Canada in Cities by Katherine A.H. Graham

Author:Katherine A.H. Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2014-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Attempts at Coordination: From the 1990s Onwards

Institutional changes began to unravel in the wake of the royal commission report entitled Regeneration. Following the advice of David Crombie, city councillors used their majority on the THC board to transfer most of its land to the City of Toronto Economic Development Corporation (TEDCO), a municipal agency set up to generate employment and economic development on underused industrial land (Tasse 2006, 15). Other THC board members, including some city councillors, contested the legality of this transfer, but to no avail. Meanwhile, the Canada Lands Company, a Crown corporation responsible for divesting surplus federal property, sold CN railway lands to a large residential developer (Toronto Star, 26 March 1997). So by the mid-1990s the federal government presence on the waterfront was much diminished.

But the federal government wanted to remain an important player on the waterfront for visibility, patronage, and electoral reasons. Toronto Liberal members of parliament were successful in having the Toronto port classified among those worthy of federal attention, even though its regional rather than national scale clearly demarcated it from other ports thus classified (Canada 1996; Toronto Star, 29 March 1996). From 1999, the Toronto port was administered by the newly formed Toronto Port Authority (TPA), an arm’s length federal agency. The TPA was differentiated from the THC by the composition of its board, no longer composed of a majority of City of Toronto appointees, and its limited land holdings: the port, the outer marina, and the Island Airport (renamed City Centre Airport in 1994) (Tasse 2006, 30). The board was largely composed of federal government patronage appointments.

Government interest in the Toronto waterfront crested between 1999 and 2001 when Toronto prepared its bid for the 2008 Olympic Games. Most of the attention focussed on the eastern portion of the waterfront, which was to be the site of the main Olympic installations, including the Olympic village, but redevelopment efforts were also targeted at the entire waterfront. In 2001, the three levels of government created the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation (TWRC), mandated for the redevelopment of the forty-six kilometres of the amalgamated City of Toronto waterfront. The agency, which was promised $1.5 billion by the three levels of government, was meant to showcase the Toronto capacity to hold the Olympic Games (Toronto Star, 1 March 2001; 2 March 2001).

The waterfront redevelopment strategy was slow to take off after the failure of the Olympic bid. By early 2004, only $35 million in government funds had been transferred to the TWRC (Toronto Star, 9 May 2002, 4 March 2004, 5 March 2004). Later that year, however, the federal and provincial governments allocated $334 million for different projects, including naturalization of the mouth of the Don River, remediation of industrial sites in the Port Lands to make them suitable for housing and parks, and a boardwalk along Harbourfront Centre. Of late, under the coordinating eye of the TWRC, relabelled Waterfront Toronto, the province, the City of Toronto and the federal government each concentrates on a different portion of the waterfront.

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