Security measures discussed at Toronto Festival and Event Safety Summit in light of Vancouver attack

With the summer festival season is right around the corner in Toronto, festival organizers, event planners and city officials all gathered at the Toronto Festival & Event Safety Summit to discuss how to keep the events safe amid the growing costs for these security measures.

“By gosh, if we have to curtail our activities because of fear? Absolutely not. That’s not who we are as a city,” said Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow.

About 150 festival organizers and security experts at the summit looked at several topics including how emergency services collaborate with event producers, the role of a safety consultant to support the festival and event sector and barrier measures including hostile vehicle mitigation. It’s a term you’ll hear more frequently, where concrete blocks or buses are used as barricades.

“M-V barriers, yellow barriers and they’re specifically there for vehicle mitigation,” said Charlotte Brookes, National Event Director for the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon. “The TTC has different vehicles buses that they will put in certain locations, city trucks, all of these various resources.”

Safety discussions are coming in the wake of the Lapu Lapu tragedy in Vancouver that killed 11 people which happened exactly one month ago today.

Nine women and two men died and 32 people were injured when the accused, 30-year-old Kai-Ji Adam Lo, allegedly drove an SUV through a crowded street at the Lapu-Lapu Day festival in East Vancouver.

“It was heartbreaking, we mourn,” said Mayor Olivia Chow.

Danilo Baluyot, executive director of Taste of Manila, said continuing to hold these family-friendly events following the deadly incident in Vancouver is about resiliency and diversity.

“We need the full support of people to show everyone that we will keep doing this for everyone.”

One major barrier facing festival organizers is the cost of the protective measures.

“The latest technology looks like a metal ‘L’ with a wheel on the back, and it could stop a vehicle pretty much in its tracks,” said Steve Adelman, Vice President of Event Safety Alliance USA. “Those are highly effective but also the most expensive means of preventing a vehicle from entering a crowd. Safety and security tend to be a stepchild. This is a new safety and security expense and that’s why it’s a difficult conversation.”

The price tag for mobile barriers can be in the thousands.

“With all this advocacy, I don’t want it to be forgotten that a lot of the expenses of these festivals is the organizations themselves who are paying these bills,” said Shelley Carroll, Toronto City Councillor for Don Valley North.

Eglinton-Lawrence City Councillor Mike Colle helped to initiate Monday’s summit. He called on other levels of government for funding.

“We want you to step up and pay for some of the security realities. Right now, they are not paying anything for the security needs that we need.”

An additional $750,000 dollars in city funding will be available to festival organizers to help cover rising security costs. This will bring money in the 2025 Special Events Stabilization Initiative up to $2.1 million. The funds, according to Pat Tobin, General Manager of economic Development and Culture, are allocated by an application and assessment basis, which is competitive.

“We never have the resources to fund all the applications. we did an announcement two months ago and 64 festivals received $2.65 million collectively, under the Cultural Festivals Funding program.”

“Perhaps the city could have purchased the hostile vehicle mitigation tools, and then the event organizers can actually rent from them because that is a huge expense from a lot of people,” said Mary Fragedakis, Executive Director at GreekTown on the Danforth BIA.

The city is adding $100,000 dollars in seed funding to help create a festivals association and will also roll out new event planning resources which have been prepared by the Event Safety Alliance.