Candidates running to be Toronto’s mayor want to spend more on the city’s heritage but not on a Toronto Museum to showcase it.

The museum, with former mayor David Crombie’s assistance, is being planned for Old City Hall after 2016, when the building may no longer be needed for courts.“We cannot afford it, period,” Rob Ford told an overflowing crowd of heritage advocates Monday, Aug. 30, at St. Lawrence Hall.

It’s a good concept, but not practical when the city’s “grinding to a halt” for lack of funds, said George Smitherman, who also criticized plans for a smaller TTC museum in York Mills.

Sarah Thomson, another mayoral contender who spoke in the historic gas-lit room, said it would be better to spread money for the museum out in grants to heritage building owners.

Rocco Rossi didn’t answer the question, and Rocco Achampong, another candidate for mayor, supported the museum but also others in places such as North York, so that, he said, everybody does not have to go downtown to learn their history.

But Joe Pantalone offered unqualified support, saying the museum project is not a waste of money but an investment that will bring tourists to hear Toronto’s “amazing story.”

The city agency, Heritage Toronto, and the Toronto Historical Association, which support building a city museum, hosted the debate to draw attention to heritage as an “under-resourced” part of Toronto and to the fact heritage properties are being lost.

“If you don’t understand the history of your city, it’s kind of hard to figure out where to take it,” said moderator Paul Bedford, a former Toronto chief planner.

Ford pledged to “to do everything in our power” to preserve the city’s heritage buildings and suggested Heritage Toronto should get more money and staff, both reassigned from elsewhere at city hall.

“You’re not going to get more money if we bring another million people into this city,” warned the Etobicoke councillor, who has said the city cannot afford to handle any population increase.

Smitherman, a former MPP, released a heritage policy platform Monday with tax breaks to encourage heritage shopping districts, a wider definition of heritage to include the city’s natural features and an “early-warning system” to crack down on those who own but neglect heritage properties.

He added both community engagement and detailed secondary planning is needed to complete the city’s heritage inventory and protect it.

Rossi said preserving heritage is not just “do-goodism” but good economics, because it gives character to a city.

“We’ve basically been starving it,” he said, promising to “de-couple” heritage from other concerns at city hall.

It makes no sense that heritage tax rebates don’t require owners to re-invest in their buildings, Rossi said, arguing they should “earn” a rebate or not get it.

Thomson, a publisher who said her hobby is restoring old homes, promised heritage concerns would not lack funding under her administration. She said she wants homes and other buildings constructed before 1920 “put in zoning that really protects them.”

Achampong, a lawyer who noted the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was one of the first to speak in the room when the hall was finished in 1851, blamed Ford and Pantalone – a councillor for almost three decades – for awarding Heritage Toronto only $330,000 a year.

“That’s why they need to go,” he said. “You are not a priority (at city hall).”

Pantalone admitted Toronto has a “checkered” record on heritage. The Guild Inn park in Scarborough, scattered with architectural relics from demolished downtown edifices, is like a “cemetery of remembrance of buildings that used to be,” he said.

“Demolition by neglect” occurs because the province hasn’t given the city power to enforce standards on vacant buildings, added Pantalone, who said he fought as a Canadian National Exhibition board member to restore the Music Building and other structures there.

Some came to the event with particular heritage concerns, including the Church and Welleslley Residents’ Association, newly formed to protect listed heritage houses at Church and Gloucester streets members say are threatened by a proposed condominium project.

A founder of the group, Brian Elder, said residents fear being “left in the dark” about the condo plans until after this fall’s municipal election.

- Mike Adler

Posted in Mayoral race, News