Woodbine Beach is the largest public beach in Toronto, and for more than twenty years the only place to buy food or alcohol on it has been controlled by one family, with the city's own council voting to keep it that way.
The arrangement is not a scandal in the sense of anything illegal. It is a scandal in the plainer sense: a public asset, used by thousands of people on a warm weekend, has had its sole commercial concession held by George Foulidis and his family for two decades, and in 2007 city council voted to renew that concession for 20 more years without putting it out to competitive bid. The vote was pushed through by then-councillor Sandra Bussin, representing Ward 32 Beaches-East York, the ward the beach sits in. A Toronto Star investigation published in July 2010 laid out the arithmetic plainly: one operator, four decades of exclusivity from start to renewal, and no competing bidder ever given a chance at the largest beach in the city.
The concession is not the only piece of Woodbine that runs on a similarly narrow channel. The beach's other signature draw, sand volleyball, tells almost the same story from a different angle. Woodbine has roughly 95 courts in the sand, but only 10 of them are open to the public without a fee. The remaining 85 are run by the Ontario Volleyball Association, and playing on them requires an adult league membership starting at $45 for the summer. A visitor who shows up expecting free, open beach volleyball on Toronto's largest beach finds instead that most of the courts are, in effect, a private club with a public-looking gate.
Demand for the beach is not the problem. On busy summer weekends the 92 Woodbine bus and 501 Queen streetcar run packed, and the parking lots at Ashbridges Bay Park fill by 10 a.m., well before most visitors have even reached the sand. That crowding is what makes the concession and the courts worth scrutinizing in the first place: this is not a quiet, under-used beach where a single vendor and a private volleyball association are a rounding error. It is a beach that fills up fast on summer weekends, and the two things people actually spend money on there, food and drink, and organized volleyball, are the two things run outside ordinary public competition. A few blocks north, Queen St. E. tells the opposite story: the Beach Business Improvement Association counted 350 businesses along that strip as of 2010, an ordinary competitive commercial corridor with no single operator controlling the block. The contrast is the point. Toronto did not fail to attract competition to the beachfront in general; Queen Street has plenty of it. The beach itself, specifically the concession and the courts, is where competition was never allowed to happen.
The city's own ambitions for the beach have run into the same wall: money. In 2008, Waterfront Toronto produced a master plan called Lake Ontario Park, envisioning more than 37 kilometres of shoreline, from Cherry Beach to the eastern beaches, remade into a connected public park. Part of that vision was a promenade linking Ashbridge's Bay to Tommy Thompson Park, estimated at roughly $17 million. No source confirms the promenade or the wider plan was ever funded or built. The same year, a section of the Ashbridge's Bay boardwalk blew out in a storm, and it took the city more than a year to repair it for lack of funding, a small, concrete example of what an unfunded master plan looks like next to a beach that still needs its boardwalk fixed.
What ties these three threads together is not corruption or neglect exactly. It is a public beach that the city treats, in practice, as a place to manage cheaply rather than invest in: hand the food concession to whoever already has it, let a private association run most of the volleyball courts, and let a glossy park plan sit on a shelf while a storm-damaged boardwalk waits over a year for a repair budget. Every individual decision has a mundane bureaucratic logic. Together, at the beach where the most people in Toronto actually show up, they add up to a public space that is publicly owned and only partly publicly run.
None of this makes Woodbine a bad beach. It is Blue Flag certified, the water is tested daily, lifeguards work the summer, and the sand gets machine-groomed every day. The complaint is narrower and, in its way, more interesting: Toronto's biggest, one of its busiest, public beach is also the one where the city has been most willing to let a single family and a private membership organization run the two things people actually come for.
