After a Friday night stacked with Finger Eleven, Headstones and The Tea Party, the Great Canadian Resort Toronto kept the momentum rolling. On Saturday, December 6, 2025, hometown heroes Our Lady Peace closed out the weekend with a sold-out, full-throttle celebration of their OLP 30 tour.
For Raine Maida, it was a return to familiar ground.
“I’m not sure where we are… Woodbine? Hello, Woodbine. Well, technically Etobicoke, and if it’s Etobicoke man that’s where I grew up,” Maida said, grinning as the crowd roared. “How many people from Etobicoke? Alright, Etobicoke, let’s hear those voices, alright?” He launched back into the final chorus of Superman’s Dead, as the room lit up with hometown pride.
The band fed off the energy all night. Bassist Duncan Coutts spent the set trading smiles and thumbs-up with the audience. Guitarist Steve Mazur tore through his solos with quiet intensity, surfacing for air between runs. Behind them, drummer Jason Pierce kept the 5,000-seat venue shaking through the 17-song, 90-minute performance.
A red-washed, distorted graphic of a Toronto subway car flashed across the video wall before Maida paused to tell a story rooted just streets away. He talked about being a young musician in Etobicoke — kicked out of high school, unsure of a path forward — until one moment of clarity changed everything.
“Forgive me if you’ve heard this story, I’ve been telling it all year long as we’ve been celebrating the whole OLP 30. It wasn’t very far from here, I was living in Etobicoke, I just got kicked out of high school and I was living with my dad. Trying to figure out how to do this, with no idea, just a dumb kid from Etobicoke wanting to be a musician.
“What I did, in my great wisdom, I bought two tickets to what was called the Toronto Music Awards. Took the bus to the Bloor Station downtown, sat in this place, kind’ve like this, for two and a half hours and watched the worst music I’d ever seen in my life.
“I was just about ready to go, I went to my girlfriend, ‘we’ve got to get out of here, this is enough.’ I was hoping to meet like a manager or a record label, but none of that was happening. My soul was being sucked out of me I felt, but there was another band that was coming on, the awards were done and they were going to play two songs. I had heard their name, hadn’t heard their music yet, but I thought it was worth staying.
“What happened was they came out and they played two songs and in 10 minutes I was transformed because it made perfect sense to me, it was with this clarity that I realized there is a very distinct difference between entertainment and art and I swore at that moment that I would chase art for the rest of my life. So the story goes that without that band there might not have ever be an OLP 30, I might be laying drywall, or I might be a mason, or a roofer, as a lot of people from Etobicoke are. But it just so happened that band was The Tragically Hip, and if you don’t mind taking out your phones, we’re going to light this place up with this next song.”
The band proceeded to perform a riveting cover of The Hip’s 1992 classic ‘Locked in the Trunk of a Car’.
The night also carried heavier emotional beats. Maida introduced a song the group had retired for nearly two decades.
“This next song we hadn’t played for 19 years. We were asked by the WWE to walk a walk out song for a wrestler. We said yes. We wrote the song, recorded it. Before it really came out an unspeakable tragedy surrounded this wrestler’s life, a suicide and some other stuff that we won’t talk about. We decided that we just couldn’t play this song, but it seems like over the last 18 or 19 years we talk about mental health a lot more, we talk about this story, we talk about erasing stigma, we talk about trying to tell our friends that you can talk to somebody and somebody will listen and you can get help. So, we re-recorded this song and we tried to flip it. Every penny that it makes on those streaming services will go to suicide hotlines, mental health awareness.”
When the song concluded, numbers for local suicide hotlines flashed on the screen behind them.
Coutts followed with his own dedication.
“A very close friend passed away this summer and he would come to the shows. Many of his friends and family are here tonight. He would always bug me that we never played this next song. So, this is for Paul and it’s Man Of Steel.”
As the night closed, Maida thanked the crowd with unmistakable gratitude.
“You’ve been amazing. Thank-you so much, everyone. You probably don’t understand this, but for us this is a gift playing here, close to home with so many friendly people, this is amazing.”
SWOMP’s Our Lady Peace Photo Gallery
On Tuesday, December 9, 2025, the band announced an extension of the OLP 30 tour into the United States for 2026, unveiling 21 dates with special guests The Verve Pipe.
From the band’s announcement:
“To our American friends — we heard you. You wanted the OLP30 tour in the US and today we are happy to announce 21 shows in the US to continue our OLP30 celebration with you. We’re so excited to get back down to the US to celebrate with you. Just like on the Canadian OLP30 dates, we’ll be playing a full headline set and digging deep into the catalogue. We hope you can join us!”
More details can be found at https://www.ourladypeace.com/.
Opening the night was Canadian indie rock band Kasador from Kingston, Ontario. Follow the band at kasadorband.com. Here are SWOMP’s photos form their set:
