The line for the Krazy Kanuck raft ride winds past a row of cabanas that have been rented out for the day, and by noon on a hot Saturday, the Wet’n’Wild parking lot is already packed. Although the park is not in Toronto at all, it calls itself Wet’n’Wild Toronto. The fact that it is located off Finch Avenue West in Brampton reveals something about the actual location of the region’s water appetite.
Once you start searching for the pattern, it is difficult to ignore it. Because Splash Works is already the most popular seasonal amusement park on the continent, Canada’s Wonderland in Vaughan continues to grow its twenty-acre water park every year. Conservation Halton has been expanding Kelso Cove in Milton with new inflatable obstacles, such as a children’s area designed for smaller bodies and shorter attention spans. At Professor’s Lake, Brampton operates its own outdoor inflatable park. These locations don’t appear to be coordinating with one another. Simply put, they are all building simultaneously.
This has a plausible explanation that is more related to math than rivalry. Families are moving to the 905 more quickly than almost anywhere else in the nation, and young families are looking for inexpensive things to do with their children on a Tuesday in July. Inflatable parks and splash pads are inexpensive to construct compared to nearly everything else a municipal council could finance, and they look great at a ribbon-cutting. One type of infrastructure that a council member can truly point to is a new water feature.
Contrast that with the events that have occurred downtown. The design, the parking garage, and the use of public waterfront land for a private recreation complex have all been points of contention for Ontario Place’s proposed indoor waterpark and spa for years. Through public consultation and political back and forth, the project continues to progress, albeit slowly. Almost as an afterthought, Biidaasige Park opened its own splash feature, the Badlands Scramble, alongside ziplines and a sculpture by Kent Monkman on the new island at the mouth of the Don River. It’s a beautiful park. It was simply not intended to be a water park at first.
That kind of ambitious civic vision was not something the suburbs waited for. They constructed more quickly, more compactly, and with less fanfare. The American company that owns Wet’n’Wild, Premier Parks, has every reason to continue making investments in bubble parties and slides in order to keep its sole Canadian location from appearing outdated in comparison to Wonderland’s. Strangely, conservation authorities are now acting somewhat like operators of theme parks, introducing a new feature every season to encourage families to pick their lake over others’.
It’s difficult to say for sure whether this is true competition or just multiple locations working on the same issue at the same time. It appears that no one in Milton or Brampton is planning a fight against Vaughan. Rivalry, the kind that naturally arises when a region grows so quickly and gets this hot for so many weeks of the year, is probably more akin to parallel ambition.
Even so, it’s difficult not to believe that the suburbs have already prevailed in whatever competition this is, regardless of whether any official has ever referred to it as such, when you watch children emerge from the wave pool in Brampton, drenched and laughing, with parents following behind with wet towels and melting popsicles. Downtown is the major public water feature that is the subject of constant debate. The real splashing is taking place somewhere else.
