[bornagainbiking]

Canada's small towns can be quite interesting but mostly by day as there tends to be in many cases the sidewalks are rolled up and put away at 6.
Unless of course you are a University town which can cover you off Sept to June and like Kingston have the tourists in the summer.
I have had the good fortune of moving around a bit with jobs and training/seminars.
In North America we have the dream of the suburbs and I see here in Hamilton projects set up for 40,000 set up on the outskirts and then the Walmarts amd plazas follow. Schools etc etc. So there is no real local need for a "downtown".
Also, because many people commute and in some cases hours aday the last thing they want to do is drive. So we are in many cases "cocooning" large fridges and freezers and a weekly trip to Walmart or Costco. Large cupboards and bulk buying.
When I lived in a smaller German town (40,000), we had a fridge and it is what I would consider a bar fridge with a tiny freezer. So we walked down to the local bakery or grocery store and bought what we needed. Plenty of interaction and a rapport with the local businessman. So the downtown I lived in was occupied from morning to late evening and the locals lived over the shops.
Here we have a surge in for the morning and a mass exodus at 5.
So maybe it is all about design and living. I was in London a couple of times for extended business and during the week the streets were bare and the downtown mall basically closed at 6. You could rent the hallways out for bowling.
Only downtown Guelph once at night even though I have been there on business and the outlying hotels are nicer and offer great deals so no real need to be enticed to go downtown.
The downtowns have to be cleaned up and organized. Maybe Kingston could be a model as out of all the nights I am in a hotel it at least has a pulse or vibrancy that draws you out. Looking forward to a conference in Windsor to check it out as I have heard good things as well as several of my friiends have moved there for retirement.
Halifax is another city with a great downtown just too active and somewhat perilous at night. With the streets of bars for the university and waterfront crowd. Victoria has a nice downtown with lots of walking destinations. PEI has a great downtown as well as Sydney was nice and busy during the week from the business crowd, hard to find a room Mon-Fri. I lived in Northern Ontario and some downtowns are pretty slow in the winter. So hard to keep a business afloat or viable.
So I think that Ontarion towns are dated and may need to adapt or draw occupants back. Hamilton had a Great butchers shop downtown but it was forced to close. Times change and so do patterns.