NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK. RANDALL WHITE, FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO, FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2023. To start with, Joyeux quatorze juillet et Bonne Fete Nationale! (Or in the American language Happy Bastille Day.)

Meanwhile, on the morning of Tuesday, July 11, 2023 my business partner and I went on a downtown Toronto excursion to test the argument that (quoting the headline on a recent blogTO piece) “Toronto’s downtown core is in major trouble as office vacancy rate soars.”

(See also in the Toronto Star in early July : “‘This will get worse before it gets better.’ Office vacancy rate in Toronto hits highest level in nearly three decades.” And then from this past April, in NOW magazine “Will downtown Toronto ever be the same? New stats show 30-year high on office vacancy rates” ; and from Bloomberg business news “Toronto Office Vacancies Hit 28-Year High as Remote Work Lingers.”)

We left from our own office in the streetcar suburbs of the old city — ordinarily about half an hour by public transit from downtown. This time the streetcar was re-routed just before the Don River, to avoid subway construction now underway at Queen and Yonge.

The streetcar turned up Broadview, then onto Dundas which it followed to the downtown core. We got off at Yonge and Dundas. Then for the first leg of our excursion we walked up Yonge north to Wellesley.

On the streetcar west of the Don River on Dundas we had seen tented and other homeless people on the sidewalk outside, especially in the area around S. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church near Parliament Street. One thing that struck me a short while later, walking up Yonge, was larger numbers of street people than I remember from my own daily downtown days long ago.

Walking up Yonge Street (and waiting for the subway back down)

I also remember being told many years ago about the ubiquity of street people in London, England — as if this were a sign of urban maturity that Toronto still lacked.

In the summer of 2023 both my business partner and I felt that, whatever else, Toronto has become more of an international big city than it used to be, with the requisite more ubiquitous street people — and many other things.

At the same time, you could see new buildings under construction along Yonge Street as well, and there were certainly many other non-street people walking along Yonge Street with us. Downtown Toronto did not remotely feel abandoned.

I recalled hearing just a few weeks ago from local friends with a son working in a European city, and now home for a short summer visit. He was struck by how much energy and bustle there is in Toronto today, compared to his current residence across the sea.

At Wellesley my business partner proposed that we get on the subway — free as a result of the two-hour grace period on the electronic fare we paid when we got on the streetcar in the city’s old early 20th century suburbs.

Waiting for the subway was our first real sign of “chaos” in Toronto today. We had to wait what seemed an interminable time to catch a southbound train that would take us back to Dundas. (The plot was to then walk through the Eaton Centre downtown mall to Queen Street, taking in this shopping and tourist side of the scene.)

It was at least very close to true that we probably could have walked to Dundas during the time we waited for the subway.

As my partner noted, if you had to face this kind of thing every day, going to work, it could become seriously annoying.

Eaton Centre and HBC

Starting at the Dundas subway station we walked through the Eaton Centre and then through the Hudson’s Bay Company store due south on Queen Street, in a stretch of Queen now made largely inaccessible by subway construction. Many others walking about did look like tourists.

“Americans like Toronto,” people from Montreal have traditionally complained, and this still seems true. Retail business of all sorts, tourist and local, was still going on at the Eaton Centre when we walked through it, though there was a small section apparently being renovated, by the southerly escalators at Queen.

The Hudson’s Bay Company — heir to a legendary “Indigenous-European” fur-trade enterprise in the growth of modern Canada, chartered by King Charles II in 1670 — is now a department store chain owned in the USA.

Its property in the old Simpson’s department store along Queen between Yonge and Bay in Toronto has grown more upscale than it used to be, underlined by the Saks Fifth Avenue outlet (owned by the HBC today) now occupying the most easterly end of the old Simpson’s store. In a recent effort to return to the more mass-market traditions of the old HBC, the downtown Toronto store now has a bargain-priced Zeller’s in the basement.

Fear and loathing in the financial district?

We walked out of the HBC store onto Bay Street (Toronto’s version of Wall Street in New York or the City in London). Then we walked south on Bay Street, from Queen to King in a quick and dirty survey of the local financial district — one of the city’s big economic strengths since the early 20th century (or even somewhat before : cf eg San Francisco in the USA).

Again there were a lot of other people about, walking on Bay Street with us. (And there were certainly fewer street people — as if they understand they are really not welcome in this very economically serious part of the downtown core.)

When we reached the corner of King Street and Bay, still the heart of the financial district with four big Canadian bank buildings in view, we paused to survey the glamour.

The Bank of Montreal (BMO, pronounced Bee-Moe nowadays) is on the northwest corner of Bay and King, and the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank) on the northeast. On the southern corners are the officially Toronto-headquartered Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD) on the southwest and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) broadly on the southeast.

(Just a little east on the south side of King Street is the old Canadian Bank of Commerce headquarters — from before the merger with the Imperial Bank of Canada on June 1, 1961. From 1931 to 1962 it was “the tallest building in the British Empire” : in the days before London decided to join the tall building trend elsewhere.)

The building of the largest and still officially Montreal-headquartered Royal Bank of Canada (once long ago headquartered in Halifax, as Scotiabank still is officially today) is somewhat further south on Bay Street, on the west side, with its striking gold towers.

Whatever else, it doesn’t seem like the Toronto financial district is about to shut down. It may not be “in major trouble as office vacancy rate soars.” Downtown Toronto may “never be the same” — but that is just because it really is more of an international big city than it used to be.

At the same time again, on our way up Yonge back to Dundas, we noticed yet another new office building under construction at 80 Queen Street East. Looking at what we could see on the street we inevitably wondered if it really makes economic sense.

For example, a new study by CBRE Canada, “global leader in commercial real estate services,” has reported that “the vacancy rate for downtown Toronto office space hit 15.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2023, the highest it’s been since 1996.” And this was up from “just two per cent in March 2020, when the pandemic was declared.”

(Back at our own offices in the streetcar suburbs we looked briefly at the website for “80 Queen — Boutique Office Building Within A Visionary Mixed-use Development.” This made us wonder slightly whether this project just might be the kind of new office development that could have a future in the new global environment, brought on by climate change, the COVID pandemic, the War in Ukraine, new directions in India and China, the apparent entrenchment of serious political disorder in the USA and elsewhere, and much, much more, no doubt.)

Some vague conclusions … (and btw do the mid 1990s have anything to tell us about the mid 2020s … 30 years later?)

Back on our return journey at Yonge and Dundas we caught the streetcar to our own offices — after another inordinately long and chaotic wait for today’s Toronto public transit.

When the streetcar arrived at Queen again it wasn’t long before it reached the intersection of Queen and Carlaw, where on Friday, July 7, 2023 Karolina Huebner-Makurat,, “a 44-year-old mother of 2, died after she was struck by a stray bullet” from a gunfight among three lunatics in broad daylight.

We tried to joke in a worldly way about keeping our heads down as we passed the Queen and Carlaw intersection on the streetcar. But we were at least pleased to hear on Thursday, July 13 that “Man charged with 2nd-degree murder in Toronto shooting death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat.”

There are still two other suspects at large in this case. And even with the first suspect we were less pleased to hear that “Man charged in shooting death of bystander in Toronto’s Leslieville has criminal history.” My business partner and I consider ourselves quite liberal (with a small l), but we also feel that criminal law enforcement in Canada is sometimes “too liberal.”

Downtown and along both Queen and Dundas streets we were also struck by the number of high-rise residential buildings under constriction.

I grew up in single family houses in Toronto and the prospect of the rising generation of Torontonians, from around the global village, living in apartments or condos in tall multi-storey buildings does not agree with me. (My partner feels it is at least more much-needed housing — though I don’t quite see myself that it’s the kind of affordable mass housing we really need.)

The recent by-election of Olivia Chow as Toronto mayor (who took office July 12) may in this and other respects be a welcome change from the more rigidly conservative administrations of both Rob Ford and John Tory, that have been in office since December 1, 2010. Some fresh policy approaches to the city’s many current problems of chaos and even violence are certainly needed.

Meanwhile yet again, Toronto has its highest office vacancy rates since the middle of the 1990s. But just what does this really mean? The city recovered from high vacancy rates back them, and if history is any guide it will again. The only thing altogether different now is caught in the Bloomberg headline : “Toronto Office Vacancies Hit 28-Year High as Remote Work Lingers.”

At this point in time it seems extremely difficult to assess the future of the “Remote Work” trend brought to life by the COVID pandemic — to say nothing of its ultimate impact on the amount of office space required in Toronto’s downtown core.

Beyond the unknown future of remote work, I can only offer two provocative accounts of the 1990s. The first is from 2019 (just before COVID struck) by Neil Sharma : “Revisiting the ’90s recession … The 1990s were a bleak period in Canadian history. The country was mired in deep recession and urban poverty affected a disquieting number of Canadians.”

The second is from 2001 by former Bank of Canada Governor Gordon Thiessen : “Canada’s Economic Future: What Have We Learned from the 1990s?”

What our trip on July 11has finally left in our minds — my business partner and I agreed yesterday — is the conviction that downtown Toronto has many problems which do require fresh attention and even bold action (like the rest of the city and many other places in Canada and beyond). But it is certainly not moving downhill!