NIGHT SWEATS
Popular Richmond Night Market faces uncertain future because of COVID-19
Weeds and brush are taking over where the Richmond Night Market should be celebrating its 20th season; give nature and COVID-19 enough time and those rubber dinosaurs could soon have their own Jurassic Park.
The main stage sits frozen, last year’s theme still on display, the teardown and reconstruction barely begun; no one until Monday had been on-site since workers laid down their tools and left the area mid-March after the pandemic began shutting things down.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Raymond Cheung, the entrepreneur who introduced the Asian night market to Metro Vancouver 20 years ago, said as he looked around. “Just coming down here is so weird and not seeing the tents set up, the colourful flags, the smell of all the foods.
“I should be in my uniform cleaning up, preparing for next weekend, but it’s like a ghost town now.”
About $80,000 worth of 2020 20th-anniversary memorabilia, tents and coupon books have been thrown out, Cheung said. He is now worried the whole night market might have to be trashed if he doesn’t get some sort of government assistance.
“Four containers (of anniversary paraphernalia) arrived in February, we were so excited. But everything has gone into the garbage,” he said.
The province has announced a $1.5-billion COVID-19 package that will be unveiled in September and the 19,000-member Tourism Industry Association of B.C. has asked for $680 million of it.
According to the association, tourism and hospitality brought in $20.4 billion in direct visitor spending in 2018, the last year for which figures are available, plus paid $5 billion in taxes.
“What we are asking for is a return on the investments the tourism and hospitality sector has made to the provincial and national economy over (the) decades,” Vivek Sharma, chairman of the provincial tourism association, said when the group made its application for provincial aid three weeks ago.
Tourism Minister Lisa Beare hasn’t said how much of the stimulus money should find its way to tourism.
In Cheung’s case, as a seasonal business, he is unable to make up any losses this winter. As a niche business, he’s ineligible for aid. He is a reluctant case study of someone who has fallen through the cracks.
“Every single crack,” he said.
The 24 acres by the Bridgeport Canada Line Station that houses the night market from May to Thanksgiving still has a landlord who expects his roughly $65,000 a month until the lease expires next spring.
In pre-COVID-19 times, Cheung could have subleased the space to the airport for overflow parking, but barely anyone is flying and there’s lots of parking in the permanent lots.
Cheung would have employed 150 workers this summer, and he had 280 vendors — 120 of them in the food court — signed up.
“I feel my business has fallen into quicksand, and the faster I move, the faster I sink,” Cheung said.
“For years we’ve welcomed thousands-and-thousands of tourists every night we’re open, we’re one of the biggest attractions in the Lower Mainland. How come we don’t fit in any (assistance) hole?”