For the last five years, the Ford government has kept the companies and other organizations that made bids to redevelop Ontario Place under wraps.
After a year-and-a-half-long effort to obtain the list through the freedom-of-information system, The Trillium recently received it from the Ministry of Infrastructure and is releasing it in full.
The list of 34 submissions shows, for the first time, the complete collection of proponents that Premier Doug Ford’s government had to choose from when it selected Therme to be its main partner to revitalize the provincially controlled site on Toronto's waterfront.
Therme Group, an Austria-based spa and water park builder, opened its flagship facility in Bucharest, Romania in 2016. It embarked on a vast international expansion around the same time, including to Canada. Therme first pitched its Ontario Place redevelopment plan to the province's previous Liberal government and then again to Ford's Progressive Conservatives, who re-launched their own call for development process in 2019.
Most of the submissions to the 2019 call for development of Ontario Place came from Canadian companies. Three Canada-based spa builders — Badenhaüs Spa, Pomeroy Lodging, and Strom Corporation Inc. — made proposals. At least one other was a business pitching another type of water park.
Submissions were made by organizations of all sizes, ranging from small businesses with a few handfuls of employees to large multinationals. Some proposals were small in terms of the amount of land or investment they'd require, while others were for projects rivalling the size of the $500-million spa and waterpark planned by Therme on Ontario Place's west island.
The Trillium and other news outlets have previously reported on about a dozen of the interested organizations.
Three companies that made submissions that hadn't previously been reported on were willing to share more details with The Trillium.
The largest of them, MI Concept + Design's, was for an indoor branded theme park encompassing the west island and the site’s pods and Cinesphere, where it proposed building multiple specialized theatres, show venues, retail spaces and eateries, an E-sports arena, and more.
Meeta Ingram, a founding partner and the chief operating officer of MI Concept + Design, said part of the company’s plan was to partner with Ubisoft to build Assassin’s Creed-themed attractions at Ontario Place. Assassin’s Creed is the best-selling series produced by Ubisoft, one of the world’s top video game makers.
MI Concept + Design, which is based in Toronto, specializes in the type of themed-based attractions it pitched at Ontario Place, with experience contributing to comparable projects built in China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, the United States and more.
While speaking to The Trillium, Ingram explained that MI Concept + Design would still be interested in contributing to the Ontario Place redevelopment, if the opportunity arose. "I feel like it's almost a well-kept hidden secret here that we are a local, Toronto-based creative company who is capable of offering any help — it doesn't matter how small that help is or how big it is," she said.
Spike's Marine Station, from Spike on the Water, was a floating platform-based proposal described in the company's submission as "a big, bold idea all about water and all about Ontario Place."
Shane "Spike" Desloges' company proposed a floating dock platform equipped with a range of water and boating-based amenities built largely within custom shipping containers. One of its main components would have been a drive-in boat wash and detailing dock, which, as Desloges explained, would have relied on eco-friendly maintenance products that he'd learned of when visiting Stockholm, Sweden.
Desloges described himself as "truly caring about ... access to clean water," and promoting "spending quality time on the water with family, friends, (and) just for their own spiritual mental health."
"Getting down to the water is how I created my life," Desloges said. "And it's a joyful life. I'm there every day."
Other components proposed as part of Spike's Marine Station were a cafe, marine stock shop, water lab, viewing deck, and virtual reality centre featuring programming meant "to expose people from all walks of life to the original water protectors: Indigenous communities," as its submission package described it.
Another proposal was pitched as a summer-only attraction and would see "a big floating, inflatable waterpark" brought to Ontario Place, according to Jason Pulchinski, owner of The Lake Distributing Incorporated’s Aguaglide Waterpark. Pulchinski’s business operates similar floating waterparks elsewhere in the province, including at the Kelso Conservation Area this past summer.
He said he doesn’t “begrudge anybody” about At The Lake’s proposal not being chosen. “It didn’t fit into (the government’s) plan. It’s not for everybody. So I get it,” Pulchinski said.
The complete list of submissions to the 2019 call for development for Ontario Place reveals previously unreported proposals were made by multiple established architectural firms, including Fischer & Meyerhans Architects, AAA Architects Inc., and Brook McIlroy.
Others also came from organizations with footprints elsewhere on the waterfront. These include York Bay Marine Services Inc., a Harbourfront Centre operator, Stolport Corporation, which runs a number of services at the Billy Bishop airport, and Otter Guy Water Taxi.
Another was made by the Canadian National Exhibition Association. It runs the CNE — or, “Ex,” as its often called — which is the annual end-of-summer fair and festival at Exhibition Place, the mainland area that Ontario Place connects to.
These companies and organizations, along with the other two handfuls of previously unreported groups shown in the complete list, either hadn't responded to or had declined interview requests by the time this story was published.
Merlin Entertainments was notably not one of the companies that submitted a proposal to the 2019 call for development for Ontario Place.
The Ford government accepted submissions from May 28, 2019 to Sept. 24, 2019, after a three-week deadline extension.
On Sept. 11, 2019, a couple of weeks before the final submission deadline, the then-cabinet minister overseeing the process updated Ford on how the Ontario Place plans were developing with a presentation showing 10 "select team profiles." Therme was first on that list, followed by Merlin Entertainments, which was second. The other eight companies listed all made submissions.
Merlin Entertainments isn't a developer — but rather an operator. Its website says the company's "preferred structure" is "as a tenant, supported by a development contribution from a landlord." It operates several dozen major attractions around the world, including numerous LEGOLANDs, and the iconic London Eye ferris wheel in the U.K.
In one of the more memorable moments from the premier's time on Toronto City Council, he'd for a short time pushed for the redevelopment of a different section of the city's waterfront to include a ferris wheel.
The "select team profiles" shown in the Sept. 11, 2019 presentation made to Ford "were presented for informational purposes only ... (and) do not represent any ranking or evaluation whatsoever, as the call for development process was still ongoing," a spokesperson for Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma wrote in an email to The Trillium a year ago.
In response to questions sent last week about the 34 submissions to the 2019 call for development, Surma declined to comment on the list. Spokesperson Ash Milton said as a result of the official Opposition leader's recent Ontario Place-focused request to the integrity commissioner, "Minister Kinga Surma has been asked not to comment and will respect the process at this time."
Therme Canada's spokesperson said the company hadn't seen the full list of submissions before The Trillium shared it as part of its request for comment from the company. “We note this was a rigorous RFP process and we are proud to have been chosen to participate in the government's revitalization of Ontario Place,” wrote Simon Bredin, Therme Canada's spokesperson, in an email.
Meanwhile, Norm Di Pasquale, co-chair of Ontario Place For All — an advocacy group that’s fought Therme’s selection over the last few years — said, “this list demonstrates how the Ford government lost the plot with Ontario Place.”
“With so many made-in-Ontario ideas, as well as Indigenous-led projects, there was an opportunity to reflect and celebrate Ontario,” Di Pasquale added. “Instead, the Ford government chose an Austrian mega-spa.”
(Re-) Building Ontario (Place)
The outline of the 2019 call for development that the government published in spring 2019 specified that its "preference is for submissions that are comprehensively planned and utilize the entire site."
By midway into summer of 2019, government officials were discussing match-making proposals of those that didn't comprise all of Ontario Place.
"As part of our proposal, we advised (the) government that we would be pleased to collaborate with other developers the province may select, to ensure that the interconnections between the islands and the mainland are appropriate and sensitive to other needs," Bredin, spokesperson for Therme Canada, said in an email on Monday.
On Jan. 20, 2020, four months after the government’s call-for-development deadline, the government was considering a “multi-partner approach” including a “waterpark attraction” on the west island, like what Therme had proposed, an internal document that the NDP released shows.
In May 2020, government decision-makers approved their initial Ontario Place redevelopment plan, including multiple partner companies.
At a news conference at Ontario Place on July 30, 2021, Ford and others announced Therme would be its main redevelopment partner for the site, with Montreal-based Ecorecreo Group — another of the 34 proponents also listed among the 10 "select team profiles" early in the process — also selected to build an "all-season adventure park," while Budweiser Stage leaseholder and operator Live Nation would upgrade the amphitheatre to become a year-round venue.
In April 2022, the provincial government approved the terms of the up to 95-year lease it negotiated with Therme. The agreement will allow Therme to build its spa and water park and require the company to rebuild, and maintain, publicly accessible park space on the west island.
Ecorecreo Group and the province couldn't agree to a long-term lease of their own, removing the company from the redevelopment.
Since the early goings of its Ontario Place planning, the Ford government has also been exploring the potential role of the Ontario Science Centre. Originally, in summer 2021, it announced the science centre would "explore opportunities to have science-related tourism and educational programming at the Cinesphere and pod complex." Those plans drastically escalated by early 2023, with the government announcing in April that it would be moving the science centre entirely to a facility that'd be newly built at Ontario Place.
The Ford government's Ontario Place redevelopment plan and its decision to close the existing Ontario Science Centre and relocate it have been recurring controversies at Queen's Park over the last couple of years.
Ontario’s auditor general is working on a report on the government's Ontario Place plans and is expected to release it within the next several weeks.
NDP Leader Marit Stiles also asked the integrity commissioner in mid-October to investigate whether Therme was given "preferential treatment" by the government. The commissioner's office hasn't decided yet whether it will or not.
Asked on Monday about the complete list of submissions to the 2019 call for development, Stiles said she'd like the government to explain if "any of those other 33 companies receive the same benefit and offer and terms that Therme did — and, if not, why not?"
For its part, Therme Canada remains "focused on delivering our destination family-friendly attraction and creating nearly 16 acres of free public park space," its spokesperson said.
