The Ben Mulroney Show - How a vibrant Toronto street is fighting for its commercial life

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Paul Macchiusi - owner Minerva Cannabis, co-founder CITIZENS OF TORONTO, starting Bathurst Village BIA Karina Lemke - candidate Ward 11, small business owner, former flower shop owner in Mirvish  Djanka Gladell- Vice Chair West Queen West BIA If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Welcome back. If you are a downtown kind of guy or guy and a gal and you tend to travel up down Queen Street, specifically Queen Street West between Ronces Vails and Spadina, you may notice some pretty significant changes coming your way. We're talking expanded, no stopping restrictions, new left turn prohibitions, rescinding existing parking windows, essentially making it very, very hard if you run a business to run said business.

We are going to start a great conversation with three guests, all of whom here, with their own thoughts and opinions representing their own thoughts and opinions and nothing else. So we're going to go left to right here. Please welcome Deionka Gaddell, vice chair of West Queen West BIA. Hello.

Hi, I just want to declare straight away I'm not participating today or rather I'm participating today in my personal capacity as an independent small business advocate. My comments reflect my own professional experiences and expertise and should not be taken as representing the position of any BIA

or any board. I should have a disclaimer off the top of the show. I should too. Yeah, I should. I must declare. Yes, I've... I'm declaring.

I declare. Paul Muck Uzi's back. He's the owner of Minerva Cannabis, co-founder of citizens of Toronto, and starting the Bathurst Village, BIA, and you may remember, we had a great conversation a little while ago where he broke down

the theatricality and the impossible uselessness of municipal deputations. Welcome back, my friend. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And Karina Lemke, candidate for Ward 11, small business owner and former flower shop owner in Mervis.

Welcome. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Okay. What's going on on Queen Street, Karina? Well, the war on the car in Toronto continues, Ben. We are definitely having a bit of a war. It is the city against car owners,

car what do they call them, car brains? Car brains, yeah. As well as small business. So we have a situation where we are taking parking away, We are reducing capacity for people to drive to get to anywhere that they need to go. And the city being the city is kind of sneaky sometimes. So even though they might have been plotting in the background, they generally drop these little nuggets,

usually just before a long weekend or a holiday. And then it goes to council a couple days later, where there is absolutely no time for people to prepare for the, you know, kind of bomb that's just been dropped. Paul, what's the justification for us? I get, we're a big city, we're a growing city. We've got to move stuff around in order to get stuff done. So what's happening here?

Why are these changes coming to Queen Street? Well, King Street is getting the construction. So Queen Street is being asked to subsidize exactly what's happening over there. What I don't understand is why the city can't figure out its own mitigation plan without having to affect the small businesses along the strip. Queen Street should still be Queen Street.

I mean, commerce is open daily. Has there been an economic impact study? Have they talked to any of the small businesses? Has anything happened in any capacity where the city has gone to Queen Street businesses from Spadaina to Roncesvale, which is well over 150,200 businesses, and said, will this impact you? How will this impact you?

And what's going to come next? Deanka, you know, we were talking about this earlier. Let's find out who voted for this on city council, but there was no vote. This was, right? This was some sort of procedural thing. Well, I'm going to speak to it from college in Dundas because college is in my ward. And the thing that's so ironic to me is that the TTC has a huge. blind spot in that they're moving transit and stopping commerce and I think that

that the irony is like so evident I know TTC is an essential public service but being essential does not make you sovereign and I think that's another really important point you don't get to say how someone or deny someone their livelihood because you're repairing this or doing that you collaborate and I am born and raised in downtown Toronto and I know from the early 60s how people would collaborate. That's a word we need to bring back in. Collaborate.

I used to live 50 feet from Queen Street West. I lived right by the old Black Bull. And so I know the lifeblood of that area. I know how important it is. I know how much of Toronto's identity is wrapped up in sort of Queen West, West, Queen West, all of it, right? And the fact that people are going to be told, don't stop here, is going to be detrimental, not just to traffic, not just to gridlock, not just to business, but to the identity of the city, Karina. Agree 100%.

Yeah. It is very unfortunate that they're doing this. And there are streets that are also being targeted. So we do have Dundas where the parking is being reduced or removed. We're having college because they want to speed up the 506 car, but no real studies of it. been done on that. So you've got a bunch of major areas that are all, they're all adjacent. So what is that going to do to traffic flow? And who has actually consulted with any of those businesses? We've seen the decimation of other things with the Egglinton and with Little

Jamaica. No one is accountable and no one is asking these small businesses. We were speaking about this, how the TTC has taken on the archetype of the very difficult and demanding girlfriend. I want, I want, I want. And the small businesses are giving and giving and giving and giving. And they have nothing else to give now except vacancy signs because their businesses are going to go up. And the girlfriend's like, too bad, too bad. I want this and I want that and you need to subsidize. And all the small businesses are saying is, let's have an equal relationship here. Little give and take. Well, we've seen this before, right? We saw it on Egglington when they built the crosstown, 300 business closures. St. Clair.

when they built the, when they built the street car, dedicated street car, 40 plus lawsuits over 100 closures. Bathurst, same thing, business losses, no accommodations for accessibility. King Street, business report down 20 to 50%. This is a script that is oft repeated in the city. The insult to the injury is that I find so egregious, is especially with the interminable construction on Eglinton, We're driving, every time I go to the airport,

I'm driving by that construction. I see those mom and pop shops that are completely barricaded. And I asked somebody once, I said, is, are they getting a rebate on their property tax? And the answer, no, no. And it was so upsetting. I got into a Twitter tiff with former mayor David Miller because the story was being written about the rebirth of St. Clair.

And he was the advocate for that transit line. And Paul, he said, oh, look at this. It's a rebirth. I said, with all due respect, Mr. Mayor, something has to die before it can be reborn. And I just wish we didn't have to do that to these areas. And these business owners who contribute to the tax base, who employ so many Torontoians, we treat them as if they're disposable and replaceable. You have to also remember, tax for commercial is higher than residential.

So for the same service on the same valued property, the commercial tax rates around 2.2%, I believe, versus the, let's say, a 1% on residential. So we're already paying double in commercial tax. Then you top up everything else from WSI to municipal licensing and so on and so forth. And a better question I have for the city is you want to remove street parking. I can almost see everybody agreeing with you if you had a place to put the cars. But they keep bringing all these developments that have no parking.

So why not create developments with parking? underground for the cars to replace the street parking. Then you can get rid of your cars on the road and give us a place to put the vehicles. But that's not happening either. And it seems like in this case, and I'll throw this to whoever wants to answer it, the issue that we have, okay, there was no vote, right, at city council, which means there was no public consultations. There was no deputations.

You guys have clearly said there was no outward outreach to these businesses to talk about what they need, what they want. where is the public where's the public voice in all of this? Surprise. That's what it was. A surprise. You just wake up and one day you're finding this happened.

You know, the thing about small businesses and the reason I've been representing them independently for almost four decades and fighting for them is they are the largest contributors to GDP. Yeah. The largest. Everything we enjoy, including TTC,

is because of them. So why are you trying to? trying to kill the Golden Goose. And when you instigate these types of environments, you instigate a thing called the shadow tax where there's loss revenue, higher delivery charges, reduced operating expenses, additional advertising, staff reduction, customer displacement.

And the one thing small businesses can't replace, no matter what their social media is, is a customer. Once that customer is displaced, they're going to go elsewhere. That's it. It's loss zero. Yeah. And we have always just kind of put them over there. Small businesses are just such lovely little sound bites. I support small business. But the people who get up at six or seven in the morning to make sure everything's ready,

so you're there for your cappuccino or for your dress or whatever, they create what I would call, and I have brought this up in several meetings, an ecosystem. And when we have an ecosystem of vitality in all these different neighborhoods throughout the city. Government doesn't create the ecosystem. We create it. It inherits it. But we save so much costs on policing, on graffiti vandalism, on a million things, and we employ so many people. The fallout is so positive in so many different areas. All right. Yeah, well, that was very well said. We're going to take a break. Continue this conversation on the other side of the break. And Paul, I want to start with you

because I think we can learn lessons from the past. And your experience, a small business owner on Bathurst, could inform what's going to happen on Queen Street West when these changes come into effect. Don't go anywhere. The conversation continues right here on the Ben Mulroney show. I challenge anyone to find a radio show that stands up for and honors the hard work of small business owners and entrepreneurs

in this country as much as this show does. Here's some knowledge to drop on you. 52% of Canada's non-government GDP is created by small and medium-sized businesses. And according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, more than half, 55% of small business owners in this country would not recommend to a friend or the next generation to start a new business in today's economic climate. What does that tell you? That tells you that we need small business,

but small business feels that the government and the governments feel that they don't need them. Imagine that. A small business owner, more than half of small business owners would tell a friend, don't start a small business today in Canada. And I suspect that number would go up in the city of Toronto. We are having a conversation with Paul McCusie,

Karina Lemke, and Deionka Gadda, about these changes that are coming to Queen Street West that are going to be yet another headwind for small business owners on that street. Paul, you are a small business owner, you have gone through one of these cataclysmic seismic changes that puts

pressure on you and your neighbors. Talk to me about what you went through. Well, the craziest thing that I think from all of that was when we were reviewing the surveying process, which was sped up, and which I can say publicly because we did do an FOI request and we distributed that publicly as well. But the surveys were being conducted by more people who didn't live in the area than that did. So why, my question to the city at the time was, why are people who don't live or pay tax in this city, or even within the ward for that matter? Why is their voice and their opinion matter more than mine as a resident and a business owner who has to not only employ people and still operate, trying to create jobs and, you know, generate revenue for the city? But as a resident,

you know, at the same time, you're taking away my rights, my simple rights to be able to simply access my front door. Yeah. Right? So, you know, it's not so much about whether the city is doing something right or wrong. I think it's more so, are we just in their way? Which brings me to the question, which I've asked you previously, is ideology superseding logic right now at City Hall? And it feels like it is. Yeah. Karina, put on your, you know, be our Swami here and predict the future.

What's going to happen? Oh my gosh. Well, I'm hoping for a very, very good outcome on October 26th. And I'm hoping that we will not only turn the mayor's chair over to someone who is reasonable. and is a champion for small business because they are extremely important to Toronto. I had to explain to my son the other day what it meant to be a city of neighborhoods because it's something that we talk about all the time, but I don't think kids necessarily have a grasp of it. So I took him on, I'm representing Ward 11, and I took him on a drive through our ward and

then a walk as well. And we did Kensington Market. We did Little Italy. We did all of the good stops. And he suddenly realized that it's like there's so many flavors and they are independent businesses. I was one of those people too. Yeah.

So I would hope that we return to a place where we are actually not taking them for granted anymore. We were championing them. But it seems like time and time again we do. And I genuinely think that there is a certain brand of politician that thinks that, don't worry, the city is ripe with people and the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. And whatever we lose in this process of modernizing the city and building out our infrastructure, we will gain 10 times over it. In fact, this is like an investment, if you will.

Sure, we're going to have to lose this, whoever's populated the street now, but just wait in 20 years, it's going to be 10 times better. I think that's what they think. Just look that. Yeah, Diaka. Oh, okay. Well, if you want to speak about modernization,

then you've got to bring the idea of electric buses into the conversation, which are versatile. We live in a city with four seasons. I don't know why City Hall doesn't understand that, But there's four seasons. We have snow. We have horrible storms sometimes.

So we really need to have public transit that accommodates all of that. In this particular issue on King, College, Dundas, whatever, no one's denying that construction needs to happen. But leave everything as is. We also have digital devices that can say, hey, you know what? Stuff's happening here temporarily. Why don't you just go around? That's it.

So why do, you know, for five cars, five street cars or how? many are coming through, I think it's five an hour, are we killing livelihoods when really it's like let them have even extra parking to compensate for this and everyone can just go around. They're going to go around anyway because MapQuest is going to tell them or whatever. So why are we spoiling another person's opportunity to bring bread home for their family? But that's what we're doing. That's what the city's doing. That's what TTC is doing. And it's right back to can't we sit at the table together, do an assessment. You weigh out where it's going to, I'll weigh out where it's going to cost our small businesses. You weigh out what you need. And we work together in a collaborative way.

That has never happened. That has to happen. Or we're going to kill the entire core of downtown Toronto. And that feels so bad, faith, Paul, like the lack of consultation, lack of knowledge, the fact that Karina said, like, this just dropped on the, on people, just found out it was happening. That's not how it's supposed to work. Representative democracy, especially at the municipal level, is not supposed to work that way. Democracy is under question. And, you know, the city likes to say it's broke, but I believe the accountability in this city is broke.

And these developments, when you really look at it, they only bring corporate and big money. So, you know, I was just walking up Youngstreet the other day at Cumberland. There's a new McDonald's going in. I saw that. Yeah. And right across the street of Shake Shack. Yeah.

And Yorkville needs a McDonald's. Really? It's like it was one area before that you could go to and find unique businesses of all kinds. And I guess that doesn't exist anymore. The new development near me at Bathurst and DuPont, McDonald's, and Dollarama. Like these are the banners that people are going to be proud of. I don't think so.

Well, that's, I think, Karina, it's sort of a tale is old as time. Like you lose one restaurant or a mom and pop shop or a bridal salon. And then another, another. Next thing, you know, the whole block is at risk. And some developer comes in and just says, well, I can get the whole thing for a song. And they are going to, they build a lovely condo. building and right in that podium goes and there's no disrespect to shopper's drug mark because I love me my points, but that's where another shopper's drug mark goes in or that's

where a rexol goes in and or a dollarama and those are great and needed, but they don't necessarily that there's nothing idiosyncratic about them. No, and then we've bemoan the loss of small business. Yeah, and I was a small business owner. So I graduated from U of T and instead of going to law school, I bought a flower shop in Mervish Village. I had that for 18 years. If I had to do it again, Now Mervish Village went under development. It no longer exists. The framework for my shop exists. I shed a tear while eating pizza there last week.

But it is not the same. Was it the bad alley? Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Not a new lineup. No. But be clear that these big box stores that come in do not pay the same GDP as a small

businesses do. It's a fraction. It's anywhere between 8 and 12% versus 33 and 44%. So who's going to make up for that money? You know, who's going to make up for all the? property tax hike no we can't do that we just can't keep doing that no I know we're kind of running out at this point yeah so we're done you you if you have the number one conduit of revenue coming in for infrastructure for everything for social programs whatever you don't close the gates on that

you look to open it further and what I'm hearing from people is and young people who want to you know start their business they have that fabulous fire in their gut is junk it's too hard it's too hard it's too It's impossible. It takes like six, six hours to fill out an A-frame application. And Victoria takes 180 seconds. You tick a box. All right? And what I'm finding is when I go outside Toronto to Prince Edward County, Niagara, whatever, I'm finding a lot of small businesses moving there because it's easy. That's very interesting. So is it very different and easier than when you leave the GTA to actually do business? It's easy because they want to run a small business, they don't want to deal with all the issues that they have to deal with in the city.

Paul, would you look to expand your business right now, or are you waiting for the environment to improve? Both. I mean, I'm always looking. I think any good business owners always looking to see how they can make, you know, grow the business. And I am looking, but the hardest part right now is trying to compete with rent against some of the bigger corporate stores who run on the stock market have now.

next to no margin. They also use the temporary foreign worker program. And then I'm left to, you know, just fend for myself. I don't have any funding. Yeah. Our team is the team that funded the project from the ground up and we're still running with it. I work more than 50 hours a week in the store plus two other jobs.

I mean, say what you will, but we're all breaking our back. Well, lastly, let's look at this from a like a planning perspective. It feels to me like what is, it's not proposed, what's going to happen on Queen West is, again, I don't know. don't know enough about it, but I know enough about the city to, to assume that they punted the ball, punted the ball, punted the ball, didn't really plan, didn't really think this through long term, and found themselves backed into a corner, and they said, we got to do something. So let's do this drastic thing.

Otherwise, we can't complete the work we need to do on King. Yes, but they also have delegated authority, which I think people are starting to wise up to, but they don't necessarily understand fully. We have a situation at City Hall where it's not your counselor who's actually, you know, sort of dealing with these issues. It's a bunch of anonymous, faceless, city hall staffers who most of them, I would think, I don't know for sure, but are probably quite young.

And they are going to do whatever they want to do and then they pass it on. And it just gets approved blindly. And there is no recourse for anyone. There's no one to go after. Yeah. When they say, oh, yes. I mean, anytime I hear city staff report this or city staff report that,

you're right. There's this assumption that it's been, it's been a deletious. liberated upon and the sage the sage minds at city hall poured over each option and this was the best one that they they chiseled into the tablets and presented to the people and it's you're probably right it's i think it's a bunch of yeah i know i sound terrible well listen we're gonna we're gonna stick a pin in it here but this is a to be continued conversation and i'd love to reconvene this this this panel because this has been a delightful conversation an important conversation

because I think if we all share one thing in common is a few things. We love this city and we know that it is excellent because of the people who live here and the people who invest their time, their money and their belief in the city into this city. So thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us.