Canada's empty downtowns defy post-pandemic return-to-normal — and business owners are feeling the pain

How weak? Chapple and her colleagues use cellphone data to compare current levels of activity — that is, the number of people downtown on a given day — to pre-pandemic levels. Some North American urban cores have come roaring back to life or even been reinvented altogether as post-COVID-19 boomtowns. For example, Salt Lake City’s activity level is at 139 per cent of what it was in 2019. But Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Edmonton and Calgary are all treading water around 50 per cent.

“It has kind of blown my brain, just how monumental the shift has been,” Glen Kristenbrun, a restaurant industry veteran, said. Kristenbrun isn’t the only one scratching his head about what happens next. Erik Joyal, president of the Ascari Hospitality Group, is also a restauranteur with a winning track record who suffered a crushing defeat during the pandemic.

“Today, if you walk down King Street on a Tuesday afternoon, you could fire a cannon and nobody would notice,” Joyal said. “The day traffic is not there at all.”Restaurateur Erik Joyal says morale in the restaurant industry is hovering around the point of despair.Some of that traffic, he said, has migrated to their friendly home neighbourhood restaurants that, pre-pandemic, only used to be open for dinner, but now have enough work-from-homers nearby to open at 11:30 a.m.

It is enough to make a successful restaurant guy want to throw in the towel, but Joyal hasn’t given up hope — he has two East End Toronto locations and a catering business — and he isn’t prepared to completely forsake the downtown core as a place to operate, but he’ll only jump back in if the conditions are “right.”

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