If it feels like Toronto culture is under relentless attack, that’s because it is. But there are different battlegrounds, different fights, and different opponents, making a united defence all the more challenging to mount. And if we want to continue living in a city that values art, imagination and the kind of transformative experiences that change lives – a once inalienable notion that has become more of a tremulous assumption over the past few years – then Toronto, and ultimately every Canadian urban centre, is facing a crisis point.

Over the past two months alone, Torontonians have lost access to a frighteningly wide range of cultural institutions: the Ontario Science Centre, the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, and, unless a solution can be found over the long weekend, the Revue Cinema, the city’s oldest operating movie house.

State of the Arts: Canada’s cultural industry is feeling the squeeze

This isn’t counting the (hopefully) temporary shuttering of the Ontario Place Cinesphere, the myriad troubles afflicting Harbourfront Centre, the Contact Photography Festival, Toronto Fringe Festival and Luminato, nor the collapse of Artscape and the extinction of Just for Laughs. The list goes on and on.

Who is to blame? Certainly the big corporations who were once happy to toss quarterly-report pocket change to arts institutions in a bid to burnish their cultural bona fides, and have now callously pulled up stakes. And while pandemic-era market forces are also at play in almost every situation, the changing habits of live-arts audiences only lit the match of the current dumpster fire raging across the city. The gasoline was provided by a frighteningly disparate number of sources.

The Cinesphere is the short-term victim of short-sighted redevelopment. Despite the many deficits of the Science Centre, which few could legitimately argue was up to contemporary standards (everyone needs to visit Vancouver’s Science World to see what a modern children’s education play space looks like), the space has been sacrificed by a super-smash-bros provincial government not in the business of sober second thought. Hot Docs was plagued by internal mismanagement, and while the situation there is still extremely perilous, the major restructuring currently being undertaken at least points toward a long-needed self-reckoning. And the Revue, a genuine success story in terms of programming and audience coming out of the pandemic, seems to simply be hostage to the indecipherable whims of its landlord.

But there is one brutal through-line uniting these varying calamities: an active distaste and fundamental ignorance of what the arts can do. To put it more bluntly, perhaps in the language of those in positions of power, who have brought so much ruin to Toronto’s front doors, can understand without misinterpretation: stop destroying our vibrant past to ensure your empty, soulless future. As a city, we all have a responsibility to ensure that communities are built not on convenience but culture. If you do not have the energy or time to imagine a Toronto that values ideas and art and experiences, then wake up or go sleep somewhere else.

Think about it this way: we are now firmly in an era in which it is impossible to imagine building cultural institutions instead of destroying them.

When the Paradise theatre reopened just before the pandemic hit, back in December, 2019, I half-joked that the cinema would be the last to ever be built in Toronto. That gag now seems to be a hard fact. When – or I should say “if,” given this province’s shameful track record of actually opening things it constructs – a new Science Centre breaks ground or a refurbished Cinesphere opens its doors, will there be any curious, adventurous, culturally invested audiences living here to enjoy and appreciate them? Or will Toronto become a vast expanse of condos, vape shops, mega-spas and construction to build more of the same?

The situation at the Revue might have shocked much of Toronto, but the bottom has been falling out for a while now. Look around while you can. Because unless a host of forces – all levels of government, all manner of recession-spooked sponsors, all kinds of private citizens from all neighbourhoods – come together, then Toronto might become a mere frame of a city, devoid of a picture.