Cambie Street: Closed for Business

After more than fifteen years of steady business, Tomato Cafe is closing its doors on Cambie Street, and you don’t have to look far to understand why. Construction of the Canada Line, also known as the RAV, has severed Cambie Village’s ties to pedestrian traffic. Christian Gaudreault, owner of Tomato, is moving his restaurant to West Broadway in search of greener pastures. “After this long, I don’t want to leave Cambie,” he says from the new location, “but if there’s no access to the street, how can we manage?”

Tomato is far from being the only Cambie business to suffer. Fairview MLA Gregor Robertson states, “There are over thirty vacant storefronts now. Some have moved, many have closed. It seems that every week there’s another closure.” The devastation of this once-vibrant commercial district has left the community wondering how the mess got started.

The Canada Line is a subway system designed to connect downtown Vancouver to the airport. According to the Minister of Transportation, Kevin Falcon, the RAV will generate approximately 100,000 users every day at a total projected cost of $1.9 billion.

Initially, it was proposed that the RAV be constructed along the Arbutus Street rail corridor. Gregor Robertson says, “Arbutus was the logical, cost-effective choice for rapid transit out to Richmond. It seems crazy to put billions into ripping up Cambie, a strip right through the middle of the city, versus using a rail corridor that already exists.” The Cambie strip was chosen instead, says Robertson, because “there was resistance on the west-side to reinvigorating the Arbutus line, and the development pressure that that would create. Cambie had a less organised, cohesive voice.”

Once Cambie became the site of the RAV, construction developers InTransitBC proposed to build the line with a bored tunnel method . Because the vast majority of bored tunnel work occurs under the ground, this method minimises the amount of street disruption as well as environmental damage. “When the environmental assessment was done on the RAV,” explains Robertson, “they approved it under the assumption that it would be bored tunnel.”

When InTransitBC began development, however, it was decided that three-quarters of the project would be constructed with the cut-and-cover method. Cut-and-cover involves excavating a trench, building the tunnel within it, and then covering it back up. This above-ground method is responsible for the extreme disruption of traffic on Cambie. “I don’t know how they were allowed to use cut-and-cover,” says Robertson. “I assume it was negotiated in the secret dealings of the public-private partnership.”

Furthermore, Roberston claims that Cambie Village business owners signed leases under the impression that the RAV would be constructed by bored tunnel. “The construction caught them all by surprise,” he says. “They assumed that there wouldn’t be a major disruption. There has been, and there will continue to be for a couple more years.” As Gaudreault of Tomato says, “No business can wait for years.”

In the meantime, the Cambie Village Business Association, a coalition of small businesses of which Gaudreault was once chairman, is calling for government compensation. “These owners are bearing the cost,” says Robertson, “and that’s not fair. There needs to be compensation. So far the government has offered none.”

When confronted with reports of closures along the Cambie line, Minister of Transportation Kevin Falcon replied, “Businesses open and close every day. That’s what the marketplace is all about.” and insists that business will blossom once thousands of RAV riders are taken through the Cambie corridor. Robertson, however, points out that “the Canada Line stops at 25th and then at Broadway, nowhere in-between.” Indeed, Gaudreault is abandoning his Cambie location because he believes that “no one will stop in that small corridor.”

“Clearly, the government is not even acknowledging this major impact,” claims Robertson. Later this month, he will introduce legislature to get property tax refunded for small business owners, an idea that came from the Cambie Village Business Association. “Meanwhile, support those businesses and make some noise,” he says. “Let them know that you think the small businesses deserve respect and compensation for their sacrifice.”

For Christian Gaudreault, however, any compensation would arrive too late. “We’ve been in that neighbourhood for years,” he laments, “but now it’s time for me to humbly withdraw. I feel as though I’ve done all I can for the strip.”