Civitan Club of Oakville

The Civitan Club of Oakville runs the Dorval Crossing Civitan Farmer’s Market — the Town of Oakville’s longest-running farmers’ market — and welcomed the Mercedes-Benz Oakville Bronte Harbour Classic 5K team every Saturday in the lead-up to the 2026 race.

Running Saturdays from May through November, the market gathers 50-plus local vendors and family farms selling fresh produce, baked goods, prepared foods, preserves, and artisan goods. And it’s a market with a heart: every dollar from market stalls supports local Oakville charities. For a community race built on neighbours showing up for neighbours, there was no better Saturday-morning partner.

Behind the market is a volunteer service club that has been quietly powering Oakville’s good causes since 1960. The Civitan Club’s mission is building good citizenship through service, with a special emphasis on supporting people with developmental disabilities — and its giving to Oakville and Halton charities, scholarships, and not-for-profit groups has averaged about $40,000 a year.

Why we call it the best farmers’ market in Canada

We do not say that lightly, and we are not saying it as a favour.

Look at one with an engineer’s eye and you can read it in twenty minutes. Where the stalls sit relative to the entrances. Whether the aisles still move at eleven o’clock. How long a problem lives before somebody solves it. Most outdoor markets are a set of tables that happen to be in the same parking lot on the same morning. Dorval Crossing is a designed thing — laid out, timed, staffed, and adjusted week over week by people who have been refining it for four decades.

Nothing about that is visible while you are there, which is the whole point. You just notice that the morning is easy. In our view it is the highest-quality farmers’ market in Canada, and it happens to be in Oakville. That is something this town should be proud of.

So here is the only ask on this page: go. Take your kids. Take your grandkids. Get there on a Saturday morning, walk the stalls slowly, talk to the growers and the bakers, buy something from someone whose name you learn. Stop at the Community Hub tent and say hello. Make a morning of it. If you have never been, you do not know what you are missing.

Not just a basket of vegetables: what else is on at the market

Here is the part people miss until they go: the market is an education.

The Civitan Market runs Ontario’s only market Community Hub — a tent, free of charge, where local organizations come to meet the community, hand out resources, explain what they do, and find the volunteers they need. On any given Saturday that might be the Oakville Public Library, Nucleus Independent Living, The Darling Home for Kids, Arthouse Halton, or a youth organization looking for the next set of hands. It is a weekly connection point for the whole town, sponsored by the Oakville Public Library and the Halton Community Services Directory.

And then there is everything laid on for the kids. RBC Kidz Day has grown into one of the biggest family days on Oakville’s summer calendar. There is face painting. There is a Family Fun Calendar printed every season and handed out at the gate, packed with live performances, contests, prize giveaways, and pop-up surprises weekend after weekend. There are therapy dogs and pet first aid at Pet Valu Petz Day. There are donation drives running right through to the end of November.

Go and see it for yourself — their Instagram is the fastest way to understand what actually happens there on a Saturday morning. It is not a row of tables selling produce. It is a town showing up for itself, with a farmers’ market attached.

Which is exactly why the money adds up. Every dollar from stall rentals goes to local causes — Kerr Street Mission, The Darling Home for Kids, the Oakville Distress Centre, Community Living Oakville, Nucleus Independent Living, the Oakville Public Library, Arthouse, the Women’s Centre of Halton, Big Brothers Big Sisters. The market’s own season poster celebrated more than $50,000 donated in 2024 alone.

Visiting the Oakville Farmers’ Market: hours, location and parking

Dorval Crossing Civitan Farmers’ Market 240 North Service Road West, Oakville, Ontario — Dorval Crossing East Plaza, at the southeast corner of North Service Road West and Dorval Drive. Saturdays, 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., May through November. Free parking on site, donated by the plaza’s property manager, BentallGreenOak.

Coming from the west, take the QEW eastbound, exit at Dorval Drive and turn north at the lights — the plaza entrance is on your right. From the east, take the QEW westbound to the Kerr Street / Dorval Drive exit, follow the signs to Dorval Drive keeping left, then turn right at the lights.

Forty-plus vendors, most Saturdays. Get there early if you want the bread.

Oakville Farmers’ Market FAQ

When is the Oakville Farmers’ Market open? Every Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., May through the end of November.

Where is the Oakville Farmers’ Market? Dorval Crossing East Plaza, 240 North Service Road West, Oakville — the southeast corner of North Service Road West and Dorval Drive. There is free on-site parking.

Is the Oakville Farmers’ Market free to attend? Yes. Admission and parking are both free, and the Community Hub is free for community organizations to use.

What is there for kids at the market? Plenty. RBC Kidz Day is one of the biggest family days on Oakville’s summer calendar, and there is face painting, live music, contests, prize draws and pop-up events running all season — the market prints a Family Fun Calendar each season and hands it out at the gate.

Who runs the Oakville Farmers’ Market? The Civitan Club of Oakville, a volunteer service club founded in 1960. The market has operated since 1979 and is the Town of Oakville’s longest-running farmers’ market.

Where does the money go? Every dollar from stall rentals is donated to Oakville and Halton charities, scholarships and not-for-profit groups — more than $50,000 in 2024 alone.

The man behind it

That photograph is from our race, not from the market — and that is the reason we chose it.

It is early on Father’s Day morning at Bronte Heritage Waterfront Park. The tent is up and square. The table is dressed and laid out. The sandwich board is already standing on the grass where people will walk past it. Behind him the harbour is flat and the vendor market is still waking up. Al McMullan is standing there, smiling, ready — well before the crowd he set up for arrived.

Nobody asked him to be there that early. Nobody asked him to be there at all. The Civitan Community Hub does not need a 5K; the market runs fine on its own. He brought it to our first race because a new event in his town was worth showing up for, and then he stood behind that table all morning doing what he does every Saturday — connecting people who need something with people who have it.

Al is one of three volunteer co-market managers, alongside Kevin Kisil and George Horhota — the “Three Amigos”, as they call themselves. Al carries the Community Hub and the front of house; Kevin and George are the engine behind vendor relations, logistics, operations, and equipment. The three of them took over from Doug Guthrie, who ran the market for more than forty years before retiring in 2022 and earned the title Honourary Mayor of the Oakville Farmers’ Market. Big shoes. They fit.

And it is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to miss: none of these men are paid. There is no job description behind any of it. A market that turns over tens of thousands of dollars a year for local charities is run, week in and week out, by volunteers who simply decided their town deserved one.

That is what a community looks like when somebody actually tends it. We have spent a year building a race on the same idea — that an event should leave the people around it better off than it found them — and it has been a privilege to learn from people who were doing it long before we showed up.

What they did for this race

A first-year race has no history, no word of mouth, and no reason for anyone to trust it. What it needs is somebody local to vouch for it out loud.

The Civitan Club gave us that. Through the spring of 2026 we had a place at the market every Saturday — not a paid booth, a welcome — and we used it to talk to Oakville in person, one conversation at a time, for months before a single runner lined up. A meaningful share of the field on Father’s Day first heard about the race standing in that parking lot on a Saturday morning. You cannot buy that, and we did not.

Then on race day they came to us. The Community Hub set up inside the Father’s Day Waterfront Festival among the other community groups — a small community sitting in the middle of ours. It was one of the best things about the 2026 race.

We owe the Civitan Club of Oakville more than a logo on a page. Go to the market. That will do nicely.