Corporations occupy Sugar Beach and lock you out

You paid $14 million for that popular facility and your Parks Department locks you out so corporations can party in your place

By Frank Touby –

Fencing keeps the public away from most of the Sugar Beach sand and the drinking fountains so corporate guests can party.

While you’re fenced out of the park you paid for, guests of a corporation eat, drink and are merry.

You thought it was your beach, didn’t you? That surprisingly successful highly creative beach at the foot of Jarvis St. opposite the Redpath Sugar refinery was constructed with $14 million of public money and the city’s Parks Department is renting it out to corporations.

What had been widely criticized as a ludicrous concept has become a much-used venue for Downtowners to luxuriate in the sand and beneath the umbrellas, perhaps pretending for a moment they’re at a real beach.

Mothers and their kids are frequent users and when the sun is shining it’s a much-visited amenity. At night, too, when the weather is mild, the chairs and sand are occupied by the public.

But not on Tuesday, Aug. 28, among too many other days. The city Parks Department, that can’t keep up with the work it needs to do at many parks, has turned Sugar Beach over to corporations for functions and locked its citizens out. They did have an area where they could sit in the sand, but they were locked out of the water fountain.

Among other Downtowners, I stood at the fence designed to keep interlopers among the public from mingling with the invitees of a corporation on whose behalf the Parks Department locked us out. I took out my camera and snapped some shots when, on the other side of the fence, a security guard told me I couldn’t do that. I’m invading their privacy, he said.

“There is no presumption of privacy in a public park,” I responded as I continued snapping, by then more for emphasis than for publication.

These outrages have been going on all summer where the Parks Department converts our park to private uses. Councillor Pam McConnell’s office doesn’t seem alarmed enough about such intrusions and needs more emphasis from you if you agree that it’s wrong to rent public facilities for corporate uses that lock the public out of its own facilities.

If you do think that should stop, that private events must not take place in our public park, please email Pam here and tell her so.

If you disagree with me, please email me here and tell me so.