{"id":7428,"date":"2009-10-26T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2009-10-26T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=7428"},"modified":"2009-10-26T14:03:39","modified_gmt":"2009-10-26T18:03:39","slug":"john-lorinc-a-graveyard-for-small-businesses-and-other-urban-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/10\/26\/john-lorinc-a-graveyard-for-small-businesses-and-other-urban-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"JOHN LORINC: A Graveyard for Small Businesses and other Urban Myths"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2066\/2244217570_b1dbf4f580.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" \/><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/images\/feature-graphics\/feature-lorinc.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"85\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Business groups come in various flavours and their messages run the gamut from insightful to irritating. My least favourite is the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents 100,000 members across Canada.<\/p>\n<p>Its chief mouthpiece is Catherine Swift, whose message that has been astonishingly consistent over the years: that almost everything governments do undermines small business.<\/p>\n<p>If one took what the CFIB says at face value, you&#8217;d have to conclude &#8212; all evidence to the contrary &#8212; that small business is a vanishing species, done in by idiot bureaucrats, conniving politicians and rapacious banks.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, Swift <a href=\"http:\/\/www.financialpost.com\/small-business\/story.html?id=2118500\">came out with a report<\/a> that concluded the City of Toronto is the worst place in the country to do business. One aggravating factor, according to her chorus of sirens: excessive regulation. (You&#8217;re glad you were sitting, no?)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to know how to respond to that kind of torque, except to note the glaring selectiveness in the analysis. If Toronto&#8217;s dead last, why&#8217;s the financial industry still here? Why is TTC ridership &#8212; an extremely reliable economic indicator &#8212; at an all time high? What about all those cars clogging up downtown streets &#8211; just driving around for the hell of it? And the cranes &#8212; what to make of the cranes?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>These kinds of studies remind me of those ominous, nonsensical warnings from the late 1980s that Toronto was on the verge of becoming Canada&#8217;s Detroit.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview with Matt Galloway on CBC, Swift neglected to mention that David Miller&#8217;s council has moved to ramp down business taxes to eliminate the long-standing gap between the 416 and 905. She forgot about the new street retailer property tax class, moves to protect industrial lands from the clutches of residential developers and the city&#8217;s long-standing support for its BIAs.<\/p>\n<p>Swift did, however, trot out the hoary old calumny against the St. Clair West right-of-way and its apparent business-killing consequences &#8212; noting that some of the CFIB&#8217;s own members had bought the farm because of construction delays. Swift seemed less concerned, oddly enough, about the well-being of the businesses that have toughed it out, as she blithely insinuated that StC-W is a commercial graveyard.<\/p>\n<p>I live a couple of blocks from St. Clair and Christie, and have watched with interest how the street has responded, first to the construction and now to its aftermath. Yes, some small, crappy businesses have vanished, but I&#8217;m not sad to see them go. Yet many good ones remained, and there&#8217;s been a steady influx of new businesses whose owners are clearly investing serious dollars.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because they recognize what Swift and others refuse to see, which is that the radical improvement of the public realm along St. Clair is, more than anything else, a boon to street retail and future development. The traffic moves well, the sidewalks are pristine, the parking is abundant, the streetscape, much improved.<\/p>\n<p>Swift won&#8217;t acknowledge these confounding details, probably because she hasn&#8217;t bothered to come down to the area to see with her own eyes what&#8217;s changed. Instead, she, like many others, continues to peddle mischaracterizations and myths.<\/p>\n<p>Strangely, though, the City hasn&#8217;t bothered to ante up a rebuttal &#8212; a glaring oversight, given that construction is poised to begin on other Transit City lines.<\/p>\n<p>Miller and his allies invested gobs of political energy in the approval fight. But there&#8217;s been virtually no follow-through on the back end, apart from a highly localized Buy-St Clair campaign from Councillor Joe Mihevc.<\/p>\n<p>With the right-of-way virtually completed from Yonge to Caledonia, the City should now be aggressively promoting the public realm improvements in a Toronto-wide marketing campaign &#8212; not just to rebut the Catherine Swifts of the world, but also to demonstrate to communities slated for the next Transit City lines how the finished product actually looks, feels and functions.<\/p>\n<p>Without loudly touting what&#8217;s been accomplished here, isn&#8217;t the City is ceding the battlefield and putting the post-Miller Transit City projects in jeopardy?<\/p>\n<p>P.S. If Swift is reading this post, I&#8217;d like to extend an invitation to her for lunch (on me) and a stroll on St. Clair West, just to see if reality and rhetoric match up&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p><em>photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/tanjatiziana\/2244217570\/\">Tanja Tiziana Burdi<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Business groups come in various flavours and their messages run the gamut from insightful to irritating. My least favourite is the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents 100,000 members across Canada. Its chief mouthpiece is Catherine Swift, whose message that has been astonishingly consistent over the years: that almost everything governments do undermines small<a href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/10\/26\/john-lorinc-a-graveyard-for-small-businesses-and-other-urban-myths\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"sr-only\">&#8220;JOHN LORINC: A Graveyard for Small Businesses and other Urban Myths&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,32,8],"tags":[457,13459,13457,307,408,425,13458,854,552,1030,1899,13460,13461,2322,19],"class_list":["post-7428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neighbourhoods","category-streetscape","category-transit","tag-canada","tag-canadian-federation-of-independent-businesses","tag-catherine-swift","tag-cbc","tag-councillor","tag-david-miller","tag-david-millers-council","tag-detroit","tag-joe-mihevc","tag-john-lorinc","tag-matt-galloway","tag-political-energy","tag-street-retail","tag-tanja-tiziana-burdi","tag-toronto"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>JOHN LORINC: A Graveyard for Small Businesses and other Urban Myths - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/10\/26\/john-lorinc-a-graveyard-for-small-businesses-and-other-urban-myths\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"JOHN LORINC: A Graveyard for Small Businesses and other Urban Myths - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Business groups come in various flavours and their messages run the gamut from insightful to irritating. 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