There is no water frontage for children to play on; it will be built up for the purposes of commerce

The City of Toronto and the Canadian Pacific Railway scrapped over the rail company’s efforts to expropriate a wide portion of Toronto’s waterfront in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The ability to expropriate land they deemed necessary for their operations had been granted to the rail companies under Canada’s Railway Act. The disagreement between the City of Toronto and the CPR went to the federal Railway Committee of the Privy Council in 1890 and the two sides argued their cases over a series of meetings.

Counsel for the CPR G. M. Clark had this to say on Sept. 19, 1890 at a meeting that included representatives of the rail company, such as President William Van Horne, the city, and Sir John A. MacDonald:

“Mr. Clark—Of course we could not do without the water frontage in either place. In speaking of that water frontage I have to make one more remark. In the discussion before the Railway Committee on different occasions people have spoken of the water frontage of the Bay, of what a great deprivation it would be to the people of the City of Toronto if they were to lose the water frontage. Mr. Glockling I think it was, spoke of it as being the lung of the City. Now that is an entire fallacy. There is no water frontage owned by the City. They have lost every inch of it so that there may be wharves. They have used the water frontage themselves so that they can get an income from it. There is no shore there that children can play upon and gather pebbles. You know what kind of water the Bay of Toronto is and is likely to be. The water frontage that they have is a water frontage for the purpose of getting an income from it. The water front in the mind of Mr. Glockling and others who think with him was the means of getting to down the streets, the means of access to the water of the Bay. It was not the water frontage. I say the water frontage has gone, gone for a very proper purpose, to make an income from it. To talk of a water front is apt to mislead. There is no water frontage for children to play on; it will be built up for the purposes of commerce.”

City Council Appendix, 1890, 1133 (Page 1897)