Toronto cancels spring recreation programs amid COVID-19 crisis

Thestar.com
April 6, 2020
David Rider

As the COVID-19 crisis ravages its finances, the City of Toronto is cancelling spring recreations, arts and museum programs -- a blow to families and 5,400 part-time city staff who won’t be hired.

Mayor John Tory told the Star in an interview Friday that he feels terrible for the people, many of them students, who were relying on those jobs, and the families losing the activities, but the city -- losing $65 million a week -- had no choice.

Physical distancing recommendations from the city’s public health officials and the city’s weakened finances made proceeding with the programs impossible, the mayor said.

Cancelled are 17,700 programs with more than 101,000 registered participants, not including drop-in clients.

Programming after June, including summer camps, have not been cancelled. Tory said he hopes all summer programs proceed, but it will depend on advice from public health.

“The real tragedy is a number of people who expected to have those jobs and they won’t now because we are obviously in no position to offer the program,” Tory said of the spring cancellations.

Sign-up happened in early March. Participants will get full refunds.

City finances “started off strong but are suffering erosion every day. I’m sorry about this. It’s a temporary measure and hopefully the sooner this gets over the sooner we can get on with these programs and hire these people, but until then we can’t ...

“Sixty five million dollars is like two points of property tax for the whole year (added) every week. The TTC losing $20 million a week -- if you spread that over months you’re looking at hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“My heart goes out to the families and the kids and the communities, but we had no choice here -- just no choice,” he said.

Dave Mitchell, president of CUPE Local 79, said most of the seasonal staff were supposed to start work next week.

“We hope to sit down with City management and find other areas of work for these employees, as we know extra support is needed in other City divisions dealing with the COVID-19 response.

“In cases where such opportunities can’t be found, we will work with our members to access available financial supports until they can get back to delivering the community-building recreation programs that Toronto’s neighbourhoods cherish.”

The city has established a working group focused on stabilizing and rebuilding city finances.

The city “is continuing to evaluate its workforce requirements and service levels,” according to a news release.

Asked if that means potential layoffs, Tory said the city is focusing on redeploying people to areas that now need extra staff, including public health child care.

Tory said he has started talking to the Ontario and federal governments about help for the country’s biggest city. That could mean in the form of regulatory relief -- for example, allowing the city to run a deficit to fund operations -- or direct economic aid, or both, the mayor said.

Also announced Friday -- Torontonians in parks and public squares who get within two metres of others not in their household -- a social distancing bylaw enacted by Tory on Thursday -- risk being handed a $1,000 ticket.

Officers could, for especially risky behaviour, issue tickets subject to court proceedings where fines can reach $5,000. As of Friday police and city staff had issued 21 tickets for breach of social-distancing rules including use of closed park amenities.