Back in the 1990s, I used to travel the province pointing to empty shop windows. Those were the days when you could walk down the main street of almost any town in B.C. and see empty shops with “for rent” signs plastered on the windows.

While the rest of North America experienced what was perhaps the biggest economic expansion in history, B.C.’s economy tanked.

And when the economy dips, it’s the little guys who struggle. Hundreds of small businesses drowned in red ink. It was fertile ground for politicians hoping to convince voters that it was time for a change in government.

The B.C. Liberals pitched themselves as the small-business party, and voters gave them a chance to prove it.

The economy isn’t in the stinker anymore. But if you want to remember what those bad old days were like, take a walk down Vancouver’s Cambie Street. It looks a lot like Campbell River’s battered main drag in 1995.

The Canada Line construction through Cambie Village has made it next to impossible to get to those businesses, much less find a parking spot. And if you can find one within walking distance, good luck figuring out how to get around all the fencing!

If you do manage to get inside, you’ll find a shop owner who greets you with a look of both desperation and gratitude. You’ll quickly realize that’s because you’re the only customer they have.

The government says that’s the price of progress. It’s impossible to build a mammoth infrastructure project right through the middle of the urban core without disrupting local businesses. They say it’s too bad if some businesses go broke, but that’s the breaks.

Hold on a second here. That’s not the way it was supposed to work, at least not under the B.C. Liberals. They were supposed to be the people who understood the trials of keeping a small business open on slim margins.

The government is right that once construction is done, business will be brisk along Cambie. Unfortunately, most of the existing business owners won’t be there to reap the benefits. Rents will go up and new tenants will move in. But most of today’s operators will have moved or gone broke.

For anyone who owns one, a small business isn’t just a job, it’s a life’s dream. They risk their life savings, sometimes their homes, on the hope that, if they work hard enough, they’ll make a decent income.

Surely none of them thought that, despite their hard work, it would be a B.C. Liberal government that drove them out of business.

The NDP are championing some relief, and local MLA Gregor Robertson is proposing a tax holiday. It’s a start.

The government should go further. They should offer no- interest loans to bridge the businesses through the many months of construction.

Change always means disruption; you can’t build the biggest infrastructure project in B.C. history without it. But what is disruption for us is the death of a life’s dream for many of those business owners along the line.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.