Toronto Waterfront destined for Palookaville

This week, one of the most famous speeches in movie history has been running through my head: Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, summing up how he saw his own potential as a professional boxer squandered throwing fights in the service of his brother’s mob connections. “So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville!” he says. “You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money ... I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.”

As you probably know, that’s from On the Waterfront. So maybe you’ll find it a little on the nose that it has been popping into my head reading stories about what appears to be manoeuvring around Toronto’s waterfront. But with every drib and drab of news, there it is: the fear that Premier Doug Ford is plotting to sell us out for the short-end money, one piece of the waterfront at a time, so that instead of a shot at class — instead of building up great new parts of the city that in some cases have been in the works for decades — we’re going to wind up with Palookaville on the lake.

Start with the rumblings that the province may be considering putting a casino on the Ontario Place site — possibly merging it somehow with Exhibition Place for some massive gambling and entertainment complex. At this point, still rumours with no confirmed plans but, pointedly, not rumours that the minister responsible is willing to deny as a possibility.

Combine it with a freeze of all work on the plan to renovate and rebuild the space as parkland that had been underway under the old government (a plan created, incidentally, by John Tory before he became mayor).

Follow that up with a provincial budget that formally dissolves the Ontario Place board and puts the whole place directly under provincial ministerial control, and it appears something is coming.

What kind of something? In August,

Ford promised to “make it the most spectacular destination anywhere in North America to visit.” Hmmm. That sounds kind of familiar to me. Where do I recall him saying something like that before?

Oh, perhaps it was a plan Ford unveiled for us in 2011 when he was a city councillor and his brother was the mayor. “It is spectacular, just spectacular,” he said then, outlining his ideas for the waterfront.

A lot of people remember that plan to hijack Toronto’s Port Lands redevelopment from Waterfront Toronto — famously, the first crushing failure of the Rob Ford mayoral administration. When we think of it, we recall the giant Ferris wheel and the boat-up restaurants and hotels and the megamall and the monorail.

What we may not recall as clearly is the breadth of Ford’s monorail-linked map, cooked up he said with the enthusi- astic participation of developers he’d pitched it to. That route began at Ontario Place. It continued to the Port Lands, where he envisioned selling off 170 acres of Toronto’s property to developers, who would get a megamall and hotels built quick. And then it would continue to ... the old Hearn generating station, where he envisioned a sports and entertainment retail complex.

That’s the same Hearn generating station we recently learned the provincially owned Ontario Power Generation had abruptly sold for the sweetheart price of $16 million. As my colleagues on the editorial board have pointed out, there are condos in Toronto listed for more than this 16-hectare lakefront lot with an landmark building on it is being sold for. As if to ratchet up levels of suspicion, the sale is to Studios of America, which is owned in part by real estate developer Mario Cortellucci, a Ford supporter and campaign donor.

We are told the provincial government and Ford’s office had nothing to do with this sale. But it is interesting that the mayor’s office was neither consulted nor informed about the sale before it was announced, and Tory has had some harsh words about the “cloudy” circumstances of the deal.

We dodged Palookaville in 2011, but it sure looks like oneof-a-kind sites on the waterfront, sites that could make our lake a real contender — the focus of long-term city-building plans — are now in danger of being sold off for quick cash. Hearn. Maybe Ontario Place. And, I fear, elsewhere on the waterfront.

The province is partners with the federal government and the city in Waterfront Toronto, which has developed a longterm plan for the redevelopment of the massive Port Lands site. The largest and most important project in making that redevelopment happen is the renaturalization of the mouth of the Don River, a project that will provide flood protection for the whole area, and facilitate the necessary environmental cleanup that will allow residential and commercial redevelopment to begin.

On Wednesday, a press event was held to formally kick off that work. The mayor was there, as were representatives of the federal government. The provincial minister of infrastructure, Monte McNaughton, was scheduled to be there on behalf of Ford’s government. He was a no-show.

We can only hope it’s not because he was making other plans. Or because his boss already has some.