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Ep 31: Unlocking Toronto’s Waterfront Potential with the Waterfront BIA

• Julia Pennella • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Toronto's shoreline holds untapped potential that could transform the city's global standing. Tim Kocur, Executive Director of the Waterfront BIA, reveals that what we see today represents only half of what's possible for the 10-kilometer stretch connecting Exhibition Place through the central harbor to the developing Port Lands.

Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) occupy a unique space in urban development—technically agencies of the city but independently funded and operated by local businesses. The Waterfront BIA raises $2.5 million annually to support everything from social media promotion and street cleaning to major public space improvements, community events, and policy advocacy. 

What stands out in Kocur's approach is the BIA's role as the glue between major waterfront stakeholders. With Harbourfront Centre, Waterfront Toronto, Exhibition Place, the Toronto Islands, and Port Toronto all operating independently, coordination becomes essential. "We're the eighth largest waterfront stakeholder," Kocur explains, positioning the BIA as the glue binding these separate visions into something cohesive.

Perhaps most surprising is Toronto's standing as the ninth-best city globally in benchmarks measuring arts, culture, quality of life, and urban experience. Drawing inspiration from waterfronts around the world—from Baltimore and San Antonio to Cape Town’s Victoria & Albert development—the BIA focuses on identifying gaps and crafting creative solutions. 

One of their latest projects included a wayfinding signage program that solved a persistent problem where visitors struggled to locate major attractions despite being only blocks away. Their Waterfront Reconnect initiative is transforming forbidding highway underpasses into vibrant, illuminated gateways to the shore.

Ready to experience Toronto's waterfront transformation firsthand? Follow the Waterfront BIA on social media to discover the latest events and activities that are reshaping this dynamic neighborhood. 

Don’t go too far! Tim’s back for Part Two, where we dive into some of the most pressing issues facing Toronto—from affordable housing and homelessness to exciting new developments like a hovercraft service connecting Toronto to Niagara. Tune in to hear how Toronto’s waterfront is transforming into a world-class destination.

Learn more about the Waterfront BIA here:

Waterfront BIA

Check out the Toronto Board of Trade report published with the Waterfront BIA:

Ripple Effect: Unlocking Toronto’s Waterfront Potential 


Check out the Toronto Waterfront Festival Happening June 28-29, 2025 details here:

Toronto Waterfront Festival 


Julia Pennella:

Hey everybody, welcome back to let's Talk Politics, the podcast, where we dive into everything political, policy-driven and economic from across Canada and around the world. Today, we're zooming in on one of Canada's most iconic cities, toronto, a city known for its vibrant culture, endless global food options, the backdrop for your favorite Netflix series pretending to be New York and, of course, the birthplace of Drake. And just a friendly reminder, if you want to sound like a local, it's pronounced Toronto. We never pronounce the second T ever. Joining us today is Tim Kocur, executive Director of the Waterfront BIA. Executive Director of the Waterfront BIA Since 2018, tim has been leading charge in revitalizing Toronto's waterfront by bringing together city councillors, businesses, residents and community partners to collaborate on the waterfront's future.

Julia Pennella:

The Waterfront BIA advocates on key policy issues and works with all three levels of government to work on public improvements, and showcases the waterfront's vibrancy through year-round events and daily promotion. From uniting stakeholders and championing light rail transit to reimagining public spaces and creating innovative ways to support local businesses. Tim and his team are working closely with partners across the waterfront to shape one of Toronto's most rapidly evolving neighbourhoods. In today's episode, we're breaking down what a BIA actually is, how these organisations influence policy and the role they play in making cities work for everyone. We're also tackling big urban issues like homelessness, housing avoidability, and Tim shares the latest innovations and events happening along the waterfront. There's a lot to cover, so let's dive in. Tim, thanks so much for coming on. Let's Talk Politics.

Tim Kocur :

Thanks for having us on, julia. I think it definitely made me nervous. I think we never think of ourselves as politicians at all, of course with the BIA. But you reminded me when I was in university studying politics, I always avoided getting into politics directly because I never wanted to pick a side. I had friends in all the three parties and just never wanted to go one with the other. And I feel like you're reminding me that now, with a job that's somewhat policy related or policy light maybe I mean we certainly engage with policy on a regular basis and planning issues. Policy-related or policy-light maybe. I mean we certainly engage with policy on a regular basis and planning issues. I think the role here is always trying to get everybody to get along and come up with positions that everyone can agree on. So I think it kind of reminds me how we are political, but in a kind of unique way.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, very well said. Part of the reason why I started the podcast is I see everything as political, inherently for funding or whatever social issues are, and you at the BIA do a wide range of things, from tourism to research and innovation. So really looking forward to diving into the conversation, tim, and let's kick it off really simple. What even is a BIA for folks who might not know, and why should the average person care what a BIA does, especially when it comes to what's happening out downtown Toronto?

Tim Kocur :

You sound like one of our members, julia. What is a BIA? Well, technically, a business improvement area is an agency of the City of Toronto, but we're independently managed and funded by the business community. So any business owner on the street or tenants in the buildings, and also each individual commercial property owner or industrial, any non-residential class, has a vote. So basically, annually they decide how much to fund us and then it's charged as an additional tax levy on the city of Toronto bill that then comes to the BIA. So we raise about two and a half million dollars a year now.

Tim Kocur :

And in terms of what we do, I mean there's people know about BIAs for doing events and more semi-permanent beautification initiatives and things like that we had down here.

Tim Kocur :

We have more cleaning and reporting programs trying to make sure that things get cleaned or fixed as fast as possible, and some of the minor cleaning to do ourselves Business promotion. I mean, two of our six full-time staff are actually social media. Essentially, we do a lot to just promote what's going on pretty much every day online, and we also do public space improvements where we can. We have a science system that actually has event listings and things on it that we manage ourselves. And then there's, of course. I mean probably what we'll get into today is the sort of the advocacy side, like we're actually not lobbyists, we're technically advocates on behalf of our area. We don't represent one business or one interest. Our job is to actually, as I said before, try and get everyone to get along and come up with positions that everyone can agree on that actually benefit all the different categories of businesses, whether it's tourism or large tenants.

Julia Pennella:

That's kind of what we're always trying to stick handle is make sure we're doing something that's supporting a few of our organizational groups. Yeah well, I appreciate that analysis. I think that gives a really good overview and I want to ask a little bit further like what does success look like when you're running a BIA? It touches on so many different elements. You know for Waterfront you're looking at foot traffic Is it happier shop owners, more patios? You know bringing a downtown vibe and culture. Like, can you walk us through a little bit more about what a BIA does really well in its job?

Tim Kocur :

Sure, yeah, I mean you actually described a few parts of it. But I mean success is that the businesses see value in our programs, as I just said, like we want to make sure that each type of business category sees at least a few of our programs and initiatives as valuable to them. Small tenants, like with retail locations, but large tenants in the office tower try to make sure you have some property owners that have been here for a long time, but also some of the newer developers that want to see something new as well. And then I mean yes to more patios. Social media is always a good gauge. Like we want to make sure that we ideally want this to look like the most exciting neighborhood in the country in one way or another.

Tim Kocur :

And then there's also, of course, on policy issues, like at the end of the year I have to report on whether we are we seeing progress and what we're advocating for for getting the water, for any solar tea funded and built, for getting the underpasses painted and light lit up, and hopefully, when the gardener rehabs, she a better experience than a dirty highway to walk under to get here. So there's all kinds of things like that. And then we even measure things like how many graffiti tags and stickers and posters we remove. But really the measure of success is are there none? When people wake up in the morning and walk their dog, and sometimes we actually get to that- Wow, really interesting.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, it's very multifaceted and I'm so glad that I'm having you on to share some of this and you know I want to even talk about you've probably seen some cool stuff in other cities, so I want you to spill the tea, like I've seen you do some cross-border stuff to speaking with other BIAs, like what are some urban planning trends from around the world that maybe you got to experience and said, oh my God, we need that in Toronto and how are you bringing that inspiration and innovation back to the waterfront?

Tim Kocur :

Yeah, I mean we're actually fortunate. Our industry has a lot of conferences and information sharing things where you can tour other cities, and the one thing we've learned from other cities is it's mostly associated with the Bentway, but the improvements under the Gardner. When I started working here, the BIA really wanted to improve the underside of the highway and start testing out what they could look like after the Gardner rehab, and so we basically hired the designers that had done the Bentway plan before. We worked directly with the Bentway, but what we were effectively doing was things we'd seen in other cities. Like we've seen, underpasses have been lit up. They do events in other cities. There's also like the high line, where you do something with older infrastructure to beautify it on the top, and so these were all things we've seen.

Tim Kocur :

We call it waterfront reconnect the intersections that we've been involved with painting and improving to connect to our area. But we were very much like showing images of what we'd seen in balt. We went to like a party under a highway once in this lit up LED zone, and then in San Antonio, there was this beautiful like lights and painting near one of the hotels I stayed at one time near the Riverwalk, and so, yeah, there's a lot of things like that. And then there's the most recent waterfront I went to in another city was Cape Town, their Victoria and Albert waterfront in South Africa. It was quite beautiful. Since apartheid there was a single developer that took over the old port and it's quite impressive. Like they have old industrial silos, like we have at both ends of the harbor here, and the bottom of it is a museum and the top of it is a really nice hotel. So they've done some really interesting rejuvenation projects. They also had, I think, three total museums. They had a Ferris wheel and then the one benefit I would say that you see there that we can't necessarily do here is that it was one developer who did most of this.

Tim Kocur :

So the comparable thing here, on a smaller scale, would be the distillery district, where you've got one owner. They don't have a BI. Essentially it operates like an outdoor mall where one developer, one property manager, can decide the look and feel of everything. They can shut down the streets when they want to. So that's the kind of thing where you can't do that on the waterfront. It's a much bigger neighborhood and there's a whole bunch of different stakeholders, but I think we are kind of getting towards that.

Tim Kocur :

I think you never copy anybody directly, but the waterfront projects here are learning in some ways from that. I think that the Quayside site that originally was known as the sidewalk labs, part of the eastern waterfront that waterfront trial has been developing. The new development team on that includes dream, which also has the distillery district just north of that area. They have the site directly to the east of that as well, and so I actually think for that part of the eastern waterfront we're expecting to see a more lively mix of a curated retail and experience and recreational experience getting on the water waterfront trial has a plan for parliament slip improvements that would include things like restaurants or where to get on and off boats and more places around the water. So I think we do learn from those sorts of places, even though you can't directly emulate something.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, and I think that even brings into the conversation like how every city kind of has their unique characteristics and cultural identity, and even parts of Toronto, like the waterfront's very unique You've got the entertainment district, a cabbage town so there's so many little different identities, I think, within Toronto, which is so cool. And I want to lean into that point, like what role do the BIAs play in shaping the identity of the neighborhood? Because we talked about it, the waterfront, there's so much untapped potential, number one, and we'll get into that. But also like growing the waterfront of it, the communities, the people, like any examples where you think the BIA really nailed and helped bring that identity and culture with both the people living there and the businesses around there?

Tim Kocur :

Well, I think we certainly like to think we have a role in especially I mean mostly it's described as events but in also what we sometimes call activation or placemaking improvements. We actually have smaller events we call community scale, like when we do a free skating day with that counselor last winter, or we did an Earth Day cleanup where a couple of politicians came out, we had like 200 people from the business that come out and help us clean. We're always looking for things like that to kind of create more local community, because our neighborhood is difficult, because people want to head north, especially in the winter, and so we're always trying to come up with a creative way to just get people to stay in the neighborhood, whether they're residents or workers. But then the BIA has also historically had a significant role in supporting festivals, especially outside of the Harborfront Center, because that's the thing here we really haven't gotten into.

Tim Kocur :

Like there's some major, very impressive stakeholders here on the waterfront historically, like the Harbfront Center has been here for 50 years, but as new parks opened up to the east and the west, like Sugar Beach, hto Park, the BIA that's actually one of the reasons the BIA was created was to help do events in some of those parks and so things like the Waterfront Festival has tall ships this year and is famous for the rubber ducks. We've also done public art. I think we actually kind of at least temporarily became a public art leader in the city during the pandemic, because you couldn't do any events and festivals, and so whenever someone came to us with a cool idea for we want to paint art on this or we want to cover this with photos we all of a sudden had all these great things in our neighborhood because that's what we could do, and so that's what we're using our funding towards.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought it up. The big rubber ducky was so iconic for Toronto. I think that made international waves on social media. I'm so really excited to see that back. And the Toronto Island or, like you mentioned, h2o Park, sugar Beach, all these like fun little pieces around the park, and it's just so nice to just sit and kind of remember you're in a city but also look out into the water so really great. I'd love to shift the conversation toward the role of BIAs as connectors, you know, bringing together businesses, residents and the broader community. What kind of matchmaking do you find yourself doing? And, through those connections, what kinds of innovation is emerging along the waterfront?

Tim Kocur :

We have a bit of a role where we can get stakeholders who don't necessarily naturally work together to work together. I think that we're quite fortunate. It's actually a bit of a fun challenge for us to find the right solution to get something done. I mentioned that one of my favorite examples right now is we've put out our own signage for wayfinding on Queens Quay and it was a legacy of the different stakeholders. Like the Parks Department, harborfront Center. New parks that are being developed didn't necessarily even have proper signage identifying that you're in that park, let alone saying like this way, harborfront Center. And the Power Plant Gallery, this way the Ferry Terminal. Like it's kind of shocking how often businesses will tell us people come in asking how to get to the ferry terminal and they're within a block of the ferry terminal and it's because there just wasn't a focus of any of these larger stakeholder initiatives, whereas the BIA is a gap-filling organization. Can we just put out our own signage that we can afford to put out that also includes events listings, also includes the local restaurants you can walk to from this center point and people generally say yes. I mean it's like part of our job is to find these creative ways and affordable ways to cut red tape. But I think that's our role is to find these solutions.

Tim Kocur :

I think one thing I haven't really gotten into yet, julie, is we have a better role, where I I always joke that we're the eighth largest waterfront stakeholder and it's because there's the waterfront is as great as it is already because a lot of different entities have done great things, like the city touches on everything. You've got different parks, department entities, including the toronto islands Place. They've done these amazing things on the waterfront and have significant room to grow to. You've got Waterfront Toronto representing all three levels of government on the eastern waterfront of the Port Lands has more development potential to come in the future, and so these stakeholders all kind of developed on their own, but now we're looking at ways they can all work together. I think that's sort of how a great neighborhood really emerges around the world is. You get lucky with a bunch of things happening well, and so we see our role as the BIA to be a cheerleader and supporter and connector for all of the greater waterfront, because we've always taken the perspective that if all of those individual stakeholders are successful oh, I didn't even mention Port Toronto has an airport. There's another major entity. So if all of these different entities are successful in their goals, the businesses will benefit.

Tim Kocur :

So in a lot of ways we try to stay out of the way and just support what the major stakeholders want, but also try to be the connector and the glue, like, for instance, you came to the event last week at the Board of Trade about. It was Hoverlink that had a big announcement about their hovercraft service they aim to have between the Toronto Harbour and St Catharines in a couple of years. We were delighted because we've been working with the Board of Trade to do events about the broader waterfront. So instead of just being an announcement about just one thing on the waterfront, the hovercrafts, like that got the immediate attention. But in the room you saw the panels were actually about like, what does this mean for connectivity across all of the stakeholders and the emerging waterfront vision? And then also for arts and culture. What does this mean about connecting us to places like niagara and the lake? How do we attract tourists together, not just as separate entities? And so that's like the big win for the bia is whenever we can see progress to the vision of the waterfront being discussed.

Tim Kocur :

That as more than one project, because in the media I think we haven't really gotten into this, but usually when the waterfront's in the media it's one controversy or another, but it's usually just one few acre site that's controversial for one reason or another, whereas if you see the map behind me, this is great for a podcast. To point to a map, I know Julia, but we're always showing the map of the entire Inner Harbor plus what's around it, like basically Exhibition Place, ontario Place, through the central waterfront, the harbourfront centre, the island airport to the new emerging portlands that's being developed by the City and Waterfront Trunnel, like that's what we see as the. We call it the 10 kilometre opportunity in a report that we sponsored with the Board of Trade last year. That's the whole waterfront that people we hope will be talking about in the future.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, and again, fantastic event and, to your point, just bringing together all of these multifaceted pieces the culture, the tourism, the business and I love that, like you guys are really a connector and I think, more than ever with when we're talking about the impact of social media, like great, it's an amplifier to get your message out, but like we need that human connection still and I think it's great that there's these events, there's this innovation to develop the waterfront further and the partnership piece. I want to lean into that. And again, the connection. We've seen different groups like BIAs, the Board of Trade and even city officials trying to make progress on different elements of bringing vibrancy to the city or tackling really serious issues, but not always together. Why has it maybe been siloed historically and what's your take on how we can build one big cohesive vision for the city of Toronto?

Tim Kocur :

So I think like yes, it sounds like a problem but that's actually fine. I think this will go into a bit of a story about. I mentioned that we were a sponsor, but the Board of Trade did a report about the broader waterfront last year called Ripple Effect, and they actually engaged a consultant from England who benchmarks world cities. You hired him to compare your museum and its arts and culture scene to Singapore and Tokyo and Sydney, and so he basically said Toronto is of the 30 cities that they regularly track on arts and culture investment from outside the country. Quality of life there's all kinds of things like the quality of parks and experience. Toronto is number nine. We're the ninth best city in the world, like there's London, paris, new York and Tokyo. They're the top four. No one's ever catching them. For quite a while we're in the next tier. But what this guy said was of those 30 cities where we rank pretty much last is we do not have a cohesive story of how we go around the world telling people about how great our city is. Like people tell us our city is great and we're like no, no, no, no, no, not us. And I mean it's Canadian modesty and in a way it's actually quite nice that we're not too arrogant about how great this city is. But he says that's actually fine because it's usually not municipal leadership expected to step up and solve these problems. It's like it kind of evolves a little bit through government and a little bit organically and quite often through the business communities. And so you see, like Waterfront Toronto to do a better job of planning out the eastern waterfront.

Tim Kocur :

In Portland All three levels of government determined that this was their plan for the eastern waterfront. That's obviously a sign of great success and that the mandate's extended through 2035 now. But then you've also got things like Harborfront Center that need to be integrated into this bigger vision of what's emerging around them. And so that's why this report, he basically said, just keep putting stakeholders together and encouraging them to work together.

Tim Kocur :

You can't expect one formal entity to manage an entire project, a city building project the size of the waterfront. And to be honest, julia, you probably don't want to Like if one stakeholder was in charge of the whole waterfront, it might not evolve the way many of us want. But if it's a whole bunch of people with their own goals also agreeing on the broader vision, like that's eventually how in another 20 or 30 years, when the whole waterfront project is likely pretty much built out probably only about halfway built right now. It truly can be a world-class waterfront, and it probably will. And just we're at the point where we want to see more collaboration and coordination amongst all those stakeholders and the different levels of government.

Julia Pennella:

I want to talk about the future. We talked about the 10 kilometer strip at the waterfront. There's so much, I think, untapped potential and we're seeing it slowly grow. But I want to point to and this was a bit of a controversial topic a few years ago, but Google's big smart city, sidewalk Labs, sparked a lot of excitement and a lot of public pushback. What exactly happened with Sidewalk Labs? It was a bit of a divisive topic. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened there?

Tim Kocur :

well, I might not be the right person to answer, but I can kind of give our perspective on it, I mean, but they were very active when I started, about six and a half, seven years ago now, and so I hope they're great, because they were just talking about this incredibly huge vision for the waterfront. I mean, the problem was they were talking about a vision beyond the 11 acres that they had actually been commissioned to explore. I guess I would say first that it was because it was Google it got a lot of attention and because of that it got a lot of attention and because of that it got a lot of negative attention when it didn't work. Like you definitely hear when you travel around the world, like Toronto scared away Google. I mean, that's not necessarily the case. I think it's fairly simple to describe what didn't work, as one thing was that they wanted to make a claim on a much larger area of property that was mostly city owned and was basically this crown jewel of future development for the next 30 years of Toronto, and it may not have been possible for the city of Toronto to ever actually grant that much authority, like it was really an 11 acre site Keysight that they were supposed to be talking about, but they, of course, as a large company, had a much bigger vision.

Tim Kocur :

The second problem was just change of leadership and governance structure at Google. If you read the book about this, I mean it started out as a founder-led project. One of the two original founders of Google was very passionate about pursuing different exciting projects like this, but then once they restructured into Alphabet, it fell into. It was a file of the new CFO and she said wait, how much money is this costing? So that was the second problem was it just may not have been financially feasible at Google's end. And then, of course, the pandemic happened. So that was within a month or two of the pandemic. That was done. That was five years ago now.

Tim Kocur :

But I think the excitement and ambition, I think like I'm still grateful that it happened, I think because it really kind of lit a fire under Toronto and the waterfront about like oh, wow, we really do have this great potential. Like if they're seeing all this possibility and some of the things that they were talking about are coming true, like there's now two tall timber wood buildings that are 10 or 11 stories on the eastern waterfront. That was the material they were pursuing building on. It may have happened anyway. But there's like Limberlost, the new George Brown College campus is open, I believe, this week for their Congress of Colleges and Universities in town.

Tim Kocur :

They had some ideas about expediting and getting the waterfront East LRT built faster and into the portlands. I mean, that's certainly. I think some of what they came up with may come true, because we know that getting that LRT funded and built is probably going to be more of a creative solution than an expensive solution. I think you'll actually see that kind of inspire some better concepts coming forward. And there's also the retail thing. I mean, there's a lot of excitement in our local business community but oh, wow, what is this going to look like? What is Google going to try retail-wise? And I actually think you'll probably see some pretty cool ideas, as I said, come out of the Keyside planning being led by Dream and others, because they're involved with so many other sites in that neighborhood, including the very exciting distillery district. So yeah, that's certainly not all negative. I mean, it's definitely positive. I hope that the reputation long term is that it just sort of spurred an even more ambitious vision for the eastern waterfront than would have happened otherwise.

Julia Pennella:

Yeah, I like that positive spin on it and I agree I think it lit a fire under the city's butt to be like well, here's the potential, here are some ideas and, like you said, some of them are being executed and hopefully we can take it by the reins and also like continue to expand that and make it with that cultural pulse that we kind of talked about uniquely to Toronto. And that's a wrap on this episode, but don't go too far. Tim's back for part two, where we dive even deeper into the beauty and untapped potential of Toronto's waterfront. We're also talking about some of the most pressing issues affecting the city, like homelessness, affordable housing and rising property taxes. But Tim also shares some Instagram-worthy events, creative collaborations and innovation happening right along Toronto's shore. It's all about making the waterfront a place for everyone. Right along Toronto's shore, it's all about making the waterfront a place for everyone. So hit play on part two and let's keep the conversation going right here on. Let's Talk Politics.