LMT #140: Allan Gardens, Toronto, Canada – Bryan Palmer

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Bryan D. Palmer
Emeritus Professor & Canada Research Chair, Trent University

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For centuries, various First Nations inhabited territories on the northern shores of Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes that constitute part of the border of Canada and the United States. Canada’s leading industrial province, Ontario, and its largest city, Toronto, emerged through processes of colonization consolidating British dominance in the northern reaches of the Americas in the aftermath of the United States War of Independence. This colonization, rooted in longstanding and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples, saw Upper Canada (Old Ontario) created in the Constitutional Act of 1791.  The nation state’s territorial consolidation continued into the 1860s with the 1867 British North America Act and the creation of the Dominion of Canada.

In paternalistic recognition of Indigenous military and trade alliances with their “father,” the monarch, there was limited acknowledgement of “Indian territory” and First Nations entitlements to its use.  A number of vague treaties and transactions known as “surrenders” and “purchases” transferred vast tracts of land to the British Crown, with Indigenous groups displaced to small, isolated reserves. More choice locations, like present-day Toronto, as well as untold forested territory, future sites of mining riches, and potentially rich agricultural acreage became designated “Crown land.” A Mississauga chief complained to an English official in the 1820s: “You came as wind blown across the Great Lake. … We protected you til you became a mighty tree that spread thro our Hunting Land. With its branches you now lash us.”

In 1830, William Allan, a mercantile banker and pillar of Upper Canada’s aristocratic ruling oligarchy, the Family Compact, purchased a large swath of Crown land running from Lake Ontario into what is now mid-town Toronto. Decades later, Allan’s son George, the mayor of Toronto and president of the city’s Horticultural Society, ceded a small portion of this lucrative plot to the municipality for its use, which included the creation of public gardens, now housed in half a dozen greenhouses. During a visit to Toronto in 1860, the Prince of Wales formally opened Allan Gardens, an urban park occupying two large city blocks.

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For more than a century and a half, Allan Gardens not only grew lush vegetation. It was also the site of protests associated with a variety of social justice movements, like, among others, the nineteenth-century suffragists; the unemployed workers’ mobilizations of the 1930s; free speech campaigns in the 1960s; gay pride marches of the 1970s, and anti-poverty protests during neoliberalism’s reign from the 1990s to the present. Few public spaces in Canada have been the sight of so many, and so varied, displays of resistance and grievance.

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Indigenous Peoples, not surprisingly, have long utilized Allan Gardens as a gathering spot; weekly drumming and healing ceremonies take place in the park to this day. In 1995, the Toronto Historical Board erected a plaque honouring Dr. Oronhyatekha (Burning Cloud/Peter Martin), the second Indigenous person in Canada to earn a medical degree and an early and prominent figure opposing the restrictive aspects of Canada’s 1876 Indian Act. Burning Cloud graduated from Toronto’s School of Medicine in 1886. He lived across the street from Allan Gardens, where he practiced conventional western medicine and dispensed “Indian” cures. A Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto now operates in the same vicinity. The park has recently been the site of vigils and protests addressing the epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.

Feminism’s association with Allan Gardens reaches back to 1892. The  suffrage-advocating National Council of Women of Canada grew out of a meeting in the park. In 1896, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union conducted a Mock Parliament in the park’s pagoda pavilion. Dr. Emily Stowe, the first female physician to practice in Canada, presided over the event, which also featured Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of the Canadian Governor General. “Well-heeled attendees,” notes historian of Canadian suffrage, Joan Sangster, came to the presentation of sardonic political theatre only by securing “tickets ahead of time.”

More raucous, and decidedly more risqué, were the dyke marches associated with Toronto’s Pride Week, the city’s first Gay Pride march starting out from Allan Gardens in 1974.  The initial lesbian procession took place in 1996. Since 2014, the dyke march has concluded at Allan Gardens, where queer theatrical performances would have caused nineteenth-century feminists to blush. Lady Aberdeen might have been flummoxed, were she not fuming, at the Slutwalks that began in Allan Gardens between 2013-17, campaigning to decriminalize sex work and create a stigma-free environment for those engaged in erotic employments.

As capitalism consolidated in the early twentieth century, trade unions grew in size and influence. Left-wing organizations such as the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation emerged. They demanded an alternative to the “dog-eat-dog” ethos of the profit system. Periodic crises left masses of workers unemployed. At Allan Gardens, protesters and police clashed repeatedly during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

A Communist-led Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League (WESL) unfurled its banner – “Heroes 1914 – Bums 1933” — at Allan Gardens, protesting unemployment, police brutality, and the suppression of free speech. Cops on horseback and motorcycles rode down the unemployed throng, which included working-class women who parked their baby carriages beneath trees and battled the rampaging police.

Under pressure from organizations such as the WESL, the Canadian Labour Defence League, and the Toronto Unemployed Council, the Civic Parks Committee designated eight local parks — including the provincial legislature, Queen’s Park — open to all public speaking and demonstrations. Yet local legislation continued to prohibit speeches in Allan Gardens, now known as a rallying point for disgruntled labour.

In 1962, radical poets rebelled against the by-law restrictions constraining public speaking in Allan Gardens. Poet laureate of the Canadian left, Milton Acorn, led resistance to the free speech embargo. He won, both in the court of public opinion and before the justice system. Toronto’s laws changed:  poets, soapboxers, and free speech advocates of all kinds were now able to use Allan Gardens as their podium.

With society’s poor and disparaged drawn to Allan Gardens, police utilized the opportunity to victimize the scapegoated and suspicious. Residential areas around the downtown Allan Gardens gentrified. Older boarding houses catering to poor, often racialized, Torontonians of Caribbean ancestry, gave way to posh, one family, residences. Such urban transformation takes time, however. For Blacks still residing near the park in the 1990s, some of them homeless and relying on shelters that continued to exist within the neighbourhood, Allan Gardens became a place to gather, socialize, and play soccer.

A police sweep of Allan Gardens in the summer of 1994 resulted in demeaning treatment of 65 black men, warnings that their return to the park would result in arrests. Affluent white home owners – champions of the rising ‘Not In My Backyard’ ideology and architects of vocal local residents associations — cheered on the cops as they handed out $3000 in loitering tickets. But Allan Gardens could not easily be turned into a site of racist repression. Reinforced by allies in the gay movement, Black Lives Matter activists converged on Allan Gardens in 2016. Their message – “I Am Not A Threat” – recalled the shameful profiling of immigrant footballers in 1994.

By the 1990s, capitalist crises precipitated a backlash. Neoliberalism’s successful assault on the basic defensive organizations of the working class left trade unions weakened. As the political spectrum shifted to the right, left-wing organizations long associated with anti-capitalism and infamous for encouraging militant uprisings of the working class faded into the background. Protest became less associated with the organized working-class and traditional movements and parties of the radical left.

An alternative emerged.  The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) grew to prominence under its slogan, “Fight to Win!” OCAP supported beleaguered encampments at the park. Allan Gardens was defended as a safe site for Toronto’s increasing numbers of destitute and homeless people. Militant marches against provincial governments often commenced in the park and wound their way through Toronto’s downtown core to lay siege to the legislature at Queen’s Park.

One such volatile demonstration culminated in a police riot on 15 June 2000. The post-mortem recorded superficial injuries to police horses, 42 cops claiming cracked shins and bruised bodies, and a like number of protesters arrested, including three of OCAP’s leading organizers. Court appearances involving over 250 criminal charges dragged into 2002-03, severely curtailing OCAP’s capacity to defend the poor, promote the need for affordable housing, and service and advise the disadvantaged dependent on its expertise and aid.

OCAP’s banners often seemed scripted out of 1930s protests: “United We Eat. Divided We Starve.” When the G-20 convened in Ontario in 2010, anti-globalization activists rallied in Allan Gardens. OCAP’s John Clarke denounced the austerity agenda of global capitalist leaders, proclaiming, “They have given us war, we are giving them war back.”

Today OCAP is largely gone, but its spirit, and that of militant predecessors, remains. Tent encampments of homeless people continued in Allan Gardens long after the anti-poverty organization’s demise. Many of the unhoused were Indigenous.

Toronto’s civic authorities eventually found accommodation for many of those living in the park. For the moment, tents of the homeless are no longer pitched on Allan Gardens grounds. But an Indigenous woman still lives there in what has become an iconic teepee, maintaining a sacred fire. Private security forces patrol Allan Gardens, making sure no enclaves of homeless people pop up in a park that has recently seen extensive renovations to a pavilion authorities obviously want to attract tourists and respectable visitors. Throughout Toronto, however, homelessness remains a central and troubling issue, with many people forced to live in ravines and other public spaces, or rely on inadequate shelter facilities.

In September 2022, a four-day festival of music, poetry, dance, and ceremony marked the artistic installation of a 27-tableaux 23-foot long sculpture. The revelry and creative paneling were part of a long-term project led by cultural programmer and filmmaker Rina Fraticelli and photographer and curator Schuster Gindin. Storytelling, artistic representations, documents, and other cultural materials commemorated the 130-year history of Allan Gardens. Fraticelli and Gindin aimed to recognize and further build a sense of community. They put out a wonderfully illustrated volume, Allan Gardens: People, Power & the Park. It illuminates how Allan Gardens has long been a public venue where freedoms of association and expression are fought for and preserved, establishing the continuity of working-class, social justice, and Indigenous protest under capitalism and colonialism.

In Allan Gardens, a horticultural park originating in an act of colonial dispossession transitioned to privatized property. This public space became contested terrain. Generations of dissidents demanded rights: to gather; to be heard; to pressure change; to get out from under the Iron Heel of authority and its gendarmes. In doing so, militants and all manner of discontented people voiced criticisms of a society that justified inequality and rationalized oppression, exploitation, and repression. Struggles of Indigenous and racialized peoples, of women and sexual minorities, and of workers — waged and unwaged — punctuated the park’s tranquility. Created as an expression of elite sensibilities, Allan Gardens developed into something different: a visible reminder that suppression of the dispossessed is never either easy or totalizing. In its remaking, the park symbolized the possibilities of wider socio-economic transformation.

^{“Jobs, Justice and Climate Action, 5 July 2015 Protest, Allan Gardens,” from Rina Fraticelli and Schuster Gindin, Allan Gardens: People, Power & the Park (Toronto: King’s Road Press, 2024).}

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To learn more:

Bryan D. Palmer and Gaétan Héroux, with a foreward by Francis Fox Piven, Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016).

Donald B. Smith, “The Dispossession of the Missisauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada,” Ontario History, 73 (June 1981), 67-87.

Joan Sangster, One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018).

Rina Fraticelli and Schuster Gindin, Allan Gardens: People, Power & the Park (Toronto: King’s Road Press, 2024).

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Cover image credit: “Communist-led Workers’ War Veterans League (WESL) demonstration on 15 August 1933 in Allan Gardens in protest against unemployment.” Source: Allan Gardens: People, Power & the Park.

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