LEASE LIMBO
Media arts centre has been locked in a fight with city over condo space since 2015,
A judge ruled against the City of Toronto’s efforts to block a media arts organization from occupying space in a condo building Wednesday, granting an injunction to Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC). The two parties will go to court on Jan. 17. TMAC had submitted the motion in hopes of eventually securing an interim lease within the condo near Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd.
Since 2015, the centre has been locked in a fight with the city over its plan to buy the 36,000-square-foot facility, an action that’s been repeatedly refused by the city, despite the planning department’s Section 37 provision. Section 37 enables the city to negotiate contributions toward local community benefits when a development requires a zoning bylaw amendment.
The group then sued the city, along with Urbancorp, a large-scale condominium developer that has gone bankrupt, citing a breach of contract.
The four organizations that comprise the centre are now either homeless or soon to be, TMAC president Henry Faber said.
“We filed a notice for this injunction,” Faber said. “The city’s response was not to that motion. It was to get the whole lawsuit dismissed — same as their defence from 2015.”
This was blocked by the judge, he said.
In an affidavit, the city says the group’s current iteration is different than the one it initially made the agreement with.
“Since the city first engaged with TMAC, six of the eight organizations have resigned from TMAC, and two more have joined it and its Board of Directors (without the city’s consent, which the city asserts is required),” the affidavit says.
TMAC has gone through several membership changes since it first formed in 2003. Anchored in recent years by the Images Festival, it has included venerable artist-run cen- tres like Gallery TPW and InterAccess. None of them remain part of the not-for-profit consortium, which now includes Charles Street Video, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Gamma Space and Dames Making Games.
Sally Han, manager of cultural partnerships with the city, says in an affidavit that the arts centre is incapable of raising adequate funds.
“According to the Canada Revenue Agency, TMAC has not raised a single dollar in receiptable charitable donations since reporting as a charity in 2014,” she says.
But Faber says the centre has invested heavily in the facility.
“It is a space that TMAC has put over $800,000 of arts funding into, spent designing, designing the theatre, the galleries,” he said. “The engraved plates on the elevators say ‘TMAC’ on them. From our perspective, it’s unquestionable who this was intended for.”
First hatched in 2011 as a partnership between TMAC and Urbancorp, the facility was hailed as an emblem of the right-minded evolution of the city’s controversial Section 37 development provision.
The provision had been used for years by developers to gain their projects additional height in exchange for a “community benefit” — most often, public art or a parkette. The TMAC space was conceived as a remedy to both the rampant gentrification of the area and the displacement of its cultural community. With files from Murray Whyte