Inside the bruising off-ice brawl over Moss Park Arena

While the pickup game is friendly — no hard hits or high elbows — for the past two years Moss Park Arena has been at the centre of a bruising off-ice battle between the local councillor, Chris Moise, and the volunteers who help run it.

The dispute over the state of the 50-year-old facility has featured allegations of bullying, mismanagement and slander, generating levels of rancour unheard of for normally sleepy municipal arena boards. At stake is more than the future of the Moss Park facility, as some councillors warn the negativity caused by the feud could dissuade residents from volunteering with the city.

Both sides insist they’re just trying to do what’s right for the arena and the surrounding community.

“We all came with the best of intentions,” said Andy Marcus, outgoing chair of the Moss Park Arena board, of his fellow members. A longtime minor hockey coach and lifelong player, Marcus, who owns a shop in St. Lawrence Market, applied to volunteer at the arena out of a desire to stay involved in the game after his kids got too old for it.

He claimed Moise’s attempts to overhaul the facility’s governance have been “slimy” and lacking transparency. “The whole process here has been really, really screwed up and unfair to be quite honest,” he said.

“We’re volunteers. We didn’t sign up for any of this s—-.”

Moise, a former police officer and addictions counsellor who is in his first term as Toronto Centre councillor, argues the board has allowed the arena to fall into disrepair, and not done enough to ensure local residents have equitable access to ice time. He told the Star he never bullied any board members, and has only ever advocated for the residents he was elected to serve. 

“I want to make sure that people in the community, especially Regent Park and St. James Town, have access to a clean facility, a safe facility,” he said at a council meeting last month, referencing two nearby underserved neighbourhoods. “The board consistently worked against me.”

Toronto owns 49 indoor arenas. Most are run directly by the city, but in a holdover from before amalgamation, eight of them in the former municipalities of Toronto and East York, including Moss Park, are overseen by boards of management. The boards consist of council-appointed volunteers, and are responsible for day-to-day programming and maintenance.

Boards are supposed to generate enough revenue through user fees to minimize the city’s rink operating costs, while the municipality provides funding for major capital work.

Moise was elected in October 2022, and as the local councillor has a seat on the 11-member Moss Park Arena board. Other members say their relationship with him got off to a rocky start months after he took office, when he began pushing them to fundraise for arena repairs. 

Karin Fritzlar, board vice-chair, said that was improper, because the board doesn’t have the capacity to come up with the required cash, and city policy dictates the municipal government is supposed to pay for building improvements that cost more than $50,000. 

“It’s like he doesn’t understand that we are actually not responsible for those big repairs,” said Fritzlar, a communications professional who spent her childhood as a recreational figure skater. 

The disagreement escalated in May 2024, when Moise put forward a council motion asking staff to look into dissolving the board and bringing Moss Park Arena under direct city control. Board members said they were blindsided.

As his proposal made its way through the council process, Moise voiced a range of complaints about the board at city hall meetings. He argued its members should better reflect the demographics of Toronto Centre, which has a higher proportion of lower-income and racialized residents compared to Toronto as a whole. Moise, who is Black, said when he was elected, none of the board members lived in the ward, and none of them “looked like me.”  

In addition to concerns that local underprivileged groups didn’t have equitable access to the rink, he recently suggested the arena, which is across the street from the Maxwell Meighen men’s shelter at Sherbourne and Queen Streets, should open its doors to allow the local homeless population to watch games or use the showers.

But much of the dispute has centred on the state of the arena itself. At last month’s council meeting, Moise displayed pictures of mould in the washrooms, inoperable showers and an outer door that for two years has been secured shut with a hockey stick. He blamed the problems on the “negligence” of the board, which he alleged had failed to address minor repairs until they grew into costly fixes.

He also slammed the board for requesting about $500,000 in emergency funding from the city in 2023 and 2024 after it missed its revenue targets.

“They expect the city to write them a cheque every year. So what exactly do they do?” he said at council.

Moise doesn’t deny that the city is responsible for funding major improvements, but said nothing prevents the board from helping to raise funds for repairs. He said his office worked hard on plans for fundraising events that would have brought in $1.2 million, but the board shut him down.  

The board leaders denied that. They said Moise brought them a proposal to hold a ball hockey tournament at the arena last summer, and while they told him that might not be feasible because the rink maintains its ice year-round, they didn’t prevent him from raising money.

Marcus, the board chair, said he was angered that Moise made the comments about the board shutting down the fundraiser at public meetings at city hall, and they weren’t given a fair chance to rebut his “lies.”

As to the board composition, the chair argued there’s nothing in the city’s policies that requires members to live near the arena or come from diverse racial backgrounds, and if Moise wanted to change that he should have taken it up with Toronto’s public appointments office, not criticized the board. Marcus said that regardless of their addresses the volunteers serving Moss Park are passionate about giving back to the community.

Fritzlar, the board vice-chair, called Moise’s concerns about lack of ice time for local youth “unfounded,” and said the arena is open to users of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. She said one of the reasons the arena required emergency funding in recent years is that it waives fees for a hockey house league that offers free registration and equipment to up to 325 youth who otherwise might not be able to afford to play.

At least some of the arena’s users disagree with assertions the rink isn’t well managed. Jeff Kassel, 53, has been playing pickup hockey at Moss Park for two decades. Like the other skaters who use the ice on weekday mornings, he doesn’t work a regular 9-to-5 job — he’s an actor. He lives on the west side of downtown but makes the trip because the ice is better than other city arenas.

He acknowledged the facility has issues, but said staff there do the best they can with limited resources. “Everybody who plays in it kind of knows these guys do the best job,” he said. “I think they put more effort in, I think they kind of baby the ice.”

When Moise’s proposal came back to Mayor Olivia Chow’s executive committee that month, arena users showed up to speak in defence of the current management, and Moise reconsidered. He agreed to keep the board in place, and instead put forward a list of recommendations he said would improve the arena’s governance. 

The recommendations, which council approved in February, directed the board to develop a multi-year strategic plan that includes identifying new revenue streams, providing more free public skates and considering “full reconstruction” of the arena. 

But while the councillor dropped his plan to bring the arena in-house, he still pushed for changes to the board. Days after the executive meeting, he tabled a motion to city council, again without notice, that would have rescinded the appointments of seven of its members, including Marcus and Fritzlar. He withdrew it before it went to a vote, but to board members it was further sign of the lack of transparency around Moise’s push for reform. 

There’s an unspoken rule at city hall that councillors don’t interfere in local matters in a colleague’s ward. But the Moss Park saga has pushed some to voice concerns.  

Coun. Stephen Holyday (Ward 2, Etobicoke Centre) told council last month that members shouldn’t interfere in the autonomy of arena boards, otherwise there could be a “chill effect” on volunteering. 

Coun. Paula Fletcher (Ward 14, Toronto-Danforth) was rankled by Moise’s motion that publicly listed the board members he wanted replaced. She said “a line got crossed here” and the motion “should never have been here on the floor of this council.” 

Marcus’s term as chair expired last month, and Moise told the Star a replacement will be appointed soon. Fritzlar’s term runs out in November, and she won’t be applying for another. “Not because I don’t want to — because I know that the councillor will not vote (for) me to be back on the board,” she said. 

She said she volunteered because she grew up figure skating in a small town arena that, like Moss Park, was under-resourced, and knows the value of giving kids time on the ice.

She predicted Moise’s “bullying” would discourage others from donating their time to the city. Who would want to volunteer knowing that “if they do something that’s contrary to what the city councillor wishes … their names all of a sudden are going to come up in a city council vote?” she said.

Moise maintains he did everything he could to foster good relations with the board, and all the suggestions he has made have been in the service of improving the arena.

“Having strong opinions and advocating for my community (which) I was elected to serve is not bullying,” the councillor said, adding that he felt “disrespected and dismissed” by the vice chair.

He said he was “putting my best foot forward and trying to do the best for my community,” but the board has treated the rink like their own “fiefdom.”

“They feel that they have some sort of ownership to it. And, you know, heaven forbid someone like me comes to tell them maybe it could be a little better,” he said.