Ontario’s auditor general has found that the much-maligned decision to build a mega-spa at Ontario Place on the Toronto waterfront came at the end of a bidding process that was “not fair, transparent or accountable”. Furthermore, the taxpayer price tag for the project has skyrocketed from approximately C$300m ($228m) at its inception in 2019 to more than C$2.2bn ($1.5bn) today.
The long-awaited bombshell report was released on 3 December, devoting 121 pages to the controversial redevelopment of the 1971 Modernist landscape designed by the Canadian landscape architect Michael Hough.
The extreme rise in price is at least partially due to the provincial government’s equally controversial decision to relocate the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place from its former home—a Raymond Moriyama-designed landmark building that was abruptly (and, some have suggested, suspiciously) shut down earlier this year. The report estimates the cost of building the new science centre at more than C$700m ($490m), markedly higher than what would be needed to repair its old building. More than 90,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the science centre’s relocation.
In response to these findings, Ontario’s minister of infrastructure laid the blame squarely on inflation.
The report further notes that the bidding process for the redevelopment of Ontario Place did not follow “typical procurement law or directives” and that the office of Ontario Premier Doug Ford gave preferential treatment to a handful of applicants via communications and meetings specifically forbidden by the government’s own rules. These preferred applicants included Therme, the Austrian wellness company building the mega-spa, which was secretly given a 95-year lease on the land in 2022. The report also finds that several of the initial applications for redevelopment projects at Ontario Place had provided solutions to the problem of parking, whereas the Therme proposal did not—another major, and expensive, issue that has come to the fore.
Perhaps most damningly for an expensive project funded by taxpayer dollars, no public input was sought on the redevelopment of Ontario Place until August 2021—well after the decision to build the mega-spa had already been made.
The architecture historian Elsa Lam, who has been following the redevelopment of Ontario Place with great interest (and scepticism), has published a multi-part breakdown of the auditor general’s report on her blog, Canadian Architect.
Even given the severity of the report’s conclusions, it serves purely as public information and Ford’s government is not required to take its recommendations to heart. In December 2023, the auditor general’s investigation into the Ontario Science Centre found troublesome irregularities in the plan to relocate the institution—but the provincial government moved forward with this project regardless.
Ontario Place is far from the only scandal Ford has been involved in recently. Earlier this month, he started a spat with Donald Trump over the US president-elect’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on all products coming in from Canada. Ford also expressed concern that, should Trump follow through on his promise to deport undocumented immigrants, many would attempt to cross the northern border. As retaliation, the Ontario premier has threatened to restrict the export of electricity to Michigan, New York and Minnesota—effectively turning the lights off in parts of those states.
