Mayor John Tory says that he remains hopeful that some of the city’s summer events can go forward this year but he said that it will “depend entirely” on where things stand with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city has not issued any permits for public events since the beginning of the pandemic last winter but Tory told CP24 during an interview on Thursday morning that he is at least hopeful that some events could be held this summer once a wider swath of the population has been vaccinated.

“We have talked about the desirability of it and I have sort set a personal kind of goal of saying could we have some Canada Day events? So I hope that we can be able to issue those permits and plan on having those events but it is going to depend entirely on how things go with both the fighting of the virus by people staying home and secondly how the vaccination programs go,” he said. “At the moment I think it is right on the margins. I think things will be getting better by the summer, I certainly hope they will but will they be better enough that we can have the crowd scenes that some of the events entail?’

By last May the city had cancelled permits for all summers events and festivals, wiping out major economic drivers like the annual Pride parade, Taste of the Danforth and the Toronto Caribbean Carnival.

Speaking with CP24 on Friday, Tory acknowledged that the city will have to make a decision on this summer’s events “as soon as possible” in order to provide organizers enough time to plan but he said that staff “are putting that day off for as long as possible” in order to garner a better idea of what the future holds.

“It may be that we can issue permits for these kinds of street festivals and so on but somehow have significant restrictions on the crowd. That is the hard thing,” he said. “You know if you have Taste of the Danforth how do you say well only a quarter as many people can come? I just think we are going to have to take it day by day and we obviously know that we have to give news to these organizations as soon as possible as to whether we are going to issue the permits so they can do their planning work if it is going to happen.”