By Pepper Parr
June 14th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
The story of the week has to be the announcement by the Art Gallery that they wanted to tear down the existing building and erect a new three-level structure – at a cost of at least $116 million.
Art Gallery Chair Susan Busby on the right wanders where Executive Director Sankey is going with the presentation.
While the gallery leadership did its best to assure council they had consulted far and wide on their plans, that wasn’t the feedback we have been getting.
Whatever changes are going to take place – it won’t happen overnight. Two things became very clear from the people we talked with – no one wanted their names used and every said they didn’t think the $116 million was a realistic number.
View from the parking lot at the rear of the property.
Intersection of Lakeshore Road and Brock
There is a Strategic Plan out there somewhere that the Art Gallery has yet to produce. Two people we talked with said they had seen the document. Staff at the AGB have yet to find it.
What we were able to get was the financial picture as it stood at the end of 2023.
There was an infographic on what took place in 2023.
People are living on the streets, people can’t afford housing, people are using food banks, food & rent costs keep going up, people are losing their jobs, people are losing their homes, taxes keep going up for frills that are not needed yet the yuppies & politicians in this city have blinders on when it comes to these things! They have to have their 25 karate gold museums, civic squares, marinas, music festivals, an out of control Bateman centre & now were expected to fork out another $1116,000,000 expenditure for something the great majority of the tax payers DO NOT WANT. Things are totally out of control, when is the cheque book that has no limit when it comes to all this be closed? When is anybody in charge going to say enough is enough? When is anybody in charge going to start listening to the people who elected them instead of the special interest groups that seem to be running things & get everything they want?
McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Vaughan typically welcomes over 100,000 visitors annually for its Group of Seven pieces.
Hamilton Art Gallery gets 160,000 visits to their collection, and over a million go to Art Gallery of Ontario.
Instead of spending $100 Million on a building – what if the Burlington Art Gallery spent a few million dollars on a dozen iconic pieces of art?
Top-end pieces to add to their (largest in Canada) collection of ceramics.
That would be something people would gladly pay to see.
Would any of us miss the Art Gallery if it didn’t exist? Maybe the 750 members would, but face facts, that’s less than half a percent of Burlington’s population. It’s a nice to have, not a need to have. The existing building suits the need just fine, and for only 28,000 visitors annually, this isn’t worth the expense. And we all know the cost of what they’re proposing will cost much more than the $116M they claim. Many residents of Burlington are fighting to keep their houses, put food on the table, and buy clothes for their children, all of which has gotten more expensive. Now is not the time for this.
There is a feeling of entitlement amongst a number of city “institutions” such as the AGB, the PAC, the SOM, LaSalle Marina and the Brant Museum. This ‘give to me so that I can continue giving back under my terms’ is pervasive and enabled by a Council that seems to believe that capital investments are their particular cookie jar. Millions spent on Bateman, Civic Centre upgrade, a private wave break and a new indigenous concrete meeting circle at Ryerson Park; all with little transparency and even less public engagement. Thousands spent on rainbow and orange crosswalks, unnecessary Council travel, mayor’s speaker events and the woke virtue signalling that has become a distinguishing feature of this group of public trough feeders.