But the most trying issues can’t be abated by subsidies, planners say. These are problems posed by the geography of Toronto. When a festival reaches a certain level of popularity, police and civil servants start to question whether it can be safely contained.

Do West Fest, which organizers estimated would bring more than a million people to Dundas Street West between Ossington and Lansdowne avenues over a weekend in June, was shut down early by police after dozens of reported thefts and assaults. At certain junctures, the crowd was so thick movement was scarcely possible. Last month, the city denied Afrofest a permit to return to Woodbine Park, where it had been celebrating African music and culture every year since 2012. Police and city officials said the festival, which anticipated about 120,000 attendees over three days, had outgrown a park they say can only safely host 17,000 people at a time.

Now, urbanists and businesspeople are wondering if more inspired planning can make festivals less costly and dangerous. Some contend that short-lived, highly concentrated festivals that draw bigger and bigger crowds every year aren’t sustainable.

“Has this scaled up so much there isn’t a return on investment anymore?” said John Kiru, CEO of the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas. 

If Toronto wants to save summer, it needs to think long-term, they say, and reconfigure neighbourhoods to receive steady streams of people throughout the season, rather than floods every time there is a big event. It may also need to start financing festivals even more heavily, as the economics of hosting them make less sense to businesses every year. 

Toronto street festivals are most often hosted by local business associations, members of which say they bear this burden because increased foot traffic can boost local shops. Now, more and more of them are asking if the juice of planning a festival is worth the squeeze, according to Kiru, whose group represents the city’s 86 BIAs. 

“There are businesses across the city that will close during festival weekends because it’s not manageable for them as a business,” Kiru said. “People question how much money is being spent hosting them and if there is really a benefit for businesses that aren’t restaurants.”

These concerns aren’t new, Kiru said, but they are growing. Not only are security costs up, even from last year, when BIAs had to spend extra money on hostile vehicle mitigation after the Vancouver attack, but with the World Cup going on, security equipment and personnel were harder to source. 

If trends continue, it won’t make financial sense to keep hosting street festivals, he said. That’s why his group and the city are creating a “festival association” to come up with a plan to keep summer festivities alive. Kiru said a report from this new association should be published by year end. One recommendation is certain to be included, he said: Organizers are going to need more government money.   

Pat Tobin, general manager of economic development and culture for Toronto, said in a statement that the city plans an end-of-season debrief “to identify opportunities to improve process and incorporate change,” which he said is part of a regular review the city does of “financial support considerations, operational requirements and security measures” for festivals. 

To Fadi Masoud, an associate professor of landscape architecture and urbanism at the University of Toronto, the growing appetite for festivals in Toronto is a beautiful thing. It’s only natural to run up against space and budgetary constraints.  

Festivals are “essential to our civic identity, social cohesion, local businesses, and quality of life,” he said. “Every successful global city experiences growing pains as public life becomes more popular.”

Toronto doesn’t need to pare down festivals, Masoud said. The real challenge is to create more “permanent, high-quality public space” to accommodate them. 

“If you compare Toronto to Montreal, the difference is striking,” he said. Montreal makes several major streets car-free for the entire summer, not just select weekends. To Masoud, this is a city that has “built an urban framework that accommodates celebration.” 

Toronto’s approach, by contrast, concentrates “enormous numbers” of people into a handful of two-day weekend events. This is more difficult and costly to police, city officials have said.    

“That creates bottlenecks on streets never intended to absorb such intense, short-lived demand,” said Masoud. “Instead of asking whether neighbourhood festivals have become too large, perhaps we should be asking whether the city has provided enough space for them to succeed.”

Already there is a push by some at city hall to rework Toronto in this fashion. A successful motion in June by Coun. Josh Matlow instructed civil servants to create a “pedestrian streets program” in the city that could, hopefully, he said, designate new, permanent car-free streets by next summer. Matlow’s motion built off one by Coun. Chris Moise to pedestrianize the Church-Wellesley Village this summer. Matlow said he believes car-free streets ought to require fewer security measures than those with vehicle traffic.

Masoud called the Church Street pedestrian pilot a success that made the area “noticeably safer, more vibrant and more enjoyable.” The pilot was in play before and after Pride, when an estimated two million people showed up for the main festival weekend.  

This week, pollster Liaison Strategies asked Torontonians about their perceptions of safety. Sixty-eight per cent of respondents said they felt safe or very safe living in Toronto — but 51 per cent said they felt somewhat or much less safe here than last year. Sixty-one per cent said they would feel safe going to a festival or other large outdoor event; 37 per cent said they would not. 

Liaison reached 1,000 Torontonians by phone for this survey. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. 

At a press conference Friday announcing the arrest of two 18-year-old men for the Salsa shooting, police Chief Myron Demkiw said the current “threat environment” demands that police continue “projecting our presence” around places where many people gather, including festivals.

“You’re going to see more cops,” he said, speaking about Taste of the Danforth.

Expert on public space planning and design Jay Pitter says the mega-festivals of today are not receiving support commensurate with their rapid growth. These were mostly small, neighbourhood affairs when they started. Now they are citywide attractions, and she feels as though local BIAs deserve better tools. 

“It’s not about density — crowds are wonderful — but when you have them on narrow, car-centric streets without better spatial planning and design, you are inadvertently contributing to safety issues,” she said.  

There’s also a cultural shift when festivals explode, said Pitter. Initially, attendees all knew each other, providing a “built-in safety mechanism,” she said. But that connection to the area has been mostly severed. Organizers need to engender the feeling that when someone participates in an event in a given community, they become part of that community, and gain a sense of “belonging and empowerment” that makes them want to look out for the people around them. 

“Being together in public is a practice, a ritual,” said Pitter. “It’s not an event, it’s not entertainment, it’s a part of repairing civic life. We see festivals as one-off initiatives, but they are part of a broader placemaking ecology. They need to be interwoven into the culture of the city.” 

Toronto also needs to lend more of a hand to burgeoning festivals, often launched by small teams with little experience battling the “intricate and unduly complicated” bureaucracy. The inaugural Taste of Little Jamaica, for example, was cancelled this summer because organizers said they had issues securing permits. 

But this process can trip up veterans, too. Tamil Fest began in 2015 in Scarborough. This year, organizers had to move it to Markham. Dushy Gnanapragasam, vice-president of the Canadian Tamil Congress, said he would have loved to stay in Toronto. But the city was incommunicative, he said, in contrast with the City of Markham, where he said the mayor had been lobbying him to bring Tamil Fest over for years. 

Gnanapragasam said Toronto soured on the festival, which draws 250,000 people over two days, after a protest at its 2024 iteration turned violent. The festival was cancelled the following year over continued threats and high security costs, he said. 

When Gnanapragasam applied to host again this year, he said it felt as though he was communicating with “a wall.” It didn’t help, he said, that police had given him a quote for security services three times higher than what he’d budgeted for. 

“We did not get a yes, nor a no,” he said. “They kept passing the buck around … It became untenable.”