Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in Ontario has leased the public space of OP to the Therme Spa company, which promises to bring wellness and democracy to the good citizens of Toronto, for a price.
Bruce Van Dieten and Ann-Elizabeth Samson of Ontario Place for All join Matthew to discuss the history and possible future of Toronto's cherished public space.
Bruce is "a retired busybody with nothing better to do than to lodge burrs under the saddles of politicians who see us as customers instead of citizens and treat us like obstacles."
Ann Elisabeth Samson specializes in equality, innovation, and futures thinking. She founded and ran BabyCenter Canada, and led the launch of the $300M Equality Fund. She is co-chair of Ontario Place for All and as an open water swimmer and rower - loves Lake Ontario.
Show Notes
Ontario Place for All
“To Rid Society of Imbeciles”: The Impact of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg’s Stand for Eugenics
RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government “Wellness Farms”
Ontario Place
Quick Facts & Analysis + Fact Checker: Ford government's health care funding
Ford government spending $525-675M on Therme Spa to get up to $380-580M in value back if it is successful for 95 years: analysis
Ford says he will ‘double and triple check’ Ontario Place deal after new report
European Spa Company Therme Misrepresented Itself in an Effort to Expand Into Canada
Province grilled over Therme's credentials to build luxury spa at Ontario Place
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
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This is episode 255.
A Maha Wellness scam at Ontario Place with Bruce Van Deaton and Anne Elizabeth Sampson.
So, Doug Ford's progressive conservative government in Ontario has leased the public space of Ontario Place to the Therme Spa Company with the promise to bring wellness and democracy to the good citizens of Toronto for a price.
*music*
Okay, Matthew, we'll talk about Ontario Place, and I know you're going to break it down a little bit for listeners who aren't aware.
I did not know about it before you brought this story to my attention, but let's just pull back a moment and talk about spas in general, because they are an important part of this story.
They date back to ancient Greece, Rome, and China, and relaxing in hot springs and communing in public baths as a form of healing has been around for thousands of years, and it continues today.
I am a huge fan.
I've visited hot springs when I was in Morocco and Hungary and Mexico.
I've gone all throughout the U.S. Wherever I go, I look to see if they have some sort of public bath culture.
And this became such a part of life in Europe that spa towns emerged hundreds of years ago.
And the first such American tradition started in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the early 19th century.
Now, by the middle of the century, spa resorts centered around mineral or hot springs in 20 states.
And they combined soaking with dancing and horse racing and even gambling.
You had sanatoriums, which were next, and they began offering alternative treatments for conditions like tuberculosis.
An early proponent of this model was John Harvey Kellogg, someone we've talked about before, wrote about in our book.
His Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan combined exercise and hydrotherapy with diet advice, a tradition that is still a major selling point in today's retreats, for example.
Yeah, so just to refresh our listeners' memory, Kellogg was really interested in strict daily routines, in cleansing practices that would purge toxins.
A real spiritual health obsession.
He was a Seventh Day Adventist who was really big on abstinence.
And these things are around today as well, but they kind of conceal the eugenics and racial segregationist views that were integral to Kellogg's movement at the time.
He definitely wanted his white clients to frolic in nature and all of the boys to eat cornflakes so that they would stop masturbating.
I don't know how that works.
But he also really wanted to rid society of So his sanitarium was also a think tank site for these ideas, where he hosted the first national conference on race betterment in 1913,
at which he hosted more than 400 eugenics experts from across the country.
I'm sure they all enjoyed the spas.
They all gathered and they sweated and they talked about their wonderful ideas.
And as we'll sort of mention later, to an extent, RFK Jr. is bringing some of those old-timey values back.
Oh yeah, we're all going to wellness camps here in America.
That is our destination.
I want to flag that this Sunday, The Guardian asked me to write their essay of the week, and I wrote it on RFK Jr.'s soft eugenics, and I do discuss the wellness camps briefly.
So if you're a reader of that publication, that'll be there.
But back to spas, and what we're really looking at here is the difference between...
These watering holes as public gathering places, which I think is just beautiful and probably very healthy in a lot of ways, and the privatization of them, because they've basically always been privately operated in America.
Government-run institutions did emerge in the 19th century, but these asylums were reserved for the mentally ill.
As you flagged, Matthew, a lot of people were not mentally ill at the time, but they were put in that category, right?
Autism was a subtype of schizophrenia, for example.
And this is all where moral treatment emerged.
So these were small facilities that brought together people in natural environments where they were able to converse socially as a form of healing.
And the general idea...
Was that you leave the stresses of society, you get to commune and interact with others, and you felt better.
Now, while they provided therapeutic environments with gardens, fresh air, and structured routines, their primary function was custodial care.
for the mentally ill or who they perceive to be, not holistic wellness or voluntary retreat experiences, so much
Most true wellness retreats catered to those who could afford them.
These asylums showed promising results early on, but they didn't distinguish between admissions and readmissions, so the data were likely skewed.
Now, regardless, by mid-century, these asylums became Overcrowded and underfunded, and there were a lot of reports of abuse going on.
They faded by the late 19th century with the advent of biomedicine interventions like antibiotics and vaccines.
Many conditions that people were sent to asylums for could be treated quickly and effectively at home, so the institutions weren't as prevalent either.
Privately owned retreats continued, and they received a big boost in the 60s as the culture shifted back.
Big time door toward alternative medicine.
The wellness retreat took new form as centers blended yoga and Ayurveda with luxury and hospitality.
They were glamping.
The counterculture that welcomed centers like Esalen, which opened in 62, and Canyon Ranch, 79. Then they had to endure Reaganomics.
And this is where the modern wellness industry reached a crossroads.
Reganomics' deregulatory stance was applied to healthcare.
The idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps became the rights deflection from discussing socialized medicine.
Now, to be clear, they didn't start that argument, but they certainly mastered it.
And so on one side, you had the chipping away of New Deal and post-New Deal social services that continues today, while figures like Dr. Oz speak about the importance of personal responsibility during his swearing-in ceremony as the new administrator of the CMS.
So we get to Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., who have both repeatedly stated that socialized medicine is not on the table.
Kennedy rehashed an old argument in his congressional hearings saying it's not fair that a smoker would get the same benefits as someone who eats organic and exercises and they would be a drain on the system.
Now, oddly, he never points out that smokers often pay higher insurance premiums, which ruins his they're taking more from the pool argument.
But this is all indicative of what this entire administration is about, which is pushing as much healthcare along with everything else, And it seems to be based on this, like, misunderstanding or,
I don't know, willful distortion.
Because the whole argument about taking more from the pool, it conceals something that I think is crucial from a socialized medicine point of view.
Like, insurance itself is a form of communistic distribution of costs and risks.
That's how it works.
So societies that commit to it...
They know that people go into and out of periods of higher needs.
They go into and out of the surplus labor pool.
You are and then you aren't capable of working, depending on what's happening in your life.
So you can abstain from every bad behavior for your entire life and then still rack up hundreds of thousands in costs through an accident or end-of-life care.
So the pool in socialized medicine just doesn't keep score.
On an individual basis, because it doesn't make sense logically.
It doesn't make sense morally either.
So when my neighbor has a heart attack, needs emergency care, I am never in the position of wondering, what are they stealing from me?
Which is kind of what Oz and RFK Jr. are pulling on with their idea of the pool.
It's just life.
The pool is life.
So what Oz and Bobby are really driving at is they're targeting individuals who would decrease...
Right.
What did RFK Jr. say first about...
Autistic people.
Children that they won't pay taxes.
They won't pay taxes.
As if that was the most important thing.
Yeah.
So what you get on all of this is Mark Hyman joining Kennedy, Oz, and Marty Macri for a public event in which it's announced that food companies have voluntarily agreed to remove eight food dyes from foods by the end of 2026.
Maha stans are calling it a ban, and that is completely false.
And as Dr. Andrea Love pointed out in a recent...
The natural dyes that will be replacing them are up to 10 times more expensive.
So there goes your free market argument for all these foods.
And many peoples have allergies to these natural dyes and you're not going to know you're eating them.
So there could be a lot of bad effects from that.
So this whole thing is Kennedy and crew have had this...
Toothless marketing opportunity here, and the work of dismantling health and human services just continues unabated.
So, just let me get this clear.
So, the dyes that are proposed to be removed...
Have they actually been, they've gone through certain testing with regard to the allergenic responses and the dyes that will replace them maybe haven't?
No.
I mean, people can be allergic to the synthetic dyes, but they are well-tolerated for the most part.
Right.
What Dr. Love is arguing is that people just have allergies to a lot of natural ingredients and specifically some of the substances that are used in dyes tend to have high allergic responses.
Right. So if you are now happy that your, whenever food is dyed with
Well, or you eat it, and then Bobby tells you that because you're eating pure food, you're going through a purification, right?
That's it, yeah.
Yeah, you're developing a rash and the toxins are coming out because actually homeopathically you are reacting to the different sort of
Color in a different way, and it'll all be fine.
I think Children's Health Defense doing a documentary on homeopathy and really pushing it hard probably should be an episode down the road because that's been kind of a mind-boggling pivot.
I mean, it makes sense because if you're not taking vaccines, homeopathy is something that's long been presented.
It's complete bullshit, but as something that can strengthen your immune system.
So that is its own episode.
But let's just move on with the spa culture here.
So our core story today is about how the logic of privatization and for-profit self-care ripple out from the ground zero of this old American-style project and how they ride the coattails of decades of neoliberal deregulation and neglect and become another front in the conflict of just how much capitalism will be invited to expand and administrate like everything.
And a big part of the background here is an intensification of the commodified presentation of nature and the natural, especially for modern urbanites.
So, Derek, one thing that we didn't talk about with regard to Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium was that it was an enormous complex.
When it was rebuilt after a fire in 1902, it shook out to 30 buildings on 30 acres.
They had the capacity to host 1,300 guests, and it was plopped down right in the middle of a bustling and growing town that Kellogg hoped would become a model for regenerating urban hygiene according to the principles of natural and divine law that he adhered to.
But to do that, of course, you have to rip up and enclose and privatize a ton of what would otherwise be green space in a town, and then you have to argue that it's worth it.
Because selling people wellness is more effective than supporting organic community function.
So to be fair, I do want to say that Kellogg's Christian sense of charity prompted some public service and pragmatic efforts.
So he did support sanitation projects in Chicago.
He supported social services for underemployed men in various places.
And so this mixed private-public model has been around for a long time, and we can see its tensions and contradictions play out.
In this interview that I'm going to do with Bruce and Anne Elizabeth about our case study today of Ontario Place.
So, Ontario Place.
I'm going to get to some basics, Derek, but I just wanted to ask you, do you have a childhood or young person experience with some kind of public space going back to your New Jersey days through which you can track, you know, the various changes in political economy and the ways in which...
We experience gathering together and doing things.
I didn't realize it at the time because when I was young, we would go annually in my school to somewhere called the Garden State Arts Center.
It's located in Holmdale, which is about a half an hour from the shore.
It's just around the Princeton area, a little further down.
And I went to my first concert there.
I probably was there about 10 times before high school.
And it is also now famously right across the parkway from the building that's used in...
the office building where everything happens.
So you have this really beautiful amphitheater that's on a hill that flows down and holds thousands of people.
And in 96, it was renamed the PNC Bank Arts Center.
And I never called it that, even when I would continue to go to concerts after that.
So it's owned by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority.
In 1954, legislation created the parkway to run throughout New Jersey, and the legislation called for a cultural and recreational center to be placed there.
It opened in 1968.
And in early days, it mixed classical programming and concerts with free programming for children and senior citizens.
And I will say that two state senators pushed back against the bank, refusing to keep Garden State in the name.
And they actually passed legislation in 96 to remove all state funds from PNC banks because of it.
But PNC banks wouldn't budge.
It has been that name ever since.
And shortly after...
Live Nation took over operations.
They do continue to work with a non-profit called the Garden State Arts Foundation, so there is free programming every year.
But this is an example of somewhere that was really created as a public good, a public service, right in the center of New Jersey for people and really served that function for decades.
And then being privatized.
And you also just saw the ticket prices go up dramatically after Live Nation took it over.
And it's really sad.
It's still a beautiful venue.
If I lived there, I would still probably regularly go there for shows.
I think the last show I saw there was Sade probably 20 years ago.
It was absolutely fantastic.
But it really sucks that just like with so many stadiums across the nation, you now have to call something after a bank because it's all just about It's just a marketing opportunity for these corporations.
You know, I don't want to get too deep psychology here, but it does end up meaning that you attend public events in a place that is named for something that doesn't reflect where you are.
It's as if, going back to what's right across from the Garden State Arts Center, which is what we'll call it on this show, Lumen had naming rights over some sports stadium or something like that in New Jersey.
It's very strange.
They did such a good job on Severance, though.
Sure, I just binged it with my wife, so we finished season two two days ago.
And just how much they nailed the little things that had the Lumen logo on it.
And it is really, with the story we're telling today, the fact that they're so close in proximity and the way that they position the corporate culture was just spot on.
What's wild about your story is that Live Nation also plays a role in the Ontario Place story because at first they ran something called the Molson Amphitheater, which is now the Budweiser stage.
So now we attend concerts that are named after beer brands.
But this comes after the free public venue that was part of Ontario Place, which was called the Forum, was underfunded by the province.
The wheelers and dealers just swept in at a certain point and started to privatize things.
It made me think that, you know, Naomi Klein talks about disaster capitalism, but this is something more like neglect capitalism, where the state kind of loses interest and imagination and people start feeling like, you know, the bureaucrats aren't really trying to make it a fun place anymore.
So as Bruce will get into in the interview a little bit...
Ontario Place comes out of this post-war period in the 1960s in Canada, which was really a boom time.
There were budget surpluses, there was this ripe post-war optimism, and it rippled throughout North America and Western Europe.
And a lot of publicly oriented projects came out of this time.
1967, we have Montreal's Expo.
We have the Chicago World's Fair Crystal Palace.
And Ontario Place was kind of like our local answer that emerged as this futuristic idea of blended architecture, technology, and nature.
And this sense that the ravages of urbanization could be restored or maybe transformed or forgiven or something like that, because the islands that Ontario Place was built on in the middle of Lake Ontario were formed from landfill waste that was pulled out of the construction of the Toronto subway,
right?
So it was this manufactured mix of nature preserve and Star Trek optimism.
There was something called the Cinesphere, which was the world's first permanent IMAX theater.
There were suspended exhibition pods over a lagoon.
In the first year, 1971, this is the year I'm born, 2.5 million visitors.
And the admission is $0.50 and $0.25 for kids.
And the following year, they lost money, so they jacked it to $1.50 and then $0.75.
So that's about $15 in today's money.
And as we'll hear, the baseline entrance fee for the public space now that's going to be administered by Thermae is $40.
Now, in my interview with Bruce and Anne Elizabeth, they'll also describe the decline of Ontario Place through the years.
But also how, in the early 2000s, the parts of Ontario Place that had been closed and fallen into disrepair, they rewilded.
And continued to attract up to a million visitors per year who paid nothing to hike and bike and sun themselves on this beautiful patch of green space in this gorgeous lake that was in walking distance from the southern edge of downtown.
And I think this is my favorite part of the story, that wherever there's green space, people will just use it.
And if people use it, other people will start plotting out ways to monetize it.
And that's sort of where it's going at this point.
Bruce and Elizabeth cover a lot of territory in our interview on how this new lease to the Therame Spa Company carries all of the hallmarks of not just privatization, but Maha-era grifting.
This is a company that's overstated their qualifications and their solvency.
The study processes and administrative hurdles have all been fudged or faked.
They have made up these weird benefits for what are essentially leisure class activities, including the claim that their water park complex will enhance democracy.
And the whole thing just pushes the entire discourse towards the benefits of private wellness.
And this is at a very sort of crucial time in, I would say, Canadian and Ontario history with regard to how we understand our public health care system.
We in this country now have an emerging fascist government to the south of us, and Derek and your puppy Tempo, you are our only line of defense at this point.
The Lion Hunter.
Right.
It's a government that is openly engaging eugenics policies wrapped up in wellness commercialism.
And the Ford government here is not going so far, but...
We know that there are trends and there are influences.
There are skids, usually rightwards.
There are shifts in Overton windows.
And the Therme project is trending in that direction.
So that, you know, if we're speaking on Tuesday, April 29th, the election was yesterday nationally.
If Pierre Poiliev had won yesterday and he didn't, you know, this development would quickly become a national model for defunding more and more public health spaces and monetizing more.
And in response to Trump waging a trade war and talking openly about annexation, the country I live in has had to resurrect this really old debate about Canadian identity.
And it's really silly.
It's based on hockey, beaver tails on the Rideau Canal.
We're not talking too much about genocide in residential schools as we talk about Canadian pride.
And the question really is, what makes this country not a client state or not the 51st state?
And in my opinion, we don't really have an answer to that that doesn't foreground the 1960s commitment to social democracy.
These are the core ways in which Canada has attempted to distinguish itself from the U.S. and to assuage at least some of its colonial guilt, which is through the adoption of social welfare policies, including...
The protection of public space and enormous parklands.
Now, these gifts have always been unequally accessible, but there has been an aspiration there.
And so now, Doug Ford and the progressive conservative government here in Ontario is locked into what is basically a Trump-style fraudulent real estate deal, dressed up in RFK Jr.
BS. And, you know, it looks like it's degrading all of the assets that
Even a nationalist like Ford says that he wants to protect.
All right, so after our break, we're going to speak to Bruce Van Deeten and Anne Elizabeth Sampson.
These are my fellow Toronto residents.
They sit on the steering committee for Ontario Place for All.
*Music*
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Bruce and Anne-Elizabeth, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where, you know, we track the tycoon takeover of public spaces to replace all of the wokeness with for-profit wellness.
So you are among friends here.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Okay, so just a little bit of background for non-Canadians, non-Ontarians.
I'd like to stroll down memory lane just to start.
Ontario Place opens in 1971.
That's actually my birth year.
What was in the air at the time?
What was the buzz?
How did this project connect with other public space projects around the world?
And what were the themes involved?
Well, fortunately, I was a teenager in the 60s, so I do have some remembrance of what it was like.
And I think everybody understands that the 60s and 70s were certainly a time of great change.
We'd come out of the war.
We were a powerful nation at that point, and we were booming.
We adopted our first Bill of Rights in the early 60s.
In 65, we adopted our flag, the red and white, with the red maple leaf at the center.
And we had a few final legal ties with the British Crown, but they would disappear soon enough.
The precursor to our universal Medicare came to Canada in the 60s.
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were playing in Yorkville cafes, and the Guess Who were singing about getting away from an American woman.
A not-so-veiled nod at American dominance in culture, finance, basically everything in Canada.
Ontario was growing, but Toronto was still pretty sleepy, but Expo 67 in Montreal woke the country up, and Toronto with it.
In 1971, Ontario Place opened, and that was our answer to Expo 67. It was to be a showcase of Canadian architectural and engineering prowess, and all the steel, etc., was manufactured in Ontario.
I believe the entire project was done in Ontario.
And it was built by Canadian workers.
It was the expression of unstoppable enthusiasm, Canadian pride, and a nationalism that is more overt than ever before.
And Elizabeth, did you want to add anything to that?
Well, I think it's important to note that it was built by a progressive conservative government at a time of great optimism and really wanting to take pride in Ontario culture and Ontario innovation.
Which, you know, when we start talking about its demise, makes it even more sad.
Before we get to the demise, let's just talk about what it felt like to go there.
I'll just pull on a memory of my own about going to the Forum, which was the music amphitheater there.
I remember, you know, you could pay whatever it was.
An $8 admission to the park per person or something like that.
And you could spend the afternoon on water slides.
You could go around to the weird futuristic buildings and whatever museum displays they had on.
And then you could go and see Judy Collins or Gordon Lightfoot playing in the round, sitting on the grass.
Help me out.
How did we afford all of that?
Why was that so cheap and available for everybody?
How did the commies pay for all of that?
Where did the money go?
And what has changed in Toronto and the province and the world?
Well, I can't tell you exactly where the money went, and I don't know exactly how they paid for it.
But again, the 60s were a different time.
We were in surpluses for most of the 60s, well, for all of the 60s.
It was only in the 70s that we started to run deficits.
There was money available and there was a pride that came out that wanted to find its way in terms of expression like Ontario Place.
It was the surpluses really that drove our ability to be able to do these bigger things.
Again, Medicare came out as part of it.
And that's how the commies worked.
And in fact, it was the progressive conservatives who you would never describe as commies who initiated many of these projects.
And they're wonderful projects.
They were projects that really expressed great civic pride.
They were done well and they were motivated by good intentions.
I think it's a super interesting example of a time and a...
When governments were investing in public spaces, right?
Even the design of Ontario Place is a modernist kind of vision come true, which quite frankly, there were many, many modernist projects on the books, but very few of them were actually built around the world.
You've got the Sansa Pompidou in Paris and just a couple of others.
So Ontario Place was built with a great optimism for...
For Canada, for Ontario, and it really was built as a showcase.
My favorite fact about it is that it was the site of the first children's ball pit.
Oh my gosh.
That was invented in Ontario, the ball pit.
Oh, I think I remember.
Wasn't it, it was sort of enclosed by netting, wasn't it?
I think so.
And, you know, the first IMAX theater, which is also a Canadian, Ontario.
Invention.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, it really was designed to be sort of a place where you would go and feel proud to be an Ontarian.
Right.
Which I think, you know...
When we think of that now, it's hard to imagine how we would actually define that.
Yes.
This is all they've taken away from us, the ball pit, the IMAX, the $8 admission to Judy Collins.
But the site went on to go into decline at a certain point.
And as somebody, I was away from Toronto for about 12 years, and I kind of lost track of what...
I know that the Forum was closed down.
I know that the Molson Amphitheater was constructed, and that became more of a big-ticket concert experience for people.
But the site in general has gone through a period of decline and neglect somewhat.
How has that worked out?
Why did that happen?
As you said, it was kind of slowly, slowly changed over the years.
So, you know, the first thing you mentioned is the forum was closed and a deal was made with Live Nation, which, and, you know, the Molson Amphitheater was built.
So that was kind of, so the site was getting kind of carved off.
And I would also argue that it was starved.
You know, it was underfunded by successive governments and it was not invested in.
And so as it was starved, eventually most of the attractions closed.
However, there were certain things that stayed open.
The Cinesphere stayed open until just a couple of years ago when the province finally shut everything down.
And many, many people were still using the site.
So it was kind of like a...
I guess it was a little bit like going to a closed theme park where you could walk around, you could see the log flume, you could skateboard in the former water park areas, you could kind of explore in a bit of a wild space is what it became.
And people were still really using it.
I personally went to a really fabulous Dine en Blanche pop-up dinner party with thousands of people just a couple of years ago.
But many, many people continued to use the site for birdwatching, swimming, kayaking, dog walking, cycling, gathering, picnicking, exploring, and just generally finding a respite from the life of the city.
We really saw this...
You know, balloon in the pandemic when people were really desperate for public space and places to be outside.
And this site, sitting right on Lake Ontario, was really just a very peaceful escape from the city for many people who felt extremely trapped.
And so, you know, entirely new communities built up around people who were using it.
All the time.
And so a lot of times when it's described as being sort of derelict and unused, it was derelict for sure.
It needed some investment and some new vision, but it definitely wasn't unused because the people of Toronto, especially Ontarians, are really desperate for additional green space.
And so that's how it became used over the last few years.
I think a big part of the reason why Ontario Place started to go down was certainly the underfunding, but a big part of it was the competition, too, with Canada's Wonderland opening up.
Right.
That changed the dynamics quite a bit.
Ontario Place was really geared really well for, like, 0 to 12 years old.
But I know my kids, by the time they got to be 12 or 13, Ontario Place held no great adventure for them.
They wanted to go to Canada's Wonderland.
And I think that that had a great effect on what happened to Ontario Place.
Perhaps the most interesting part of that is because where it's located, it's near major highway hubs, and it's not going downtown Toronto.
To go to Ontario Place, to go downtown Toronto was...
Not as easy as going to Canada's Wonderland, so why would you bother?
I think that's going to come into play when this structure goes up, when this new development is finally at hand.
Right, because the current government is going to have to get over the transit issues and the congestion problems.
Exactly.
Okay, I understand what you're saying.
But, Anne-Elizabeth, you tell a really kind of...
Interesting story about how a provincial and a national pride, civic pride project goes through an institutional phase in which it's well used.
And this is part of my own rosy memory.
But then as it falls out of the sort of, you know, sphere of public services, as the funding is withdrawn, people don't abandon it, actually.
as governments pull back through the neoliberal era, that people will find stuff to do in their same favorite places anyway.
And I kind of really love, you know, it's not a post-apocalyptic scene, but I do have this feeling of kind of the overgrown water parks that people are skateboarding in as
I think, on the part of city administrators to say, okay, well...
How can we preserve some of the heritage almost in ruins form as this transitions into a public park?
And I think that would have been the other fork in the road.
But we're going to talk about where it actually goes because this is now property that has been assigned by the...
Current conservative government under Premier Doug Ford to be leased for 95 years to the Therme Wellness Company.
And the problem is right off the top is that in the application process...
A couple of things went awry with regard to public consultation and whether or not this company was above board and whether they were entirely honest.
So can you just run down the bullet points of what's gone wrong here and what the Attorney General said in their audit of the contract?
I'll give it a try.
It's a very complicated story, and it would take this entire podcast to really go through all of the ins and outs of what we've seen our government do here.
The RFP process, according to the Auditor General, was flawed and favored this company, Therma, more than any other of the proposals, including Ontario-based proposals.
The Auditor General also noted that the company did not appear to have enough money in the bank to take on the project.
Which is kind of an essential point.
Yes, yes.
However, the government signed a lease with the company.
It's for 95 years and allows them to basically do what they want on the site once the thing is built.
The company itself is building their facility and they're also increasing the size of the island in order to...
So the spa and water park, we often call the mega spa, is an indoor...
Um, facility that is sort of like a stadium or, um, it's a stadium size.
You could think of it as a mall maybe with only, uh, you know, with pools and palm trees and, um, you know, there's a water park area.
There'll be like, you know, quiet areas, um, for adults and the company.
In addition to building their own facility, they are building what they're calling public realm space, which is pub paths around the facility and some garden areas that are supposed to be accessible to the public.
But they also will control those for a big part of the time.
So that's the other really weird thing about the lease is that not only are they building their own...
But they also are being contracted with by our government to build and maintain public space, which they can monetize at their will.
So that's another, that's one of the other kind of pieces.
The cost to the taxpayers of Ontario have ballooned.
So, you know, when we started this fight, we kind of, we would nervously say, oh, we think it's going to be $400 million of taxpayer money.
The Auditor General said it's almost $2.3 billion now.
And that's missing a lot of costs.
So you mentioned the transportation.
We don't know about that.
We don't know about how they're going to build parking facilities.
There's a number of things which may cause that number to go even higher.
And then the other thing is, in order to avoid consultation and scrutiny and accountability, the government actually passed a law allowing themselves to do whatever they want on the site, basically, with no recourse.
So it's a very unusual project.
And for your listeners, it's in the city of Toronto, but the land itself was built.
The islands were built in the 70s.
The land didn't exist before Ontario plays.
And as such, the province of Ontario, the government of Ontario, owns the land and controls the land.
And so this is why it's in a very strange gray zone of kind of oversight.
So the city, the province has been able to basically tell the city they're going to do whatever they want.
They no longer have to go through, you know, an application review or any of those other processes, which any other developer would have to do.
And so it makes it a very unusual project in that way.
Thank you.
I want to just go back to the description that you gave, Anne-Elizabeth, of the planned building site, because I think this is going to tie into the...
of language that's being used to sell this particular project, which is our next topic,
When I was away from Toronto, during part of that time, I was in rural Wisconsin.
And I lived in a small vacation town called Lake Delton, which was close to a place called Wisconsin Dells.
And Wisconsin Dells was like an old resort sort of venue that the rich folks from Chicago and mobsters as well would come up to in the 20s and 30s.
And there were a number of resorts that had recently taken over.
The sort of mom and pop theme park outlets in Wisconsin Dells.
And one of them was called the Great Wolf Lodge.
And I think it was the first one that was established in Lake Delton.
And I actually worked there in services as a waiter for a while.
And, you know, if listeners haven't been in one of these very large indoor water park type spa places, They are enormous.
All of the vegetation is imported.
If it's vegetation at all, it's going to be a mixture of palm trees and plastic things.
But the entire building smells of chlorine.
Because the water park part of the spa part of this thing is the largest part of the building.
And there's a number of...
Entrances and exits to it, and they all go to the inside of where the services are and the hotel rooms and so on.
And everything is kind of off in terms of temperature as well.
It's a climate-controlled, very humid environment.
And I guess, is this the kind of thing that you're envisioning being plopped down now right in the middle of this heritage property?
So I would say that if you imagine the Great Wolf Lodge, for those of you who have ever been, I've certainly taken my children to the one in Niagara Falls, then you multiply it by probably,
I don't know, four or five times.
The size of this facility is the size of a stadium.
The volume of the building that's being proposed for the West Island on Ontario Place is the same volume as at BMO Field across the street, which is where our professional soccer team plays.
And, you know, instead of four or five pools, this thing is supposed to have 17. Oh, my gosh.
Okay.
And the other thing I would note is that we've done some work around...
How many people they're saying need to come to this thing to make it financially viable?
And it's many thousands a day, which when you imagine your experience at Great Wolf Lodge, my guess is there were, I don't know, 1,000, 2,000, maybe three a day.
Something like that.
I think, Bruce, what did they say?
14,000 is the target.
For the daily, which means as well that they plan to run it almost 24 hours a day.
And there's this idea that you go to be calm and you go to connect.
And I think the general idea is that you send your kids to the Great Wolf Lodge part and you, the adults, can go and relax in the adult part.
But it's certainly not a concept that has been built yet in North America.
There is one in Romania that the company has built itself, and it's actually only half the size of the proposed facility in Toronto.
And they're working on building them around the world, but it's definitely a concept that we haven't yet seen.
Definitely more of like a theme park water attraction than a relaxation and wellness facility.
Well, speaking of relaxation and wellness, I don't think either of you are big-time yoga and wellness people.
I'm not sure, but I guess it was kind of a surprise for you to start to pick up that.
The Thermae Spa Company was using some strange language to sell the takeover of this public space.
How did you clue into that?
Well, this is one of the things, actually, that got me interested in this fight for Ontario Place.
And it's because, you know, I actually didn't grow up in Toronto.
I was not connected to that original vision of Ontario Place.
But I am a swimmer and a rower, and I love the lake.
I spend a lot of time on it and in it.
And from this, I get incredible wellness, right?
I find, you know, I'm getting exercise.
It's very peaceful.
It's very refreshing.
But this is not what's being proposed, which is a commoditized version of that.
And what I find fascinating is how they don't just conflate the wellness benefits of swimming and soaking or being in this artificial environment.
That's not enough.
Oh!
Which is really where it gets fascinating.
Because there's 14,000 people a day who have to come and spend their money to hang out with each other.
And they'll speak.
They'll talk.
They'll talk with each other.
It'll be like the Roman spas.
That's exactly what they try to say.
They, you know, I've got, I was in preparing for this interview, I was looking for the quotes that most enrage me.
And, you know.
Just as Roman baths once served as essential centers for community connection, our Thermae will provide dynamic spaces where people gather and thrive.
Like museums and libraries today, every great city will soon count a Thermae as a vital urban amenity.
Oh, they're trying to turn the corporate term into its own noun, like a proper noun, like this is the thermae for this city.
Yes.
And I don't know how this particular thing is different than the hundreds of other spas in our province that are not supported by the taxpayers.
But the marketing also features people inside a building.
Relaxing and looking up at a digital screen showing the trees.
And they've cut down, you know, we think up near 1,500 mature trees to make room for the spa.
So they're destroying an actual outdoor experience and replacing it with a virtual one.
But this democratic vision, you know, they talk about The, you know, facilities in Europe as, quote, the most democratic spaces.
And my favorite, my favorite is, you know, they accuse the opponents of the project as not recognizing growing international trends in wellness, nutrition, sustainability, and therapy.
Oh my gosh.
But they love to talk about...
They're so smug.
They are so smug.
Smugness is astounding.
But who do you think is being attracted by that?
That sounds like it is written for the government.
Well, the government bought it.
The government bought it.
Okay, maybe that's just part of the marketing language.
You get that into the application.
Do you have any neighbors who would read that and not smell a huge fart in the room?
But my favorite to all of the marketing is that Therma is bringing to Canada a, quote, European appreciation for democratic water experience.
So, I mean, is this democracy?
You have to pay to get in.
You can only do it while you're wet?
Yeah.
You can only do it if you can afford it.
And I mean, in that sense, it is going back to the old demos of the Greek experience where you had to be a senator to sit to make the democratic decisions.
Right.
I mean, it's just astounding here how they conflate a lot of things in their assertions about what its benefits will be for our community.
And, you know, it's a tourist attraction, right?
Yeah.
It's not going to be a civic space where people are going to gather.
And do Robert's rules over what the next sort of attraction should be or what their next activity should be.
Nobody's going to get together and say, okay, well, let's do the steam bath at 2.15.
Does everybody agree and then they'll vote?
No.
It's not going to be like that.
And, you know, even the wellness claims.
They're very conflated as well.
They talk about it's a place you can be active 365 days a year.
As a swimmer, I'm not sure how sitting in a pool is equated with being active because there's not a single one of the pools they're building in there for swimming.
Oh, really?
17 pools?
There's not a swimming pool?
No, it's all for floating, soaking.
Water slides, etc.
Wait a minute.
17 pools and no lane pool?
No.
What?
Yes.
That is so bizarre.
If you have a stadium, why not even appeal to sporty swimmer types?
Exactly.
That's so bizarre.
Bruce, in your first email to me, you wrote, and Elizabeth just mentioned this, that as part of the contract, the province actually Agreed to prepare some of the property, and that involved raising 1,500
mature trees to make way for the facility.
So what's the environmental impact there?
Well, as you can imagine, an urban forest has been cut down.
And that is just, it is so anti what the City of Toronto is trying to achieve with its own...
Plans to try and have a canopy, a 40% canopy in Toronto by 2040.
You can throw that out the window the way the trees are coming down in Toronto.
And there's an old, mature canopy in Toronto, and it's coming down, it's getting old, and it needs to be replaced.
So these are the kind of retrograde things that we just don't need to have happen.
But I've also never seen a more obvious one-to-one connection when you talk about the environment than you can see here the relationship with coyotes.
They've always been part of Toronto's fauna.
They've always been here.
They would certainly be attracted to places like railroad tracks and places like Ontario Place, where it was more wild and wide open.
But since that's been closed off, there suddenly appeared problems in Liberty Village, which is the community right next to where Ontario Place is going to be.
There's been all sorts of problems with coyotes.
Suddenly, where did all these coyotes come from?
Of course, a lot of people, I can't blame them necessarily, but that they don't know that coyotes have always been there is something that we have to allow for.
Now there's more of them because their dens have been destroyed and they're coming up.
Now we hear about people who want to call the coyotes because they're attacking their little dogs and apparently attacking young children, although I've never actually seen evidence of that.
But those are just a couple examples.
I mean, it just makes no sense.
And I just want to add one thing into about the property itself.
We just situate some things for your listeners on the east side of Toronto.
There's a place called the Don River.
And the Don River was this horribly polluted area.
It was all industrial.
It has been reclaimed.
It has been redone.
And it is absolutely remarkably fabulous what they've done there.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And it didn't take that long.
When I was growing up, you just did not walk through the Don River Valley.
And what?
It's 20 years later, 30 years later, something like that.
And it is a gorgeous urban park, absolutely wilded over.
It's incredible.
It's incredible how nature takes it back.
Even when we keep doing these projects of laying the sort of facsimile of nature on top of it.
Here's another one you might find interesting, and that is what's called Tommy Thompson Park or the Leslie Street Spit, which is this big, huge area of garbage, of construction materials that have been tipped there for a number of decades now.
And for years and years and years, the Toronto Council could not come to any kind of agreement on what to do with Tommy Thompson Park.
And then they just left it.
And it rewilded on its own, and it's taken its own course.
Now, they have gone back in now and reengineered certain areas, you know, for habitats, to create habitats for the species that they want to support.
But it was just done because the government didn't get to touch it.
This is like the Ontario Place rewilding story itself as well.
If there might be a benefit from neoliberal governments just saying fuck it to public services once in a while, because if they just drop the ball, the animals are going to come back.
Well, the other thing to keep a note of is that the best projects in Toronto are not run by the province, right?
So we have Waterfront Toronto, which is a structure that's designed to be all levels of government cooperating.
They've built a number of great parks and public spaces along the waterfront over the last, you know, I don't know, couple of decades.
But this particular site that we're talking about is outside of that and is outside of this kind of realm of public consultation.
The province has done some, they call it public consultation, but it's been mostly marketing.
So all of our supporters who oppose the project, they show up and they're not allowed to ask certain kinds of questions.
They're only asked to respond to very particular premises, which are not about the Whether or not it's wise to do this at all, or, you know, it's all kind of at the edges.
And so I think it's also an important story about governance, in addition to kind of the neglect, right?
There are different levels of government where people are more, citizens are more active, they're more engaged, there's more accountability.
Part of what we fight is that the site is located in Toronto, but the Premier loves to say, well, it's not Toronto Place, it's Ontario Place, right?
As though Torontonians are not Ontarians.
I mean, it sounds, Anne Elizabeth, like you're saying that Toronto already has its own Therme-type democracy, although you just don't have to get wet, you don't have to pay $40 to get in, and you don't have to make sure that $14,000 That would be lovely.
That's the goal.
Like, more consultation, more transparency.
Bruce and Anne-Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining us.
