As hot weather starts settling into southern Ontario and the region prepares to mark Pride Month, advocates who use Hanlan’s Point Beach say they’re frustrated by a lack of progress in addressing shoreline erosion.
“Hanlan’s Point as a beach has been decimated. There used to be about 15 to 20 meters of shoreline, that’s completely gone,” Travis Myers, co-founder of Friends of Hanlan’s, told CityNews during a recent visit to the beach.
“The historic site of Canada’s first Pride is … about 15 meters out into the water because that place has been critically eroded for about a decade now.
In the latest example that reinforces erosion problems, the City of Toronto blocked off a large southern section of the well-known beach to visitors amid concerns over high water levels and rough conditions.
“If there’s no sand added to this space, the dunes will fail. You can see the dunes are already failing. [There] are 80-year-old heritage trees that have fallen into the water,” Myers said.
“Even in the face of something as simple as a beach without sand needing sand, it’s been incredibly frustrating over the last three years.”
Aside from the environmental impacts, Myers fears losing a significant space for Toronto’s 2SLGBTQ+ community and their history.
“For the queer community, losing this space would be horrible. This is a come-as-you-are, free-to-access space. There are very few spaces like this in Canada and around the world where people can come find their community,” he said.
“There were gatherings for queer people to go out on their bicycles, and then, of course, in 1971, it only made sense for this to be the location for the first Pride gathering in all of Canada.”
Cris Nippard co-organizes the annual Lez Beach event, which welcomes lesbian, queer, transgender and non-binary people in June. She said she’s concerned about the shrinking amount of space available for visitors.
“It’s kind of hard to have a beach day with no beach, that’s kind of the primary concern, but right now it’s mainly that with the other side of the beach closed, it’s going to send every single person who goes to Hanlan’s towards the part of the beach where we do Lez Beach,” she said.
“A lot of people think of the [2SLGBTQ+] community as a monolith, but we have a lot of different experiences and a lot of different levels of comfort with each other, and so having everyone kind of mixed into this one very small part of the beach is harming the people who are the most marginalized.”
Myers said his group has been pushing for action over the past few years.
“We’ve been alerting the staff who work on the island. We’ve been alerting council for years to please bring sand here. It’s insulting to the community, especially as we head into Pride month. That historic place in our civil rights movement, the site of the first Pride, is underwater and has been,” he said.
“A lot of politicians who are grandstanding, rushing down here to take their videos to pick a fight with Doug Ford over land that the city doesn’t own. When the land that the city does own is underwater, and they’re not doing anything about it.”
CityNews contacted Coun. Ausma Malik, who represents Toronto Island, to ask about the concerns. She wasn’t available for an on-camera interview, but in a statement called the erosion “an urgent issue.”
“With high water levels in Lake Ontario, I have pushed for City staff and [Toronto and Region Conservation Authority] to ensure they are engaging with Hanlan’s users and Toronto Island Park Plan stakeholders to develop options that protect sensitive ecology and maintain access during the busy summer season and moved a motion at Council last week to do this,” Malik wrote in part.
“My motion requested implementation of an immediate plan to restore beach access by the start of Pride Month on June 1 and acceleration of sand renourishment as quickly as possible in advance of more comprehensive work planned to begin this fall.”
Netami Stuart, a senior project manager with the City of Toronto, told CityNews they should be able to make the Monday reopening deadline. She said the City, along with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, have been studying the best solution.
“It’s a big project, it’s a lot of construction, large-scale construction, that needs to be studied carefully before we undertake it,” Stuart said.
“We have been working with community stakeholders and subject matter experts, coastal engineers, to protect the shoreline long-term. In 2021 to 2023, the TRCA placed 50,000 tons of sand on the beach at the southern end of Hanlan’s Point Beach and near Gibraltar Point constructed a near-shore reef, and we’re continuing to work on extending that type of protection, shoreline protection up the shore.”
She said the results of a feasibility study outlining how best to move forward are due before the end of the year. She said new funding also needs to be requested in future budget submissions.
“We really also have the long-term sustainability and long-term viability of this beach as a cultural space at heart, and we’re working really hard to make sure that people can use it in the short-term and that it stays protected and stays a beach in the long-term,” she said.
Meanwhile, advocates said they hope others will join them to keep demanding a quicker resolution.
“It’s a pretty easy request to put sand on the beach. Pretty much every other coastal city in the world does that easily, and if they had been doing it for the last 10 years, we wouldn’t be facing this problem now,” Nibbard said.
“This is not just a queer issue, this is an issue with public space in general, this is an issue with the ecology of Toronto Island,” Myers said.
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