The “revitalization” of Ontario Place — specifically, the Therme megaspa that serves as the project’s cornerstone — has become a blight on Toronto’s waterfront, leaving passersby both devastated and enraged to see a public green space and mature habitat reduced to dust overnight despite ample resistance.
Alarming revelations about the site’s enormous future parking garage, plans to extend the development over the lake, the lack of environmental assessments involved, and more have emerged in the years since the overhaul of the 155-acre property was first announced.
But the latest update, which comes via a damning New York Times investigation published on Wednesday, may be the most scandalous yet.
While most would agree that the long-defunct amusement park could have benefited from an overhaul, NYT — which is already very familiar with the Ontario Place saga — elucidates why Therme was, as many community members already feel, a particularly poor choice for a partner to reach this goal.
Aside from the obvious angst surrounding private entity taking over a public space (parts of which residents will now have to pay to access), Reporters Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Rebecca R. Ruiz also assert that Therme thoroughly “misrepresented itself, misleading the Ontario government and exaggerating its experience in its bid to secure the Toronto deal.”
While billing itself as at the helm of multiple bougie wellness facilities elsewhere in the world, Therme actually only had one spa to its name, and some $1.1 million in equity at the time the Ontario Place deal was struck, operating with what the writers call “shaky” finances.
The way that the company came to acquire its whopping 95 year lease of the downtown Toronto lands was also “unusual,” the article notes before positioning Premier Doug Ford and his team as naive for placing such faith in the brand without doing the due diligence of examining what it had actually accomplished since it was founded in 2012.
BREAKING: @nytimes investigation reveals that the Ford Government was sold a bill of goods by a penniless fraudster in Therme, who stole their name & brand from a CEO who died in a plane crash. https://t.co/z9kkKDqeml #topoli #onpoli
— Ontario Place for All © (@ONPlace4All) April 16, 2025
Per the Times investigation, along with greatly exaggerating its own track record, even the Austrian-based company’s name and logo are a farce, lifted from a competitor with the same name and a virtually identical logo.
The owner of that older firm, who was a friend of Therme Group CEO Robert Hanea, died in a plane crash in 2017. “Mr. Hanea did not inherit his friend’s spa company. Instead, he inherited its story,” says the Times.
“While the German [Therme] spas continued operating as distinct businesses, they became indistinguishable from Mr. Hanea’s Therme in public discourse and, importantly, in submissions to the Ontario government.”
🚨 Another Ontario Place scandal
This morning The New York Times reported that Therme made false claims to get the deal. Therme claimed they ran spas across Europe. They don’t. They just stole another company’s name and logo.
Turns out Therme was hunting for a jurisdiction with… pic.twitter.com/67Lr29lsJv
— Chris Glover (@chrisgloverndp) April 16, 2025
The widely-shared article also touches on an Ontario Auditor General’s Report that deemed the provincial government’s processes in selecting Therme were “not fair, transparent or accountable to all participants,” and that “the social and environmental benefits and costs of redevelopment were not considered.”
As local city councillors, MPPs, organizations, and others continue to contend the monumental project, the irreversible destruction of Ontario Place (on the taxpayers’ dime, to boot) is unfortunately already done.
