It’s been five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Businesses shuttered almost overnight, offices and other workplaces were left deserted, and downtown Toronto fell eerily silent.
Through numerous cycles of lockdowns and reopenings, businesses both small and large struggled to survive, and while economic recovery from the ravages of 2020 looks promising, it remains challenging.
“It was a huge shock – an economic shock the likes of which we really hadn’t seen in decades and decades. On that famous March day, people went home. They left their offices, and the whole world changed,” says Giles Gherson, President and CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
“Until that time, it was routine for people to come to the office five days a week and a whole economy grew around that. You had retail, you had restaurants all serving the office worker.”
Gherson says that with the switch to working from home and the adoption of a hybrid model for many, people have been slow to return to the office, but numbers have been going up.
“The latest numbers that I’ve seen we’re now at return to the workplace in the downtown core, it’s about 87 per cent on Wednesdays, which is the peak day. That’s about 13 points higher [than] it was a year ago. The average weekday is 77 per cent. Again, that’s about 10 points higher than it was a year ago. So that’s pretty good progress. Fridays are still pretty slow at around 48 per cent,” he says.
Waterfront pub owner Peter Bulut confirms that the lack of office workers directly translates into a lack of business on weekdays.
“The worst part is not having everyone back in the office because they’re not going out for those lunches together. They’re not socializing together. And the pub down here, Monday and Friday are pretty quiet still after all of these years, which is surprising,” says the GLB Brewpub owner.
“We are in like a food plaza here, and I’ve spoken with the majority of the owners and everybody’s feeling the pain of not having the volume of people that we used to have pre-pandemic.”
The Waterfront BIA, within which the pub is located, says the area is “generally doing well,” but there is always room for improvement.
“During the pandemic, we definitely had a very, very significant drop in visits, but then even the return, we’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels in the spring and summer in terms of total visits,” says executive director Tim Kocur.
“It has been tracking up each year since 2020. But it is still not quite at the 2019, pre-pandemic level unfortunately.”
He adds that new developments along Queens Quay East have brought more residents to the area, which will no doubt be a boon for the local economy. The number of local visitors has also gone up, but out-of-town visitors aren’t flocking to the area like they used to.
“International visits are not as high, and you’ll see that across the city as well. Those are typically the tourists and visitors you expect to spend the most. So the loss of that has been a bit hard on some businesses,” he says.
In the downtown Yonge Street area, which typically sees some of the highest volumes of pedestrian traffic in the country, the bounce back has been fairly strong.
“I think the thing that I remember most from COVID was standing at the middle of Yonge and Dundas and you could almost see a tumbleweed. There was nothing. There were no people, there was no activity. When we started to feel like things might be shifting was probably around the spring of 2022,” says Pauline Larsen, executive director of the Downtown Yonge BIA.
“Over 2021 to 2024, we saw the number of pedestrians coming back about 75 per cent. So in 2024, we recorded 60 million people back walking along this street. On the flip side, we would still see our traffic counts and pedestrian traffic counts probably 10 per cent below 2019 as an average. But we are seeing them exceed 2019 levels for holidays, like Thanksgiving for instance – those are tending to peak higher than the pre-COVID levels.”
Larsen adds that numerous new businesses have opened up along Yonge street as well as taken up residence in the Eaton Centre.
“I’ll also highlight that in the street front, we got up to about a 19 per cent retail vacancy during COVID, that’s back down to about 13 per cent.”
In addition, Larsen says eight out of 10 retail stores in the neighbourhood that were open in 2021 remained open in 2024.
Toronto’s oldest steakhouse on Yonge and Elm Streets was one of the survivors, and the owner says business is getting better, but there’s a long way to go.
“Returning from COVID was very difficult. You never get that money back. In the restaurant business, we sell time in a seat. Nobody ever comes in and says ‘I missed dinner yesterday, I’m going to have two entrees tonight.’ That’s not what happens,” says Aaron Barberian, owner of Barberian’s Steak House.
“The drag on our business is still there. Some of the debts related to that are still there … there was significant inflation near the end of COVID, so we had to raise our prices. So if you look at the top line number, we’re as good as we’ve ever been. But the number of customers has gone down a little bit. And whether it’s become more profitable or not? Not so much because margins are shrinking as inflation takes its toll on our bottom line.”
The BIA for Queen West, long considered one of “downtown’s coolest streets,” says that, like in other parts of the city, momentum is ramping up, but slowly.
“Our traffic numbers have increased. Transit numbers have increased into the quarter, which is wonderful, which has allowed us to continue strong business growth in this area. However, business hasn’t gone back and hasn’t really translated to robust business sales,” says executive director Simon Wong.
“Our traffic is still down. I’d say probably about 25 per cent compared to pre-pandemic, but you definitely see that improving,” adds Wong, who also serves as the General Manager of Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) on Queen Street West.
“Over the last holiday season, we saw the foot traffic coming back a lot more than the previous two years.”
One of the challenges Wong says most BIAs are facing across the city is traffic mitigation and advocating for better congestion management, which will make visiting the downtown core from neighbouring areas easier. Gherson agrees that gridlock is turning people away from the downtown core.
Gridlock action plan proposed by Toronto Region Board of Trade
Gherson says Toronto’s congestion problem went into overdrive post-COVID. While there are massive transit projects underway that will ultimately alleviate the issue, while they’re being built, people are choosing to drive.
“A lot of people took the opportunity during COVID, since they’re working from home, to move farther out from the city core, and now they have much longer commutes. 75 per cent of commuters drive and the roads are clogged,” he says.
“Commutes that used to take half an hour are now taking close to an hour. You’ve all heard the war stories. And then that becomes an inhibitor to coming downtown. They don’t want to go shopping, they don’t want to go to entertainment events or sporting events. They don’t even want to visit their family.”
In a poll conducted by Ipsos commissioned by the board of trade in 2024, 86 pre cent of respondents said congestion is a crisis, and 85 per cent agreed it is hurting the economy. Around 40 per cent said they don’t visit family as often as they used to due to traffic woes.
“We, as a board of trade, believe that job one for the city has to be to solve the congestion crisis,” says Gherson.
The board had proposed a Gridlock Action Plan to the City of Toronto with recommendations that they believe would go a long way in relieving the traffic headaches in the core.
Key points in the plan relate to unclogging the city’s 16 major arteries as well as automated enforcement of traffic rules in those areas.
“We don’t have enough police. We’ve got the wild west on the roads here now. People are so frustrated. You’ve got people parking illegally during rush hour, which causes more bottlenecks. People pulling a U-turn, blocking the box as they run red lights. All of those things are happening like an epidemic,” says Gherson.
“We need much better enforcement for discipline on the roads that will have a huge impact on congestion. Not all roads, just those major arteries. We think we need automated enforcement there.”
The plan also proposes incentivizing overnight deliveries.
“Because again, delivery vehicles during the day can really cause big bottlenecks,” says Gherson.
“We think there needs to be a congestion commissioner that the city needs to have at a very senior level, [someone] who will oversee the battle against congestion. Because without a project manager, you’re not going to solve the problem. We think we need somebody who’s clearly identified with that mandate, or we don’t think it’s going to get resolved. It’s Toronto’s biggest problem and it needs a very big solution and somebody to lead that.”
Gherson says the city is reviewing the plan, and so far, the response has been fairly positive. He says the board understands that the plan may involve enacting some unpopular mitigation measures, but “you’re not going to make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
“If you really want to solve the congestion problem, you’re going to have to do some things that some people aren’t going to like. But we’ve got to focus on the next five years or six years until the transit build is done. Then we may be able to rethink some of these things, but until that’s done, we’ve got to get the city moving again.”