The Toronto Media Arts Centre will make its case for an interim occupation of a downtown condo building in court next month.

On Wednesday, a court determined that the City of Toronto and Centre will appear on Jan. 17.

The Toronto Media Arts Centre wants to secure an interim lease within the condo near Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd.

The Toronto Media Arts Centre (TMAC) had submitted the motion in hopes of eventually securing an interim lease within the condo near Queen St. W. and Dovercourt Rd.

Since 2015, the Centre has been locked in a fight with the City to greenlight its agreement of purchase and sale of the 36,000-square-foot facility, an action that’s been repeatedly refused by the city, despite the planning department’s Section 37 development provision. Section 37 provisions enable the City to negotiate contributions towards local community benefits when a development requires a Zoning By-law amendment.

The group then sued the city, along with Urbancorp, a large-scale condominium developer that has gone bankrupt, citing a breach of contract.

The four organizations that comprise the Centre are either homeless or soon to be, Henry Faber, president of the Toronto Media Arts Centre said.

“We filed a notice for this injunction,” said Faber. “The city’s response was not to that motion. It was to get the whole lawsuit dismissed — same as their defence from 2015.”

This was blocked by the judge, he said.

In an affidavit, the City says the group’s current iteration is different than the one it initially made the agreement with.

“Since the city first engaged with TMAC, six of the eight organizations have resigned from TMAC, and two more have joined it and its Board of Directors (without the city’s consent, which the city asserts is required),” it says.

The Toronto Media Arts Centre has gone through several membership changes since it first formed in 2003. Anchored in recent years by the Images Festival, it has included venerable artist-run centres like Gallery TPW and InterAccess. None of them remain part of the not-for-profit consortium, which now counts as members Charles Street Video, the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Gamma Space, and Dames Making Games, aimed at increasing female participation in video game culture.

Sally Han, manager of cultural partnerships with the city’s arts and culture division, says in an affidavit the Toronto Media Arts Centre is incapable of raising adequate funds.

“According to the Canada Revenue Agency TMAC has not raised a single dollar in receiptable charitable donations since reporting as a charity in 2014,” she says.

But Faber says TMAC has invested heavily in the facility.

“It is a space that TMAC has put over $800,000 of arts funding into, spent designing, designing the theatre, the galleries,” he said. “The engraved plates on the elevators say ‘TMAC’ on them. From our perspective, it’s unquestionable who this was intended for.”

Councillor Ana Bailao, has been involved with the negotiations for more than two years. Her office declined to comment for this story.

First hatched in 2011 as a partnership between TMAC and Urbancorp, the facility was hailed as an emblem of the right-minded evolution of the city’s controversial Section 37 development provision.

The provision had been used for years by developers to gain their projects additional height outside the city’s official plan in exchange for a “community benefit” — most often, a piece of public art or a parkette.

The TMAC space was conceived as a way to use the section 37 provision to address an urgent need, as a remedy to both the rampant gentrification of the area and the displacement of its cultural community.

Partly brokered by a group of local residents called Active 18, the thinking that went in to the TMAC project has helped to serve as a model for similar projects. Crow’s Theatre on Carlaw Street, gained ownership of their space at the foot of a new condominium tower through the section 37 provision earlier this year.

But the pioneer of the concept is still shut out of the space some six years on.

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“We agree to the fundamental principles of this agreement,” Faber said, “we just want interim occupancy. We said three years ago, that if we didn’t resolve this, the organizations that make up TMAC would be out of space and unable to do their activities.”

Correction – December 22, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said a judge ruled against the City of Toronto’s efforts to block the organization from occupying space in a Queen St. W. condo building and granted them an injunction. In fact, the judge did not grant or rule upon an injunction at this time. The court appearance on Dec. 20 was to set a date to argue TMAC's request for interim occupation.

With files from Murray Whyte