I used to live on Vancouver Island. Sometimes, I would travel up the island to check out local sights. Instead of quaint family restaurants with local specials along the way, there were big chain fast-food places like Denny’s, Dairy Queen, and McDonalds on the main strips. Many towns on the island were like this. A product of decades of governments that valued big money above all else. Twenty-five years later, the same thing is happening here.
Small local restaurants that attracted a lot of locals are closing. In our area, that would be The Oakwood Hardware, The Girl from Ipanema, and recently the 5 Points Bar and Grill, to name a few.
Small shops close while big chain restaurants stay open. Pizza Pizza, Popeye’s, Tim Hortons. These big fast-food operators are staying open on our streets. It’s a continuation of what we saw during COVID. Small shops forced to shut down while big box stores were allowed to stay open.
Instead of helping, the federal government is acting like the Grim Reaper. Trudeau is demanding local businesses in critical condition pay back their $60,000 in CEBA loans, or else. It doesn’t matter those small businesses never recovered from COVID. Their old clients never returned in the numbers they used to. And their rents doubled in a city where landlords can charge whatever they want for commercial rent.
While the feds tighten the screws on mom-and-pop shops, they let billionaires get away with the real loot. Laid off workers and small businesses didn’t line their bank accounts with federal help. Billionaires did.
Canadian workers and small businesses spent all the COVID money given to them to pay their debtors. That’s why 15 new billionaires were created during the pandemic. Canada’s 59 billionaires increased their wealth by $111 billion since 2020, about the same amount the Canadian government spent on COVID-19 income support.
If Trudeau doesn’t change course soon, our main streets will look like the big box, big chain, main strips of Vancouver Island. No offence Vancouver Islanders.
