“I’ve already booked my bed at the homeless shelter,” David Gareau says. He’s only half-joking.
Gareau is one of the vendors of the St. Lawrence Market’s cart program who have launched a petition asking the city to reconsider evicting the vendors on April 1. Rumours of privatization that have haunted the Market for the last three years are coming to a head, with the Market vendors believing that they are being pushed out for a large restaurant chain.
According to the city, the program is nothing more than an unfortunate casualty of the redevelopment of the North Building at Front and Jarvis. In a letter released to the vendors on December 22, the Market’s current manager, Nick Simos, detailed the space constraints involved in the North Building’s redevelopment. The temporary setup for the Saturday farmer’s market and Sunday antique market is 9,000 square feet to the North Building’s 12,000, meaning that the small wooden carts that surround the perimeter of both the North and South building that the Market vendors occupy will need to be freed up to accommodate the Saturday farmers.
Local councillor Pam McConnell offered an explanation that differed from the letter that the city released. McConnell says the St. Lawrence Market’s advisory committee has considered retooling the Market cart program for a while and called the rumour regarding the chain restaurant “ludicrous.” According to McConnell, it’s likely that the retooled program would exclusively involve personally handcrafted artisanal goods – criterion that would leave Gareau’s crafts as well as Sky Kumpar’s imported silk scarves from India out in the cold.
The retooling lines up with the promotion of “better market processes” outlined in Simos’ letter. However, this leaves questions about why the space constraints are being emphasized as the primary reason many of the vendors in the program don’t even occupy space that the city claims it will need. For example, Gareau’s Worldbeat Crafts occupies a corner of the South building’s basement.
“[The farmers wanting our space] is not a valid excuse to close our program,” said one vendor who asked to not to be named. “They’re only here once a week.” There are six vendors left in the basement that have been asked to leave.
There is an air of emptiness to the place. After taking the elevator down to the basement, I was immediately faced by approximately 30 feet of empty corridor. Vendors say that once Simos took office, tighter regulations began to be enforced, such as having to be at work at 5 am on Saturdays, when the farmers arrive. But Market cart vendors argue that they sell artisanal jewelry, imported scarves, bomber jackets and other non-perishable items – there just isn’t the same motivation to drive a jewelry customer to the Market at 7 am like there is for a customer looking to pick up produce for the day. To Gareau, these aren’t reasonable expectations: “They’ve simply been leveraging vendors out of here,” he says.
Orna Braginsky, who runs Orna’s Ornaments, has documented the warnings she’s received from the city for failing to be open that early. One is accompanied by a time-stamped picture of her booth shuttered close, which reads 5:26 am.
“My customers don’t start coming in until 11,” she laments, “and they want me sit here for six hours?” Braginsky has received five warnings to date for not being there at the stipulated time. She’s resorted to recording videos surveying the market on Saturday mornings. The videos start with an empty market, with farmers also not setting up shop until around 6:30 am.
These rule changes, as well as a 70 per cent increase in rent for the indoor tenants, have forced four vendors out since 2013, according to Gareau. “These are people who counted on the market for their livelihood,” he remarks. “One by one the weakest have left, and for those of us who have toughed it out and remained, it’s come down to ‘Get out.’”
In a 2014 letter to Simos and the city’s real estate director, Joe Casali, the vendors pleaded for a retooling of the operating hours based on vendor type. The time-stamped pictures and warnings continued. Simos and Casali both declined to comment on this story.
Things were not like this three years ago. From 1996 to 2012, the Market’s manager was Jorge Carvalho, whose tenure was a marked difference from Simos’. Then, one week after National Geographic named the market ‘The Best Market in the World’, Carvalho was gone. “It happened very quickly – I come in one Saturday and Jorge was fired,” Gareau tells me, “and what for? There was no reason given. It was really suspicious.” After being heavily involved in the media coverage surrounding his firing, both the city and Carvalho suddenly went mute.
In addition to the petition, the vendors say they have all but given up appealing to Simos, Casali and Casali’s boss, the city’s Chief Operating Officer Josie Scioli. As I’m chatting with David, Orna pops over to let him know that she’s completed the registration process to become a for-profit lobbyist for the city. It’s the first required step to plead their case to City Hall. “I’m coming to the end of the civil servant ladder,” says Gareau, “so now we’re looking at the mayor’s office, elected representatives.”
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