Ontario is set to open an interim science centre next summer on Toronto's waterfront, two years after the province abruptly closed the old location in the city's east end.
Tourism Minister Stan Cho announced Wednesday that the temporary location will be at the Harbourfront Centre, which has been hosting one of two pop-up locations, an interactive play space called KidSpark that was also at the old location. The other site at Sherway Gardens mall in west Toronto will close Jan. 4.
"KidSpark ... has been met with a lot of success, a lot of traffic, and Harbourfront Centre is a site that already attracts five million visitors a year, so we're very excited about the interim location of the science centre," Cho said.
"It's a beautiful site. It's right on the water. You're going to have access to outdoor space, a ton of natural light."
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While the temporary science centre will open with a larger footprint than the current pop-up exhibit, at about 86,000 square feet it will still be a fraction of the size of the old location, which was 568,000 square feet.
The pop-up exhibit does not come close to meeting the need for science education, Liberal critic Adil Shamji said.
"It is a shadow of its former self, and it is a metaphor of this government's consistent over promises and failure to deliver every single time," he said.
The province abruptly closed the science centre in June 2024 with only a few hours' warning, saying the roof needed urgent repairs — a claim workers and critics dispute.
"I don't buy it for a second, and the science centre is still standing," said NDP Leader Marit Stiles. "They could have closed a portion of it and had the rest of it continue to be open. We all know that there's something else behind this."
Premier Doug Ford's government is planning to open a new, permanent science centre in 2029 at Ontario Place, a move critics charge is just to provide them cover for the controversial spa and waterpark planned there by Europe-based company Therme.
An auditor general report suggested Ontario's obligations to provide parking for Therme factored into its decision to relocate the science centre there, "in order to dispel public/stakeholder concerns relating to cost and impact on the environment."
The auditor general has also found the cost of the new science centre had shot up to $1.4 billion, more than the $1.3 billion originally estimated to maintain the centre's east Toronto location, though officials have said the cost of rehabilitating the old location would have also increased.
Cho did not provide a cost for expanding the pop-up at Harbourfront into an interim science centre.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 10, 2025.
