Ontario Place doesn't need Science Centre

The abrupt closure last week of the Ontario Science Centre by Premier Doug Ford’s government has given impetus to some rather drastic “solutions” to what supposedly ails Toronto’s urban core.

- DAVID OLIVE

Ontario Place has not been abandoned, as Premier Doug Ford seems to believe; it welcomed more than two million visitors in 2022, the most recent year for which attendance figures are available, David Olive writes.

The province’s two most dubious remedies are its plans to relocate a science centre it claims to be in a state of near collapse to Ontario Place.

And Ford also wants to destroy the forests and pebble beaches of Ontario Place’s West Island — a rare urban oasis of serenity — to make way for an enormous private luxury spa operated by an Austrian resort developer.

That act of state-sponsored vandalism is already underway.

Power brokers like Ford live to make big statements, which are often vanity projects.

This city’s political and urbanplanning elite pines for a Toronto equivalent to the Sydney Opera House; the London Eye; or Millennium Park, Chicago’s waterfront extravaganza of public amenities.

We should stop here and assess the beneficial impact of recent improvements in Toronto’s core amenities before committing to megaprojects we might regret.

The elite blundered with Roy Thomson Hall, an intimidating brutalist structure accessible only to those with often pricey symphony tickets; and with a hideous expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum that juts over Bloor Street near Avenue Road like a menacing tetradactyl.

In recent years, Toronto has quietly embellished the urban core with more free amenities — parks, sculpture gardens, unique natural ecosystems and open spaces.