Ontario Place

 

From the CBC

Ontario Premier Doug Ford today held a press conference at Toronto’s Ontario Place to announce plans to rejuvenate the park. This was, to my mind, very good news. Ontario Place had somehow been allowed to fall into disrepair, and in the last few years had become only another nature park. I feared it would remain no more than this.

Nature is a grand thing, no doubt. But Ontario, with almost 90% of its land area undeveloped, is not short of nature. Toronto is not short of green space.

Another rumour was that the site was going to be turned into a casino, or condominiums. Good for government revenue, and Toronto needs housing, but not very exciting.

I am happier to see it continue as it previously was, a family destination; originally it was like a miniature compensation for Montreal, and not Toronto, hosting Expo 67. We need places close to the city where the urban poor can take their kids to get away from it all. We need places where we can meet and form shared memories. there is a kind of urban heritage to be preserved here. Too many people have too many fond memories of Ontario Place from childhood to let it go. That would be painful in the way Montrealers lament the loss of Belmont Park, or Torontonians Sunnyside, or New Yorkers the Brooklyn Dodgers.

We also needed something cheering like this to bring us out of the pandemic doldrums, and to help the tourist trade recover. We need at least the promise of a party.

But one thing about the announcement was both troubling and absurd. It began with a sort of bland sermon by the chief of the Mississagua Indians, whose reserve is near Brantford. Each speaker in turn then began by acknowledging that “this ceremony takes place on the traditional lands of the Mississauga.” The chief spoke again to conclude the function.

In short, this guy, who represents two thousand people in another part of Ontario, was being treated as the feudal lord of the land.

In fact, Ontario Place was never in a literal sense part of the lands of the Mississagua Indians. It is an artificial island, built from the lakebed in the early 1970s. 

But even if it were not, why this special treatment? Like the Indians throughout most of Canada, the Mississagua unambiguously renounced any claim to the lands on which Toronto was built in return for compensation some years ago. Is it sensible to forever commemorate this? What about commemorating the French, and the British, who also once made some claim to this land?

Because, you may argue, the Mississagua, unlike the French, or the British, were aboriginal here.

They were not—literally, no more than were the French. The French moved into the area from their base in Montreal in the Seventeenth Century. So did the Mississagua, coming from their previous lands north of lakes Huron and Superior after the Iroquois had pretty much wiped out the Huron and other Iroquioan tribes living around the lower Great Lakes. Thanks to firearms they got from the Dutch.

Canadians seem to be aggressively adopting an official class system and a ruling class; for no comprehensible reason.