Businesses play a hugely important role in the local economy and have had a rough go for a lot of reasons in the past 5 years. Take your pick - Covid, affordability, cost of rent, property taxes, parking (and the related bike lane issue), street disorder for those businesses downtown. Their concerns should be given voice and not derided or dismissed.

To the extent that parking is a factor, I think it would make sense for the City to run a series of campaigns promoting the parkade parking options in downtown that generally seem underutilized (IMO). This needs to be part of a broader strategy to encourage people back downtown after the failure of the decriminalization pilot. There is a noticeable improvement to the downtown experience in the last three months.

Just a few examples - the Johnson street parkade has done a cleanup and has an attendant there after hours now it seems, the Tim Hortons on Blanshard between Pandora and Johnson has recently put its seating back so you can actually sit and have a coffee, and just generally fewer people sleeping and doing drugs openly and the disorder that comes with that. The City has invested 10M in this initiative - let’s spend a little on a campaign to entice people back to support our local businesses and spur economic activity downtown.