Opinion: Small businesses can’t absorb Broadway’s next shutdown

Written by Neil Wyles, executive director of the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Area.

When governments say they have the backs of small businesses, those words matter most in moments of real hardship.

For the businesses along Vancouver’s Broadway corridor, that moment is now.

Last week, the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Area met with Transportation and Transit Minister Mike Farnworth to discuss the upcoming full four-month shutdown of Broadway between Main and Quebec streets—the most severe phase yet of a construction project that has already disrupted the neighbourhood for more than five years. Following that meeting, we are cautiously optimistic. The Minister committed to taking our concerns to his cabinet colleagues to explore what support options might be available.

We are taking him at his word. But trust must be matched with urgency.

The businesses facing this shutdown are not abstract storefronts or balance sheets. They are family-run cafés, retailers, and service businesses where multiple generations often work side by side. They employ neighbourhood residents. They provide first jobs for students and part-time work for parents trying to stay close to home. These are community anchors, woven into the daily life of Mount Pleasant—and they are now being asked to shoulder a level of disruption few could survive.

For years, many of these businesses have been operating at roughly half of their pre-construction revenues. Costs have risen. Margins have thinned. And now, a complete shutdown threatens to erase what little resilience remains. This is not a future concern—it is a present-day crisis unfolding in real time.

To be clear, this has never been about stopping construction. Mount Pleasant understands the importance of major infrastructure projects and the long-term benefits they bring. But infrastructure cannot—and should not —be delivered on the backs of the very communities it is meant to serve.

The province has been clear that it will not provide direct compensation for what it defines as “short-term disruption.” We understand the concern about precedent. But that argument rings hollow when weighed against the real-world consequences now facing dozens of viable businesses.

There are other tools available. Practical, time-limited measures—such as bridge financing or interest-free loan programs—could provide critical cash flow during the shutdown, becoming repayable only once construction is complete and businesses are operating normally again. These are not handouts. They are survival tools.

In the context of a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project, such measures would amount to a rounding error. The province has already found more than $130 million to address construction delays. The question is not whether resources exist—it is whether there is the will to apply them to the businesses absorbing the economic shock of those delays.

Government often warns about setting a precedent. But allowing dozens of community-serving businesses to fail would set one too—and it would not be a new one.

We have seen this pattern before. During the Canada Line. The Evergreen Line. The Millennium Line. And now again with Broadway. Time and time again, small businesses are told there is no mechanism to help them survive major construction—only to be left behind once the project is complete.

This is a cycle of inaction, and it needs to be broken.

In the days ahead, the Mount Pleasant BIA will continue knocking on doors, including those of our local MLAs Christine Boyle and Brenda Bailey, both of whom sit at the cabinet table. We will continue advocating for a targeted, time-limited mitigation framework that reflects the true scale and severity of what businesses are facing.

We are cautiously optimistic. But optimism alone won’t keep doors open, staff employed, or neighbourhoods intact.

Doing nothing has a cost. On Broadway, that cost will be measured not just in closed storefronts, but in lost livelihoods, fractured communities, and a growing erosion of trust.

This moment calls for empathy, leadership, and action—and for government conversations to move with the same urgency that small businesses are living with every day.