Legendary Club The Guvernment Returns for One Night in Toronto to Celebrate 30th Anniversary

Iconic Toronto club The Guvernment will be returning to the city for one night only.

On Nov. 28, the shuttered venue’s parent company, INK Entertainment, will be hosting an event at its Rebel venue to celebrate the club’s 30th anniversary.

“30 years after it all began, we’re bringing a piece of Toronto nightlife history back for one night only,” INK writes on social media. “For the generations who lived it, the nights that defined an era and the memories that never left.”

Once known as RPM, the venue opened its doors as The Guvernment in September 1996. It became the overarching name for the two main performance venues, dance hub The Guvernment and concert venue Kool Haus (formerly known as The Warehouse).

Located near Queen’s Quay, the spaces hosted some of today’s biggest artists, including Coldplay, Oasis, Ashanti, The Black Keys and the late David Bowie, among others. Legends like deadmau5 helped build their careers there, and Kool Haus even hosted one of Drake’s first performances in 2006, when he opened for Ice Cube.

On weekends, the venue hosted “Spin Saturdays” to help boost the audience for local and international DJs like Armin van Buuren, David Guetta and more.

While The Guvernment was a hot spot for music fans, by 2014, it was confirmed by the venue’s parent company, INK Entertainment, that the 3,000-capacity event space would be demolished to make room for condos, a fate many local venues have faced since the 2010s.

“We were supposed to close a year ago and we fought, tooth and nail. We spent a lot of money on legal fees and ended up not being able to stretch it much more than a year,” the company’s CEO Charles Khabouth told Vice at the time. “I knew about it and delayed it as much as I could. I’m a little sad, but I feel that the club had its run.”

A year later, The Guvernment closed its doors. Canadian producer and DJ deadmau5 returned to the venue as the headliner for its closing night in January 2015, while the event space’s resident DJ Mark Oliver and Khabouth played the final track of the evening: a remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” by Patrick Cowley. One month later, the venue started its demolition process.

The space is now home to Daniels Waterfront, a condo building that is also home to arts and culture organizations including Daniels Artscape Launchpad and HXOUSE.

Over three decades later, Toronto’s nightlife scene is getting to relive the energy of one of its first major clubs.