The 12 Feb 2026 Ban Anniversary (Part 2)

this rink guard blocked me from leaving

Last week -- Feb.12, 2026 -- was exactly one year since two city part time rink staff made up a story for the police. They said I had attacked one of them with my cane inside the rink building. Their supervisor, arriving after this imaginary event, supported their story. Three police officers came to my house to let me know that, due to these rink guards requesting it, I was under a lifetime ban from entering the rink building.

At the time a considerable list of neighbours said they wanted to be kept informed about this strange story. It dragged along for almost three months. The police order was eventually withdrawn [see below], but City recreation management seemed unable to really fix the rogue youth-staff culture that had developed at the park after the public health rules were lifted in 2023. So in May 2025, I withdrew from doing any work in the park.

Some management shuffles happened over the past year, but many of the Dufferin Grove park troubles have not been solved (see below).

The problems are a lot bigger than just this park. The City auditor reported in October 2024 and again February 2025 that there was a long list of problems with the work of parks maintenance, citywide. The link to the most recent Auditor Report is here. And there’s more. Last February, while the confusion around my ban was going on, a city manager named Stefany Hanson was announced as the new Recreation director. Before she actually got started, she mysteriously (at least, to non-insiders) disappeared from the City staff list. Then in June, the general manager of Parks and Recreation, Howie Dayton, suddenly either quit or was fired; rumours suggest the second. During the three-year covid restrictions, quite a few older staff took early retirement, meaning that institutional memory was lost. A new general manager wasn’t hired until September. Her name is Terry Ricketts, she’s trained as an engineer, and she’ll have quite a task trying to plug the holes in this leaky ship.

Since the Parks audit, there has been no parallel audit of Recreation, nor of P&R capital projects, nor of the city’s parks and rec employment practices. But sooner or later there will have to be. In the meantime, it's possible to take a closer look, from the outside, at what's not working.

Staffing

1. Hiring Practices need fixing: The City's hiring is done centrally, through Human Resources (HR). There is a bottleneck, particularly in processing* youth for part-time entry-level jobs in Recreation. Many people who apply to get a rink guard or wading pool job never hear back. It's a common story, and no wonder, with so many people applying centrally, all trying to get through the same narrow gate.

(* The assembly-line metaphor is intentional.)

The workaround is that if a "Community recreation programmer" (CRP) -- the first line of supervision for the part-time rec staff -- knows someone who has applied, and wants to hire that person, s/he can call HR and flag the name or the position. So the application gets pulled to the top of a pile -- a stack that is so big that the HR staff or robot may never make it to the bottom. That means that despite the City's intention to flatten the playing field, it's sometimes the case that the CRP hires people who he knows or - when there are more than one -- maybe who are friends and want to be assigned together. As for those people who don't have a CRP connection -- they may be out of luck.

Many of the jobs are not exactly work

2. Many of the jobs are not exactly work. The part-time recreation jobs are not a mix of ages and experience; almost all are youth. Their work culture is troubled by an unfortunate combination of "thou shalt not" training, very lax supervision with few or no consequences for poor work, and a staff hierarchy that discourages people from problem-solving together in favour of top-down instructions.

The result can be easily seen at Dufferin Grove. In summer, the wading pool attendants look at their phones or sit and chat with each other, rarely getting to know the families that come to the playground. In winter the rink guards skate around a bit, hand out some skates, and then sit in the skate room or their little closed office or the kitchen, chatting with each other, rarely getting to know the people who come to skate. Some staff disappear on long bathroom breaks. Staff who find themselves in need of something more to keep busy, have in some cases segwayed into bullying, or have taken up sideline activities, during their shifts, which hover on either edge of legality. That's been a part of the staff culture.

The period of staff/community collaboration that formerly made Dufferin Grove unusual is described here and here.

The cost increase of central control after 2011 is itemized in a 2015 newsletter editorial here.

The Dufferin Grove Park budget

Getting the information:

During the public meetings about the "Northwest Corner Revitalization" of the park, a recreation manager said that one of the benefits of all the "conflict of interest" staff changes in 2011 was that "now we will know where the money goes," as opposed to the time when Dufferin Grove had much more staff/community involvement.

Actually, during the collaboration time, much more park income/expenses information was posted publicly. These days, it's harder to find out where the money goes, but not impossible. There are two main ways that outsiders (i.e. not City staff) can learn the details of how money is spent to run Dufferin Grove Park. One is to ask for the City's SAP financial report for any fiscal year, through FOI (Freedom of Information). It costs $5 and usually takes about 2 months after the fiscal year reports are in (around April or May).

The other way, just for spending, is to go to Open Data and look up the Pcard spending details for materials (groceries, equipment, etc.) linked to Dufferin Grove. The City Auditor has required this public reporting from all city divisions, starting in 2011.

It turns out that the cost of just recreation staffing has hugely increased since the restructuring of Parks and Rec in 2003, at the same time as the programs have shrunk.

For 2024, it appears that $494,000 was spent just for Recreation staff wages at Dufferin Grove. That does not include any Parks wages (e.g. Parks maintenance, rink maintenance, garbage collection) nor any reno staff (Capital Projects staff) costs. The fiscal-year details of running Dufferin Grove during the troubled year of 2025 won't be available until April or May of 2026.

The highlights-summary of the first ten months of the 2025 Pcard cost-of-materials spending details is posted here. The total so far is $49,600.65. That total will be considerably higher when the missing two months, November and December, are posted. But there are some interesting comparisons with the pre-2011 time already.

Sources

supplies are no longer bought at the Dufferin farmers' market

The first is that during the collaboration times, every effort was made to buy materials and equipment locally, thereby boosting the local economy. Groceries for all the food being cooked at the park were the largest expense. The farmers' market and small local grocery stores (who would deliver) were the main sources. For equipment, including for the kitchens and oven, the staff went to the local Home Hardware and to Chinatown, mainly to Tap Phong.

In 2025, the main places where supplies were bought were Costco, Amazon, and Walmart. No Frills was the other main source for groceries, but not the one across from the park. There's no record of any purchases from the farmers' market, but some last-minute items from Dollarama.

Pricing

To make a program sustainable over the long term, for example skate lending and Friday Night Supper, it needs to cover the cost of materials and of the staffing that's directly connected to the program (shopping, cooking, clean-up, record-keeping). Grants are one way to fund programs, but they always run out. Realistic charges are better, especially if it can make room for people who can't pay the full amount.

Example: During the collaboration times, the $2 skate-lending covered the wages costs and had money left-over to pay for skate upkeep.

The current skate lending has no charge and so is not sustainable.

Example: Friday Night Supper 2025 income (estimating 15 - 25 paying customers per dinner; note that staff ate the leftovers for free, so food wasn't wasted), July 4 to Nov.21: $2948. It's unlikely that this income is lower than the cost of the groceries, and it wouldn't cover any of the ample staffing either.

Information about former Dufferin Grove finances: the CELOS financial pages.

Police and the ban

The Toronto Star has recently run several pieces on the worry that there are too many new, inexperienced officers in the Toronto Police Service (TPS), making it more likely that mistakes are being made. Certainly there was a mistake in how three TPS officers went ahead and told me I was banned from the park (at all, not only "for life").

To follow up, I wrote to Fourteen Division Supt.Domenic Sinopoli last May, asking for a meeting to go over what had happened. (The convoluted trail of "trespass order" misunderstandings, both by Parks and Rec management and by TPS, is chronicled here under the heading "Snakes and ladders.").

The superintendent responded that there was no need for a meeting because

Hopefully not, since police cannot "trespass" a person from a park unless they are requested by management, not by rink guards, to act as agents for the City government. But Parks and Rec management had made no such agreement (partly because the managers were also new enough that they didn't know the regulations in the Occupiers' Liability Act).

What a schmozzle.

See also: The State of the Park, Part One.