This week, Doug Ford’s government struck a deal with the City of Toronto giving the province fuller control over the future of Ontario Place, in exchange for the province taking on responsibility for the DVP and Gardiner Expressway, as well as additional funding for transit and addressing homelessness.
In the wake of this agreement, Infrastructure Ontario has released its business case for a major, and controversial, component of their Ontario Place plans: the closure of the existing Raymond Moriyama-designed 1969 Ontario Science Centre, and its relocation to a smaller, new-build facility at Ontario Place.
The 78-page document, accompanied by a 333-page appendix, argues that the Ontario Science Centre will require $369 million in deferred and critical maintenance over the next 20 years, and an additional $109 million to upgrade its exhibitions and public spaces, for a total cost of $478 million. In comparison, it says that the cost to build a new science centre at Ontario Place would be $322 million, plus $64 million for its exhibitions, for a total of $384 million—$94 million less.
It also argues that cost savings would be achieved through lower ongoing maintenance costs for the new building, and would be strongly offset through the larger attendance and new sponsorship opportunities that a new downtown facility might command. Overall, according to the report, the provincial government would save $596 million in nominal costs ($257 million net present value) over a 50-year period by relocating the science centre.
Scratch below the surface, though, and there’s some clear problems with the province’s math.
As the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic Alex Bozikovic writes, the new Science Centre is proposed to sit on top of a 2,000-space underground parking garage, which, if built, will cost about half a billion dollars. If the parking moves to a different location, as Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Premier Doug Ford suggested earlier this week, the Science Centre will need to build its own basement and foundations—at a cost of perhaps some hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other side of the equation, points out Bozikovic, the Science Centre’s required repairs result from the government choosing not to invest in the building over many years. Someone will need to pay for those repairs eventually, should the building continue to be used, either as a cultural building or for another purpose. “If it survives, the province is saving money by dumping perhaps $300 million in liabilities on the city. It’s a shell game, nothing more,” he writes.
Even taken purely at face value, there are problems with the two figures.
The cost of building a new science centre, which the report pegs at $384 million, disregards pricing put forward by its own consultants. It doesn’t include quantity surveyor A.W. Hooker’s allowances for soft costs and a construction contingency—including consultant fees, project management fees, independent inspection and testing, third party commissioning, legal fees, development and permit charges, client FFE, and the cost of change orders made post-tender—which amount to an estimated additional $100 million. A.W. Hooker’s overall estimate for the project is $499,200,000. And that’s for a building whose program relies on 2,750 square metres of underground functional space—a full floor—but whose price tag does not include that floor, nor any type of parking, basement, or foundations.
Because no below-ground work is included, the price tag also excludes the cost for a 150-metre-long underground, 2-level link between the new Science Pavilion on the mainland and the bridge to the pods—an enormously expensive component of the project due to its proximity to the waterfront, and an essential element for allowing ticketed visitors to move from the main science pavilion to the Pods and Cinesphere.
The $499-million price tag also excludes exhibitions from the majority of the pods [“OSC has opted to not program three of the pods on opening day, therefore remove $16.8M from the previous allowance”]. It doesn’t include most of the renovations to the heritage pods, including the $25.5 million currently being spent on recladding those structures. It assumes that there will be no phased work, no accelerated construction schedule, and no work completed during the winter, after hours, or on weekends—all of which command premiums.
Diving into the $369 million repair bill for the existing Ontario Science Centre, on the other hand, it seems that the number is significantly inflated. Environmental consultants Pinchin pegged the cost at $228,604,000. This is already a generous number: the consultants note that an “adjustment factor” of 1.85 was “applied to all repair and replacement costs” due to the “fact that Ontario Science Centre is a complex facility with unique characteristics” and “per Client’s [IO’s] request to account for the hidden internal and external fees.” Without this adjustment factor, the cost of repairs would be around $142 million.
To reach the estimated costs for its business case, Pinchin was asked to apply a projected inflation rate of 2.5% over the work phases as they extended over 20 years, to reach a grand total of $263,322,619. IO then applied a mark-up of a whopping 40% to Pinchin’s $263 million bill “to account for uncertain and rapidly increasing cost pressures.” (There is a similar contingency for cost escalation and market volatility in the estimate for relocating the Science Centre—but it amounts to 32.8%, and is applied to the base construction cost of $153,830,000 for that project, not to a total estimate that was already nearly doubled to account for unanticipated extra fees and inflation. Applying the same logic to the repairs for the science centre would result in a cost escalation contingency of $46.6 million—not the $141 million that the business case adds to the estimate.)
For the sake of simplicity, a somewhat more accurate high-level comparison might be to just put the two consultant estimates, in full, side-by-side: $499 million for a new science centre and partial exhibitions, to which should be added the cost of a basement level, foundations, and the underground link—versus $328 million to repair the existing Science Centre, including giving its exhibitions and public spaces a generous $100-million refresh.
From a sustainability perspective, one might also consider the massive carbon cost of building an underground, multi-level concrete parking garage and underground link next to a lake—as opposed to renovating an existing building whose embodied carbon has already been locked into place.
There’s also a human cost to the math. The government’s case for relocating the Ontario Science Centre is strongly based on the efficiencies of a smaller facility, but also on its ability, paradoxically, to attract more visitors. It estimates that 1.15 million people will visit the relocated science centre in its first years. It also expects to accrue cost savings through staffing reductions: the estimates count on laying off 53 people, or one out of every six people who currently work at the Science Centre.
In short, they are expecting that 50% more people will visit a facility that is 45% of the size of the current Science Centre, with a significantly reduced staff managing it all.
There’s a few more salient details. On the side of retaining the existing building, the case assumes that the opening of the Eglinton LRT and eventually the Ontario Line, the densification of the area with condo towers, and the investment of over $100 million in exhibitions and public spaces in the building will result in precisely no increase in the visitors to the Science Centre in its existing location. The vaunted savings from maintaining a smaller science centre evaporate—and are in fact reversed—when you remove the “adjustment factor” of 1.3 that IO instructed its consultants to apply to the replacement value of the existing building, which carries forward in maintenance costs that are inflated by 30%.
Of course, it’s not surprising that the business case contorts itself an attempt to justify the relocation. As the document states, it was prepared “in response to the December 2021 direction to identify order of magnitude costing and capital requirements associated with relocating the OSC to the Ontario Place site and subsequent April 2022 direction to seek Stage Two (construction) approval for the project.” In other words, the provincial government had already determined, more than two years before any public announcement, that it was determined to relocate the Ontario Science Centre to Ontario Place. The business case was specifically constructed to justify this decision.
Whole sections of the business case are dedicated to another subject: the value of the current Ontario Science Centre lands, if redeveloped—a proposition in which the provincial government anticipates sharing profits with the City. There is a real hodge podge of ideas here, from repurposing the Valley building as a cultural facility to revamping it as a long-term care facility. Interestingly, there is no equivalent analysis of what the value of the waterfront-adjacent lands at Ontario Place would be worth if the Ontario Science Centre does not relocate there.
The horse may be out of the barn for building Therme’s facility at Ontario Place, but there is still an imperative to change course on the government’s idea of shuttering and relocating the Ontario Science Centre to the waterfront site. While we may take it for granted, there is value in taking care of what we have: a magnificent, much-loved museum at the Ontario Science Centre that is in need of some TLC. The value of such a gem isn’t something we usually quantify, but if we did—in a neutral way that accounted for cultural value, economic value, social value, and sustainability—it’s clear how the business case would land.