Journey to the Centre of the Science

January 17, 2024·35 min·3 clips

Fixing the Science Centre costs $5 million a year but Ontario is spending $4 billion on Volkswagen subsidies.

The Science Center comes across as a place people actually used. The host begins with the oddly grown up letdown of sound baffling, where a childhood thrill turns into a small joke about aging, podcast booths, and a building wearing down. Then the attendance figures show up. Before the pandemic, annual visits were around a million or a little below in 2015, 2016, and 2017, before dropping to 884,000 just before the pandemic. So yes, the decline was real. But demand had not disappeared. Family Day and March Break numbers were apparently rising again, and parents still needed somewhere useful to take their kids. That is where the policy argument starts to feel less tidy. Infrastructure Ontario's business case, released at the end of November, describes the existing building as basically at the end of its life. Michael Lindsay gives the official version. The excerpt complicates it, though, because timely repairs could have extended the site, while maintenance kept falling behind other priorities. The blame does not land in only one place. The PCs and the Liberals both come up as periods when Science Center upkeep slid down Infrastructure Ontario's list. Then the savings claim gets its air let out. The big $250 million figure over 25 years becomes, in the host's dry read, $5 million a year. Once the number is put that way, the Ontario Place move sounds less like a budget emergency and more like a choice looking for budget language. The stroller detail helps. The childless-adult aside gives the whole thing a human scale, swapping visitor charts for the physical reality of families using the place. The ending also cleans up the record. Some things that sounded closed should reopen, and the planetarium may come back temporarily, so the episode does not turn inconvenience into the entire story.

As heard by us

A skeptical, accessible look at why the Ontario Science Centre closure is about more than an aging building.

Wag the Doug treats the Ontario Science Centre closure as a fight over public priorities, with nostalgia kept mostly in check. The hosts move from the practical reality of the place, crowded with families and strollers, to Infrastructure Ontario's case for shutting the building…

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Why you'd press play

You want the Ontario Science Centre shutdown rationale without the government brochure version.

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