The Shaw Festival didn’t get a multimillion-dollar parking break for the Royal George Theatre rebuild.
A correction published this week clarifies that the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake did not “waive” parking requirements for the project.
The theatre was built long before modern municipal parking rules existed and was never required to provide general parking.
As long as it remains a theatre, that zero-parking requirement is legally grandfathered under the Ontario Planning Act. Shaw will still add five accessible parking spaces on-site.
Provincial law protects uses that were legally established before newer rules came into force, so the town can’t apply modern parking requirements as long as the property continues to operate as a theatre. In planning language, “use” refers to the activity occurring on the land — in this case, a theatre.
Current NOTL parking rules say a theatre the size of the original Royal George would require 104 parking spaces, and the rebuilt design would require 105.
Shaw owes a single $72,664 cash-in-lieu fee for that one additional space. This will come alongside the rebuild’s site plan agreement. The town’s website says the site plan is under review.
The extra space isn’t grandfathered because only the theatre’s original zero-parking requirement is protected, not the new number created by the rebuilt design.
If a theatre had no grandfathered protection and had to meet today’s parking rules, more than 100 required spaces would cost over $7 million at current cash-in-lieu rates.
But the Royal George isn’t subject to those rules — its parking requirement remains legally grandfathered at zero.
