Olivia Chow says province needs to fix shuttered Science Centre

The province needs to fund repairs to the Ontario Science Centre building that it suddenly shuttered last week and come to the table for promised talks about its future, Toronto’s mayor says.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Olivia Chow ruled out a city takeover of the repair bill for the Flemingdon Park site, which the Ontario government abruptly closed on Friday, citing an engineering report that says parts of its roof could collapse under a heavy snowfall this winter.

“We don’t have the money to fix the Science Centre. Absolutely not. We don’t even have enough money to fix City Hall,” Ms. Chow said Monday, adding that recent rains had caused the roof over her office to leak.

Despite Ontario’s surprise announcement, the mayor said talks between city and provincial officials on future “science-based programming” for the site, which were promised in her city’s “new deal” with Premier Doug Ford last November, have yet to take place.

Ms. Chow, who acknowledged the commitment in the deal was “fairly vague,” urged the province to come to the table for the promised talks soon. The mayor also said she did not believe the province would simply walk away from the aging building, which sits on land leased from the city and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

Meanwhile, Toronto City Council is set this week to debate a motion from councillor and former mayoral candidate Josh Matlow that calls for city bureaucrats to study the numbers and lay out options for the Flemgingdon Park site’s future.

A timeline of events in the Ontario Science Centre closure, announced Friday

The scenarios could include a city-operated “Toronto Science Centre” – although Ms. Chow says she would rule this out unless it was totally funded by the province – or another kind of institution that could inhabit the building.

The site’s surprise shutdown on Friday sparked outrage from local activists who have been campaigning to save the distinctive 55-year-old Science Centre, designed by architect Raymond Moriyama. Critics also say the Flemingdon Park area, home to many low-income immigrant families, will be harmed by the departure of the Science Centre.

The Premier had already announced plans last year to relocate the institution to a new, smaller building at the province’s waterfront Ontario Place site. His government’s other plans for the site – a long-term lease for Vienna-based Therme Group to build a large spa and waterpark and a taxpayer-subsidized 2,100-car parking garage – have also faced vocal opposition.

The province’s relocation plan was predicated on a business case that suggested moving to a new building would save the Science Centre money over the next 50 years. But an Auditor-General’s report says the calculations had not included a range of extra costs, including hundreds of millions of dollars for the parking garage. The business case also did not contemplate the costs of restoring the existing building.

Provincial government reports have laid out a long list of repairs needed at the existing Science Centre, a bill the province pegged last week at more than $450-million. The roof alone, the head of the government’s Infrastructure Ontario agency said last week, could cost $40-million and require a two-to-five-year shutdown. Shutting it now would allow staff to move exhibits safely over the next several months, before any threat of snow, the government said.

Bozikovic: Shameless spin aside, closing the Ontario Science Centre is a choice

But critics point to other numbers in the recent engineering report that suggest that the emergency roof repairs needed to keep the site open in the short term could cost as little as $500,000. Only a small percentage of concrete roof panels, most away from key areas, were labelled as high risk and a total shutdown was not the only course of action that engineers had included as an option in their report.

Both Ms. Chow and Mr. Matlow pointed to other sources of potential funding, such as former executives with Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify, who have posted on social media saying they would put up the $500,000 cost to keep the Science Centre open for now.

Sabina Vohra-Miller, who, with husband Craig Miller, a former Shopify executive, has established a charitable foundation, said she has already heard from other philanthropists and could easily raise that amount to keep the Science Centre open for summer.

She said she felt strongly about the need for science education and had just visited the centre with her seven-year-old.

“This is something that is deeply personal to us,” Ms. Vohra-Miller said in an interview, adding that she hoped to speak to Mr. Ford about it personally. “If they choose not to do it, we’ll stand up and do it.”

Earlier on Monday, Kinga Surma, Mr. Ford’s Infrastructure Minister, and defended the shutdown at an unrelated event in Toronto.

“There’s lots of structural issues with the building,” she said. “It was my hope that we could keep the building alive until the new Science Centre was built. But unfortunately we have to take the warning signs of engineers very seriously.”