297 College Street

When you think of Kensington Market nowadays, what comes to mind? Pedestrian Sundays? Narrow streets? Countercultural activism? Mixed-use housing? A multicultural neighbourhood? Eclectic shops? Commercial gentrification?

21st century Kensington Market is a site rich with collective action and community organizing, where workers, tenants, and neighbours prove the power of standing up to exploitation and mega-corporations. 

In 2013, as Kensington neighbours got organized, they successfully blocked the development of a Walmart on Bathurst between Dundas and College. While there have been other fights in the years before (e.g., against Starbucks), we can think of this as the “first big win” of this particular era of Kensington Market’s struggle against gentrification.

A second win in 2013 occurred when Friends of Kensington Market organized to block a Loblaws at College and Spadina, to protect local grocers and community foodways.

Who fights Loblaws and Walmart and wins? The working class and residents of Kensington Market. These wins emphasize the power of strong community organizing to ward against the threat of poor labour practices, opposition to unions, and the destruction of independent businesses including local grocers and community establishments — threats that often accompany mega-corporations.

If you walk past the sites of the would-be Walmarts and Loblaws, you can see that those two wins are tempered by the fact that at Spadina and College there is now a T&T Supermarket, which is owned by Loblaws Companies, and at Bathurst and Nassau there is now a FreshCo, which is owned by Sobeys. These are both much smaller establishments than the proposed Loblaws and Walmart would have been, but ultimately there is no denying that mega-grocers have begun to encroach on the market. 

So, did the residents actually ‘win’, or are these events ‘losses’ for Kensington residents? Considering the power dynamics at play, what comes through above all is the power of community organizing: the Kensington Market community of a few thousand residents has demonstrated an outsized ability to hold back mega-corporations, each with several billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Discussion questions:

• What can we learn from the residents of Kensington Market? How might other communities build on their successes?

• What are the similarities between the resistance of contemporary Kensington Market residents and the resistance of last century's Jewish Market residents? What might some of their differences be?

Bibliography:

Armstrong, J. (2014, February 15). Developer backs away from Walmart in Kensington Market. Global News.

Hodgson, K. (2013, February 12). Loblaws, please don’t wreck Kensington Market. Change.org.