Last week Barry Hertz of the Globe and Mail reported on yet another scandal on Toronto’s waterfront, the continued closure of the Cinesphere at Ontario Place which needs major repairs.
Doug Ford promised to make those repairs by late 2023. But the Ontario Government hasn’t even started, claiming now that the Cinesphere will re-open by 2029. Hertz tells this new drama in the context of the bigger ones surrounding Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre.
But there’s another tragedy here, of how successive governments of every political stripe have slowly bled and starved architect Eb Zeidler’s jewel on Toronto’s waterfront ever since Bill Davis walked away in 1985. I know this story well; my brother James Ramsay helped create Ontario Place and would fill me in on its decline and fall for years after he’d left government.
On May 22, 1971, the province’s very new Premier, Bill Davis, opened Ontario Place, calling it a place that would give people “a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride that everyone needs.” Its cost was already climbing to twice its $19 million budget.
While Ontario Place was an instant hit, drawing large crowds from Day One, it also ran a deficit from its very first season, $2.2 million in 1971, rising to $2.75 million by 1978 when David Peterson’s Liberals ended the Progressive Conservative’s 43-year hold on power in Ontario. A year later, as a reward to one of his volunteer fundraisers, Peterson appointed Patti Starr the Chair of Ontario Place. Starr got embroiled in a kickback scandal for which she served time, but not before raising entrance fees to Ontario Place and cutting marketing expenses.
Cutting costs is the time-honoured way to reduce a deficit. But when you cut marketing costs, you risk becoming less relevant and less able to reduce your deficit through higher revenues.
No surprise, attendance at Ontario Place started to fall, from three million visitors a year in the 70s, to 2.5 million by 1985, to 2.1 million by 1989, and down to one million by 2004.
Each dip in attendance was then cited as justification for the next round of cuts, which produced the next dip. Thus was created a doom loop, built one budget line at a time.
The 1990s brought the demolition of the beloved Forum, the free concert stage that had been Ontario Place’s real draw. It was replaced by the larger Molson Amphitheatre, which sold ticketed events explicitly to shrink the operating deficit. One observer later said that decision alone “decimated” the park’s attendance. The NDP under Bob Rae did nothing to reverse the decline from 1990 to 1995, and the Mike Harris Conservatives kept squeezing from 1995 to 2002.
By 2003, the province’s annual subsidy had shrunk to just $3 million, a fraction of what a waterfront attraction that big needed to stay competitive. By its final season in 2011, Ontario Place drew only 563,000 visitors and ran a $12.8-million deficit against a $6.2-million subsidy from the province. By February, 2012, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government pulled the plug on the main attractions, including the Cinesphere itself.
Every political party has had its turn holding the knife. That is the real scandal of Ontario Place.
It isn’t that one government killed it. It’s that no government, of any stripe, has ever believed that giving people a reason to show up was worth paying for. Cut the marketing, watch the crowds thin, point to the thinner crowds as proof the place doesn’t matter, cut again.
Fifty-five years after Ontario Place rose out of the lake, it is still being managed by the same logic that’s always failed it: starve it a little more each year, and call the resulting emptiness inevitable. The fact that its sad story is told in so many other public-sector attractions, like the Ontario Science Centre, reduces the pain just a little.
James Ramsay and Eb Zeidler must be turning in their graves.
Meanwhile…
1. Old wars, new fronts. Why did Japan really surrender? Eighty years on, Hiroshima’s scarred maidens still carry the political weight of that decision. And Europe’s spies believe that nobody does it better than MI6. Meanwhile, China plays its great game in the Arctic, and migrants get a step-by-step guide to crossing the English Channel while Chinese students go to Ice Camp to prepare for life in the States.
2. Statesmen behaving strangely. Jon Stewart breaks down Donald Trump’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. RFK Jr. has a new cooking show (yes, really). Gianni Infantino defies gravity as FIFA’s President. And Bob Rae contends Canada’s peacekeeping legacy shouldn’t be snuffed out just because nobody’s minding it.
3. The rich, the scammed, and the reluctantly generous. The class divisions of AI are getting harder to ignore, and so is decadence without pleasure or the fine print behind “click to cancel” consumer protection. Also, it turns out making gobs of money can be traumatic, so much that there’s now a guide to actually giving away your AI money. Spare a thought, too, for the internet’s original con: hello, I am a Nigerian Prince.
4. Authors galore. This year’s Toronto International Festival of Authors runs from Oct. 28 through Nov. 1 at Victoria College at the U of T. Who’s speaking? Barbara Kingsolver, Marie NDiaye, David Szalay, Patrick deWitt, and Philippe Sands, with more TBA. Plus pre-Festival events with Ann Cleeves, Bonnie Garmus, Emily St. John Mandel, and the PEN Canada Graeme Gibson Talk.
Tickets here.
5. The body keeps score. How the hottest years are burning us up; how scientists caught a sun we’ve never seen . Also, U.S. doctors are mapping how “Swift Trust” and financial toxicity undermine patients, and nobody can quite agree why we keep eating ultra-processed foods anyway. Yet squirrels have this figured out: they hug and kiss the ones they love. Finally, test your own wiring with a quiz on how well you recall colour, or fall down a Wikipedia hole on the reminiscence bump.
6. Appetite, abroad and at home. The secret behind ranch dressing; and the surprisingly heated transatlantic feud over air conditioning (90 percent of American homes have it, only 20 percent of European ones do) all circle the same question: how much comfort is too much? Coolcations say the answer is never enough, and Martha Gellhorn, with a hand from husband Ernest Hemingway, was grabbing pleasure while she could long before anyone coined the word.
7. High notes and low. Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter marks 50 years at Lucerne, where her career began and spread to the concert halls of the world. Plus The Impressionist Revolution opens at the AGO, and is it time for music legends to leave the stage?
8. Scroll, don’t think. A drone finally finds a good use, a glass artist shows you how to eat glass (carefully), and a website turns your handwriting into a font. Somewhere between David Attenborough’s entire back catalogue in one scroll, and a Substack asking if we were ever really online together, the internet is still a strange place to spend an afternoon. See also: how to pose, who was actually the strongest at soccer, and a new kind of book club?
9. Maps and the rooms we build. Steve Paikin admits he thought he knew Toronto until a new plan proved otherwise. Further afield, making the case for looking up, at Grand Central’s ceiling and at a Sunday in the Park. Zoom out and America really is a melting pot, mapped down to the zip code, while UNESCO quietly adds new World Heritage Sites to the list of places worth building a life around.
10. Seeing yourself clearly, or not. Here’s new insight to the old line that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and real discomfort in a surgeon’s confession that if you think you’re perverse, you haven’t heard the half of it. Some days you simply wonder why you bother. Other days you’re Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan epidemiologist-politician whom most Americans are seeing for the first time.
11. Slow down and pay attention. Neal Stephenson makes the case that writing things down engages more of your brain than typing ever will; a magazine asks how diplomats actually see the world, and a video compresses 13 billion years into ten minutes flat. Somewhere between a glacial river meeting the Atlantic and the Toronto Public Library’s quietly excellent Audubon Collection, there’s a case for turning the page on a great book-ish tradition instead of your phone.
12. What I’m reading…Trees and Shrubs of Mount Pleasant Cemetery by Janet Davis. Published to mark the 150th anniversary of the large lush cemetery in the middle of Toronto, which houses even some Titanic passengers, Whether you’re alive or have passed beyond, Mt. Pleasant is a lovely place to walk through or live in.
Guaranteed 100% written by Bob Ramsay, human.