Coronavirus: A Vancouver-area city hall tells businesses to shut, but one landlord plays ‘hardball’ on rent – city hall
- The District of North Vancouver wants businesses shut if they cannot respect social distancing – but it also wants full rent from its commercial tenants
- Yoga studio boss Terry McBride says that unlike his private landlords, the district was ‘heartless’ to offer a secret half-month deferral with 48-hour deadline
The shops on Robson Street, downtown Vancouver’s once-glitzy shopping district, are boarded up now, in the time of Covid-19.
Provincial health orders last month demanded the closure of businesses that could not maintain two metres (6.6 feet) of distance between customers and staff, so Lululemon, Aritzia and other shopfronts are now covered in plywood, adding to the sense of desolation on the empty street.
Across the Lions Gate Bridge, in the District of North Vancouver, the plywood is absent but things are not much better. The district’s city hall, like the other 21 municipal authorities that make up Metro Vancouver, is requiring businesses to follow the British Columbia provincial government’s orders to close in the name of physical distancing.
Terry McBride, CEO of the Yyoga studio chain, says he is happy to comply; distancing orders made it impossible to safely run any of his 10 yoga studios in BC.
I have no income. I cannot do takeout. There’s no income, period. I don’t see how they expect businesses to pay [rent] when they have no income
But McBride is furious that one landlord is playing “hardball” on rent – the District of North Vancouver.
Yyoga is one of 27 tenants in the Lynn Valley Village shopping complex, owned by the district. The studio in question is just 500 metres from the Lynn Valley Care Centre, the nursing home where 18 residents have died of Covid-19 and almost 70 residents and staff have been sickened in one of Canada’s worst outbreaks.