It’s cheaper. We need more housing. It’s rundown. Employees are keen to move. Those are a few of the reasons Premier Doug Ford and his cabinet ministers have offered up to justify their controversial decision to relocate the Ontario Science Centre.
It’s been almost a month since the announcement about the centre’s move to Ontario Place and still there remain more questions than answers around the government’s rationale. Among them:
- Moving the science centre will allow “thousands” of new housing units to be built on the site at Eglinton Avenue East and Don Mills Road. This, according to the province, is the main motivation for the move. “We want to create as much density as possible,” Premier Doug Ford said in announcing the relocation.
Not so fast, says the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which owns portions of the lands occupied by the centre and its parking lots. The centre sits in a scenic ravine setting where the lands are considered hazardous “due to the steep slopes and floodplain associated with the West Don River.”
“Nothing can be built on our land,” Michael Tolensky, the TRCA’s chief financial and operating officer, told the Star, citing provincial, municipal and authority policies.
The authority bluntly noted that no discussions had been held between it, the province and the city on plans to move the centre and build housing on the lands or change the 99-year lease for the property occupied by the centre. The authority was seeking a meeting with the province to clarify its plans. A spokesperson said this week there is no update.
- Science centre staff want to make the move. “They want something new, they want something sparkling and have an opportunity to be able to walk into a beautiful facility,” Ford declared.
Not so, says JP Hornick, president of OPSEU, the union which represents some 400 employees at the centre. “Not a single one of them is happy. They’re angry. They’re upset. They weren’t consulted,” Hornick told the Star this week.
- Declining attendance. Ford declared that visitors to the centre were down 40 per cent, a figure later clarified to 30 per cent. Even that is misleading. As Canadian Press noted, that comes from comparing 2012-13 figures to 2022-23, a year when the pandemic had slashed attendance. The drop is about 10 per cent when compared to 2018-19, before the pandemic, when there were 884,837 visitors, it said.
- The new site will attract attract one million visitors a year. The centre may certainly benefit from a waterfront location close to other attractions. Less clear is how many visitors will stay away, put off by inevitable downtown traffic bottlenecks.
That concern puts a question mark over a key role of the science centre, to educate students. The 2017-18 annual report counted some 170,000 visits by students and teachers. Will the relocated centre remain accessible — and inviting — to such school field trips?
The proposed move comes just as the existing site will be easier to access via public transit once the Eglinton Crosstown LRT eventually opens.
- The existing centre is a “run-down, old building.” Here, the provincial government needs to look in the mirror. If the centre is in disrepair, the blame falls squarely on Queen’s Park for failing to make the investments needed for centre upkeep and to revitalize exhibits. For example, a key pedestrian walkway is closed, forcing visitors to take a shuttle to exhibits on a lower level. The centre’s 2017-18 business plan highlighted that the building requires “ongoing upkeep of obsolete or failed infrastructure” and pegged the 10-year deferred maintenance needs at $147.5 million.
Raymond Moriyama, the architect who designed the centre, said it was built to last. “We guaranteed that with proper maintenance the life of this project will last far beyond 250 years,” he wrote in a letter to the Star.
- Moving the centre is cheaper than renovating and revitalizing the existing site. Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma said a business case showed it was “less expensive” to make the science centre part of Ontario Place and “build a brand new modern facility, one with new exhibits.”
Yet, the province has so far refused to make that business case public, keeping Ontario residents in the dark about the assumptions in the business case and the true price tag.
- The relocated centre will be “spectacular” and “state-of-the-art.” The government rolled out the superlatives to describe the new site. One thing is for sure — it will be smaller, just about half the current space. “What gets left behind in that move? What’s the impact on the exhibits?” Hornick said.
As well, as Hornick notes, the current facility was purpose-built to be a science centre, with dedicated workshops behind-the-scenes for the design and maintenance of exhibits.
Ontario Place could well serve as a satellite facility to showcase a specific science theme. But the government has yet to show how the entire centre can be shoehorned into a space half its current size.
These are all red flags. More and more, it screams of something thought up in a hurry to distract from the government’s other waterfront folly, the mammoth private spa on prime Ontario Place lands.
