Anyone living in a community of any size in Canada can tell you where their main street is. It might be a commercial district like Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, Spring Garden Road in Halifax or the gathering spots in Wortley Village in London, Ont. It’s also a strip mall in Toronto’s east end, or Tina’s Gas Bar on the main road through Joe Batt’s Arm, N.L.
Our main streets are the economic and social spines of our communities: half of Canada’s annual gross domestic product is generated from businesses that are considered small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and up to a third of those are located on or connected to a main street, employing millions of people. Further, nine out of 10 Canadians live within a kilometre of a main street.
Long-term retail patterns have shifted consumers away from local bricks-and-mortar shopping to suburban malls and online. And up to now, local businesses and service providers scattered across the country have relied on a hodgepodge of anecdotal evidence to counter Amazon’s algorithmic models and win back customers.
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That’s about to change. A new Main Street Economy Index of 100 main streets in Canada is set to launch, revealing how many people are visiting, how much they’re spending and how well these businesses are holding up. The potential to quickly capitalize on emerging trends is enormous; already, a shift toward experiential retail and Gen Z’s penchant for life off-screen is driving a renewed preference for in-person shopping that the index can help document and catalyze.
Importantly, the new index, spearheaded by the Canadian Urban Institute, will strengthen the case for investment in new businesses and sustained economic development by making the main street economy visible to planners and policymakers.
The annual index will build on a recently established platform that draws from more than a dozen sources, including cellphone and payment data, pinpointing users’ travel patterns, consumer preferences, psychographic characteristics, trends and gaps. In 2027, use will expand to include about 75 per cent of main street SMEs in Canada.
Here’s how local data is already working: in Brampton, Ont., Celebration Season, a popular clothing store, shifted from selling mostly menswear when detailed spend data for the local area showed that women, often shopping with their daughters, were potentially their biggest spenders.
In Ottawa, a consortium of downtown Business Improvement Areas repurposed their marketing dollars to encourage longer stays and local purchasing when local data showed “share of wallet” spend had diminished.
In Winnipeg, True North Sports + Entertainment, a business that includes various main street real estate and hospitality ventures, uses local downtown data and insights to inform decisions around programming, hospitality, events and the overall downtown experience.
And most recently, in Toronto and Vancouver, local data presented by the downtown BIAs persuaded municipal governments to target millions in public investment to support main streets during and following World Cup games hosted in each city.
By making data more accessible to local users, hundreds of organizations, businesses and agencies dependent on a healthy, vibrant main street can quickly identify patterns and shift their services or investments to serve a more localized customer base. Verifiable local data also helps recruit new ventures and attract anchor businesses to main streets to occupy vacant storefronts and second floors, restoring public safety and commercial vibrancy.
Canada has one of the densest networks of community-serving civic institutions and gathering places in the developed world – public libraries, legion halls, curling clubs, places of worship, community centres, arenas, service clubs, post offices and businesses – and all of these services are centred on main streets.
Main streets hold our history, but they’re also places of invention and surprise, where a local coffee shop can give birth to the country’s largest e-commerce platform (the Shopify origin story) or a street performer can start one of the world’s most extraordinary touring circuses (Cirque du Soleil).
When a main street thrives, so does the neighbourhood around it. As Canada adjusts to the economic uncertainty provoked by tariffs, local data will ensure that main street economies replace their dependency on the U.S. by finding suppliers and customers closer to home.
This piece is an excerpt from our new book, 27 Giant Ideas for 2027, which gathers some of Canada’s most imaginative thinkers to explore the ideas that will shape the year ahead. Get your copy for free now.
