Do you need union labour at the Enercare Centre?

In brief. Often, yes. Exhibition Place, home of the Enercare Centre, is a City of Toronto-owned, unionized facility. The 2025 TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon Expo handbook gives booth assembly and dismantling to Labourers' Local 506, lets your own builder install only if it is Local 506-affiliated, and says non-union companies are not permitted. Simple marketing pop-up displays can be exempt. The practical question is who installs your booth on the floor, so ask the show early.

The exhibitor handbook for the 2025 TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon Expo, held in Hall A of the Enercare Centre that October, has a page headed "Union Restrictions at Enercare Centre". Its shortest line does the most work: non-union companies are not permitted. For anyone planning a custom booth at Exhibition Place, that page decides who can put the booth up, how labour gets budgeted and how the booth should be designed.

Brience is a Toronto-based custom fabrication and experiential design studio, and this is a question we'd want answered before quoting any Enercare build. Below is what the published rules say, with the show and year each comes from. Rules change by show and year, so read the manual for your own show. Our guide to hiring a fabricator in Toronto covers the other checks venues make.

According to the 2025 handbook, Exhibition Place is a City of Toronto-owned, unionized facility, and every exhibitor must follow its collective agreements with seven unions: labourers and cleaners, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, IATSE (stage and production crews), painters and CUPE. Its labour overview gives Labourers' Union Local 506 four kinds of work:

The rules for exhibitors are short. A general service contractor affiliated with Local 506 must be hired to do the labour. You may bring your own exhibit builder only if that builder is affiliated with Local 506. Your own staff may set up product displays and supervise the booth set-up, but union personnel do the actual labour. A small family business may install its own booth with its own employees. At that expo, OPS Event Rentals handled labour, furniture and material handling, Showtech supplied power and lighting, and the Enercare Centre looked after parking, cleaning, internet and plumbing.

There is one useful exception. What the handbook calls marketing pop-up exhibits don't need union labour: displays that are easy to put up and take down, often pack into a carrying case and need no specialized tools or skills, such as pop-up banners and literature racks. The handbook encourages exhibitors to send an example through the event organizer for assessment, which is the right move for anything borderline.

Read together, these rules separate two jobs that are easy to blur. Building the booth happens in a shop. Installing it happens on the Enercare floor, and that is where union jurisdiction applies. As we read it, a shop that isn't affiliated with Local 506 can still make your booth; what changes is who assembles it in the hall, and whether the builder's own people can do more than supervise. Confirm that reading with your show before you rely on it.

The 2025 Toronto International Boat Show at the Enercare Centre put it the same way from the contractor side. Its notice for exhibitor-appointed contractors, due to GES at least 30 days before the show, said an outside contractor may be required to hire installation labour from GES and may only be able to supervise, and that every company must follow the venue's union jurisdiction.

Boats at that show sit on things somebody built: carpeted stands, timber stairs up to the deck, frames for dealers' signs. The photos here are from the show's 2009 edition, when the building was still called the Direct Energy Centre. A booth that someone else will assemble needs a few things built in:

Exclusive services sit on top of the labour rules. Exhibition Place lists itself and its partners as the exclusive providers of banner hanging, booth cleaning, internet, parking, food and beverage (OVG Hospitality at the Enercare Centre), and electrical, plumbing and mechanical services through Showtech Power & Lighting, with labour included in its utility prices.

Before the design is final, ask the show manager:

Then bring the answers to your fabricator. If you'd like a second read of an Enercare brief, get in touch.

Sources: TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon, "2025 TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon Expo Exhibitor Handbook" (August 2025); GES, "Toronto International Boat Show: Notice of Intent to Hire an EAC" (January 2025); Exhibition Place, "Exhibiting Info" (accessed November 2026).