct subsidy,” Vaughan argued.
This is nonsense. Therme is the biggest tenant in the new Ontario Place and its enormous building will have huge functional requirements. Mr. Vaughan would not guess how much of the remaining $2.177-billion might accrue to Therme’s benefit. He simply insisted it was wrong to say any of it did. “Ask the government,” he told me.
The Ford government, that is. The government who signed up Therme through what the province’s Auditor-General called an “irregular” and “subjective” process. Mr. Ford himself has been deeply interested in this project, and Therme Canada has worked with a passel of Ontario Progressive Conservative insiders. Recently its former head of communications, Simon Bredin, moved to become Mr. Ford’s chief speechwriter. This small foreign company and Mr. Ford’s government are joined at the hip.
Which makes Mr. Vaughan a strange bedfellow. He spent years on Toronto City Council sparring with then-councillor Mr. Ford. He, like his father Colin, spent decades advocating for public space.
One can imagine the old Adam Vaughan raising an eyebrow at this whole production. Why bulldoze a park only to build a poor substitute in the margins of a corporate bathhouse? Why pour cash into a private attraction when the original site could have been revived, much more cheaply, with a touch of care and cultural imagination?
I might have asked him these questions, but we ran out of time. If Therme’s plan is to steamroll dissent with bluster, they have found their man.