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Work, Business & the Local Economy

Published 2026-07-30 · part of the research library.

Toronto’s downtown office towers are filling back up, but that recovery hasn’t reached every storefront the same way, and rents for small businesses have been rising fast with no legal ceiling on how much a landlord can raise them. At the same time, more people are doing gig-platform work — delivery and rideshare — under new provincial rules that only partly protect them.

A source-tier note up front: a few figures often cited for this category — like the latest downtown office-vacancy rate and the national count of gig-platform workers — could not yet be independently confirmed against a primary source when this page was built, so they are named below as open items rather than stated as fact.

Where things stand

  1. Toronto’s Small Business Property Tax Subclass cuts municipal property taxes by 20% for about 28,000 businesses, covering roughly 63% of the city’s commercial properties.
  2. The City runs 86 Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) citywide. For the 2026 budget year, funding between individual BIAs is deeply uneven: one downtown BIA’s levy can be roughly 219 times a smaller one’s, because the levy is based on commercial property value, not need. In 2026, Toronto Downtown West’s BIA levy was $4,845,021 against Harbord Street’s $22,121.
  3. Toronto invented the tool most North American cities now use to fund their main streets. In 1970, Ontario passed the law creating the world’s first Business Improvement Area, in Toronto’s Bloor West Village. The model has since spread to 500-plus Canadian communities and 2,000-plus in the United States; Ontario alone now has more than 270.
  4. Toronto directly licenses vehicle-for-hire drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft — the training, background checks, and vehicle standards a driver needs to work here.
  5. A provincial law, the Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, requires minimum wage for each paid gig-platform work assignment — but not for the time a driver or courier spends logged into the app waiting between jobs.
  6. Ontario has no cap on commercial rent increases — a landlord can raise the rent as much as they want at lease renewal. No one currently publishes a single, current, citywide count of empty storefronts on Toronto’s main streets, even though the City already tracks BIA finances the same detailed way.

Not yet independently confirmed, so not stated as fact above: the latest quarterly downtown Toronto office-vacancy rate and office-space absorption figures; how retail-only buildings’ pandemic recovery compares with other building types; the most recent year-over-year change in commercial/retail lease rates; the current national count of Canadians doing paid gig-platform work; and one advocacy group’s self-reported main-street reinvestment total. None of these are shown to be wrong — they simply couldn’t be pinned to a primary source in time for this page, and remain candidates for a future update.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: the Small Business Property Tax Subclass rate and eligibility; how BIA levies are distributed across the city’s 86 BIAs; publishing a real, citywide storefront-vacancy count the same way it already tracks BIA finances (a “count it and publish it” fix, not a spending one); vehicle-for-hire driver licensing standards, including what companies must report about driver pay for logged-in time.

Needs the province: capping commercial rent increases (Ontario currently sets no limit); extending minimum-wage coverage to gig workers’ logged-in waiting time, not just paid assignments. Toronto’s own ten-year economic plan promises to lobby the province for commercial rent protection by 2030, but it is unclear whether that promise has been acted on or is still in progress.

One honest gap: the sources behind this page are scoped narrowly to Toronto’s downtown and main-street economy; they don’t say much about the federal role here beyond noting Ottawa funds time-limited main-street recovery grants but sets no minimum wage or rent rules.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

The levers described above sit mostly with Toronto’s city council and mayor; the province controls commercial rent regulation and gig-worker wage rules directly, as noted above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign.

Sources & receipts

  1. Small Business Property Tax Subclass figures — City of Toronto, February 2026 news release; see the local economy backgrounder above (fact 1).
  2. 86-BIA count and levy-gap figures — see the local economy and downtown revitalization backgrounders above (fact 2).
  3. Introduction to Business Improvement Areas (Business Improvement Area Handbook); Introduction to Business Improvement Areas (Business Improvement Area Handbook) (fact 3).
  4. City of Toronto vehicle-for-hire driver-licensing rules — see the gig economy backgrounder above (fact 4).
  5. Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act (O. Reg. 344/24) — see the gig economy backgrounder above (fact 5).
  6. Absence of an Ontario commercial rent cap, and the missing citywide vacancy count — see the local economy backgrounder above (fact 6).