Opinion | Doug Ford’s party built the Ontario Science Centre. That makes his plan to demolish it even more puzzling

I grew up in Windsor and thought Ontario was flat. Dead flat and boring. No hills or valleys, none of the wildly dramatic and varied landscape other parts of Canada had. I’ve come to appreciate and love the southwest Ontario flatlands since, but I was a jealous kid. Then I went to the Ontario Science Centre and it changed the way I thought about this province.

It seemed like we travelled to another place very far away — the building a futuristic, brutalist mothership, a place from a sci-fi film. It’s been many decades since that first trip but I still remember crossing the internal bridge and going down the escalators that followed the contours of the Don Valley. With many windows looking out at the wild-seeming ravine, inside felt outdoors. The science exhibits were an additional experience from the place itself.

With the announcement this week that the Ford government wants to move the Science Centre to Ontario Place and the building torn down, many people are sharing these kinds of memories. It’s easy to dismiss this as childhood nostalgia, but the Science Centre is a profoundly unique architectural and topographical experience, connecting city, landscape and province. There’s nothing like it, anywhere, yet it might be trashed.

What I am deeply nostalgic for is an Ontario Progressive Conservative party that could come up with good new ideas rather than tearing existing things down. Oh, where have you gone, William G. Davis? A province turns its lonely eyes to you. Woo, woo, woo.

Ah, there were once Conservative premiers who wanted to build an Ontario to be proud of. It’s ironic that both Ontario Place and the Science Centre were created under another Conservative premier, John Robarts, and preceding him, Leslie Frost also had his own province-building legacy. This mid- to late-century lot all had fresh, new ideas and were committed to creating the modern Ontario we know today.

Another inexplicable irony here is Doug Ford and his brother Rob made their political careers on suburban grievance. They railed against downtown elites and caterwauled for years that the suburbs were left out, disrespected and didn’t get enough stuff. Now here’s Doug Ford removing an awfully big and important chunk of stuff from the suburbs and putting it downtown. It’s incoherent and perplexing.

The Science Centre is also a huge building, and moving it to Ontario Place will require building vast new structures. Those costs haven’t been released, but it makes the government’s claim that the building is too expensive to repair as weak an argument as when they say nobody visits Ontario Place today. Go see for yourself.

Apart from the insincerity of Ford’s grievance politics, moving the Science Centre is a terrible idea because it’s been part of Flemingdon Park and Don Mills for more than half a century, communities that deserve cultural attractions as much as any other. Indeed, this area of Toronto is a cultural hub, and could be even greater.

Down the street from the Science Center is the Aga Khan Museum and the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. Also nearby is the original Japanese Cultural Centre, the first major project by Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama. It, like Moriyama’s Science Centre, is currently at risk of destruction but could be something special again.

Sometimes the phrase “heritage landscape” is thrown around too loosely, but this part of Toronto is just that. Moriyama’s Science Centre was even a 1967 centennial project, though it opened two years later. Soon this will all have big-time transit connections when the Eglinton Crosstown opens.

Further underscoring the absurdity of this slapdash plan is that the Ford government now says it will rename the already-built and signed “Science Centre” station. It will also be a stop on the Ontario Line, the subway that, for now, government websites tout as connecting the Ontario Science Centre with Ontario Place. It’s the “Ontario Line,” get it?

The province says it will build housing on the Science Centre site, but in Toronto we haven’t built housing in ravines since Hurricane Hazel, though knowing Ford’s penchant for upending long-held norms and rules, it could happen. More likely the housing will be up top where a sea of parking lots is now. The Science Centre doesn’t have to move to build housing, they can coexist happily: the parking can go underground and an even better connection to the transit station established.

Across the street a massive residential and commercial complex at the former IBM/Celestica campus on the northwest corner of Eglinton and Don Mills is under construction. The northeast corner is currently parking lots and a big-box Supercentre, exactly the kind of place appropriate for something like a big indoor European spa, unlike Ontario Place. More irony.

Both the Science Centre and Ontario Place have become flashpoints at either end of their namesake transit line. Both have been poorly treated by provincial governments, allowing their unique heritage architecture to degrade, only to be “saved” by awful, destructive plans.

Too bad the old Conservatives aren’t around to stop it.

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