As retail shops across Toronto and the province reopen for curbside pickup and delivery today, Mayor John Tory is telling residents not to shop unless it is absolutely necessary.
“I would say to shoppers, if you really don't need to get something, don't. I think at the end of the day we are still saying it is going to be better if we don't have crowd scenes,” Tory said during an interview with CP24 on Monday morning.
Tory said he hopes to see the smaller retailers follow the lead of some of the larger stores that have been permitted to stay open over the course of the pandemic.
“With respect to retailers, I would say please show the kind of discipline and ingenuity that the big retailers have shown in organizing lineups and making sure that inside the front of the store that it is organized,” the mayor added.
The Ford government has given retail shops with street entrances the green light to reopen for curbside pickup and delivery starting today.
Concerns have been raised about the potential for crowded sidewalks in some of the city’s busiest shopping areas, including Queen Street and Bloor Street in Yorkville.
“I think people think that there are people at city hall sitting around trying to dream up ways to make life difficult for people and make sure people can't buy things and go to parks. Not at all,” Tory said.
“We are trying to make sure there aren't these crowd scenes where you are going to enhance the chance of people giving the virus to one another because there are people walking around that still have it, lots of people unfortunately.”
The province has seen a dip in new cases of COVID-19 in recent days with 294 new cases of the virus reported on Saturday and 346 new cases on Friday.
Those numbers are down significantly from the record 640 cases reported on April 25.
The decline in new cases also comes as the province has ramped up testing, processing more than 19,000 tests on Saturday and 17,000 tests on Sunday.
The province has said that it will continue to reopen parts of the economy as long as we see a consistent decline in new cases of the virus.
Over the weekend, garden centres and hardware stores were permitted to reopen and provincial parks are also reopening to the public starting this week.
