Canada Kanthaswamy Temple Society (Scarborough)
For worshippers of Lord Murugan, an incarnation of Shiva popular in Toronto’s Tamil community, Nov. 25 was anything but a gloomy fall day.Scarborough’s Canada Kanthaswamy Temple, dedicated to Murugan, had been without a home all last spring and summer.
The City of Toronto refused last April to let the temple, rebuilt on its property at 733 Birchmount Rd. but unfinished, open with a partial occupancy permit. Nor could the temple continue at what had been its temporary home, a warehouse at 1380 Birchmount Rd. where it fought successfully to continue holding services until last March 31.
Devotees of the ever-youthful Murugan, after three decades of organization in Scarborough, were left in “kind of a grey area,” said MuthuSubramaniam, the temple president.
We had a little bit of tough time.”
That changed in November when, after two refusals, the city said yes, and the temple, in a beautiful new building, started a new chapter as a local institution.
The Kanthaswamy temple began in a warehouse at Kennedy Road and Passmore Avenue in 1991, and bought 733 Birchmount in 2000, when a one-storey building on the property was used by Bell Canada and what Subramaniam described as a “cowboy-style restaurant.”
The temple did the best it could, until the structure started to crack here and there, and “finally, we said enough is enough,” said Subramaniam.
“What is the point of putting on a new roof?”
To pay for a new and proper building, temple directors refinanced their homes, and Kanthaswamy took interest-free loans from other Hindu temples, while donations from worshippers continued on wedding days, birthdays and remembrance days for fathers.
Bad weather and problems scheduling tradespeople put construction behind schedule, Subramaniam acknowledged. “Plus, (raising) the money is not an easy thing.”
The temple also launched its bid for rebirth when the city was determined to stem losses of industrial land in “employment areas” along roads such as Birchmount, which was already home to churches, temples and schools, as well as factories.
