CITATION: Eritrean Cultural Centre v. Toronto (City), 2025 ONSC 3672
DIVISIONAL COURT FILE NO.: 517/23 JR
DATE: 20250623
ONTARIO SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE
DIVISIONAL COURT
D.L. Corbett, Lococo and MacNeil JJ.
BETWEEN:
Eritrean Cultural Centre, Greater Toronto Eritrean Canadian Community Centre, Eritrean Canadian Association of Ontario Inc., and Estifanos Mehari
Applicants
- and -
City of Toronto
Respondent
COUNSEL:
Rob Kittredge and Senai Iman, for the Applicants
Tim Carre and Ryan Krahn, for the Respondent
HEARD at Toronto: November 26, 2024
REASONS FOR DECISION
D.L. Corbett J.
[1] The Applicants have run an annual three-day community event called “Festival Eritrea” in Toronto (the “Festival”) since the year 2000.
[2] In December 2022, the Applicants sought a Special Use Permit from the Respondent for its 2023 Festival, to be held August 5-7, 2023. The permit was granted by the Respondent on August 3, 2023, as sought, for a picnic area and an adjacent soccer field in Earlscourt Park.
[3] On the first day of the Festival, August 5th, it was interrupted by violent protests resulting in numerous injuries requiring that multiple people be taken to hospital for treatment, including one reported stabbing.
[4] At 10:00 pm on August 5th, the City revoked the Special Event Permit “as a result of violent events that have unfolded in relation to your organization’s permitted time at Earlscourt Park” and because the situation had “become a matter of public safety”.
[5] The Applicants wrote immediately to the City requesting reconsideration of the decision to revoke the permit; no response was received to this request.
[6] In the result, the balance of the 2023 Festival was cancelled and did not take place.
[7] This application for judicial review was commenced on September 1, 2023, seeking to quash the City’s revocation decision and for related relief.
Issues and Summary
[8] The parties raise the following issues:
a. Is the impugned decision amenable to judicial review?
b. Is the application for judicial review moot? If it is, should the court exercise its discretion to hear it?
c. Did the City breach the Applicants’ rights under ss. 2(b) and (c) of the Charter[^1]?
d. Is the impugned decision reasonable?
e. Was the impugned decision ultra vires the City?
[9] For the reasons that follow, I would find that the application is moot, and so I would not decide several of the legal issues raised by the parties.
[10] I conclude that the impugned decision was reasonable in substance, given the apprehended risk to public safety. I understand that the Applicants take issue with some policing decisions taken by Toronto Police Service, but those concerns do not render the City’s impugned decision unreasonable.
[11] It was a term of the City’s permit that the permitted event would not give rise to risk to public safety. In 2023, the violence that took place was a basis on which the City reasonably concluded that public safety was at risk and therefore that the permit should be withdrawn. No useful purpose would be served by entertaining an application to undo a decision that is substantively reasonable on its face and which cannot now be undone.
Analysis
1. Is the Decision Amenable to Judicial Review?
[12] Toronto argues that the City’s decision to withdraw a permit is not subject to judicial review because the impugned decision was not of a sufficiently public nature to engage the court’s judicial review jurisdiction (Toronto Factum, paras. 36-43). As stated by McLachlin J. (as she then was) in Committee for the Commonwealth of Canada v. Ontario, [1991] 1 SCR 139, para. 263: “[u]nder the Civil Code