Toronto City Council gets a lot of flak, and often for good reason. So let’s take a moment to praise the elected officials of Canada’s largest city on an occasion where they moved the needle in the right direction: this week, council broadly liberalized the rules around corner stores opening in the city’s hallowed “neighbourhoods,” a term that’s not just a generic label but one that carries real legal force. Neighbourhoods, in Toronto’s plan, are areas that have historically been sheltered from change both in terms of building (the vast majority of the city has not, in fact, seen much new construction despite a decades-long building boom south of Bloor Street) as well as types of use: a lot designated for a home cannot be turned into a corner store, a pharmacy, or a barber shop.
The catch has been that the maps used to designate neighbourhoods don’t reflect the actual reality on the ground; thousands of corner stores exist in this city that shouldn’t, at least in the eyes of the official plan. When these businesses (operating with licences granted decades ago, under a more permissive zoning regime) close — often simply because the proprietors retire — it’s functionally illegal for someone to replace the lost store elsewhere. In the name of preserving “neighbourhood character” the city’s rules have been wrecking it, in slow motion, for decades. The city’s own research says they’ve been segregating land uses like this since at least 1959: it’s literally an idea that’s reached retirement age.
Aside from making our neighbourhoods marginally less salubrious with every passing year, there are real economic and environmental impacts to this. A neighbourhood where you can’t walk to the store is a neighbourhood where you’re compelled to drive; urban planning reports going back to the oil shocks of the 1970s have argued that simply allowing corner stores in more places could meaningfully reduce fossil fuel consumption. To put it another way, almost as soon as the victory over neighbourhood retail was complete, policymakers were realizing it had been a mistake — yet it’s still taken decades to reverse it even incrementally.
And to be clear, the measures adopted by Toronto City Council on Thursday are incremental. The broadest permissions will apply only to the wards of the old, densest, most walkable wards in the city, mirroring the decision on sixplexes from earlier this year. Unlike the sixplex vote, however, the city’s suburbs won’t be entirely untouched: planning and housing chair Gord Perks got suburban councillors to accept some new retail permission on major streets throughout the city’s periphery in exchange for some streets being declared entirely off-limits.
(I can’t help but note the two-faced nature of urban politics at work here. The excluded roads in question are, in many places, four-lane arterials that easily meet the definition of “major streets.” When anyone suggests accommodating vulnerable road users with things like bike lanes, we’re rebuffed with the argument that these busy suburban arterials aren’t the place for them; but propose to legalize retail uses and suddenly they transform into sleepy bucolic byways whose residents need to be sheltered. The only consistency is opposition to change.)
There are good reasons to be skeptical about just how much change this week’s reform will actually induce. As is Toronto’s practice, the by-law that could survive passage through council is heavily laden with enough conditions and caveats that any budding entrepreneurs will find it’s far from simple to open a retail location even in areas where it’s now theoretically permitted. The immediate impact will, amusingly enough, be the preservation of the status quo: retail locations that currently exist in the city will have a bit of recognition in law and won’t face the same level of public pressure to go away and die a quiet death.
The bigger question will be what happens if and when we do actually start to see neighbourhoods change in the way advocates would like to see — more small shops, more services, more lively communities. As has become clear in recent weeks as this issue has moved through public hearings, for some people these things are abominations before man and God. The opposition to the purely hypothetical changes has already been wild to behold; when real-life shops start opening the opposition will intensify further.
To be clear, this isn’t purely or exclusively a suburban phenomenon. Old Toronto supports sixplexes, except for where it doesn’t. They support garden suites, except for where they don’t. They support bike lanes, except for where they want to preserve parking spaces instead. The opposition to local retail that’s coming will primarily come from Old Toronto because that’s where the demand for these spaces is most intense, and local residents are no less protective of the status quo than anywhere else in the city. Perhaps the worst of all scenarios would be if we see a wave of applications for retail spaces across the core of the city and concomitant opposition in the summer months of the coming year, just as the coming municipal election campaign heats up. Will council have the stomach to try and rebuff angry voters in an election year? History gives us plenty of reason to be skeptical.
Finally, even if these reforms lead to more change than city officials intend, and even if those changes don’t spark a wave of opposition in an election year, the last 12 months compel us to ask whether these changes can survive provincial oversight. Regarding the Ford government’s moves on bike lanes, speed cameras, and homeless encampments, more than one local elected official in the GTA has described current Ontario policy to me as: “municipalities can do what they want in areas of their responsibility, unless something irritates Doug Ford from outside the windshield of his SUV.” Ford has been staunch in his defense of the suburbs staying suburban in the most classic 1950s sense of the word, and he’s made it clear that in Toronto at least, no local decision is too local to be reversed by the legislature.
Toronto’s elected officials did a good thing this week. Whether they can preserve that victory is another question altogether.
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