Our business, staff and more importantly our community is suffering.

I’m unable to provide my services to my clients which means no support for their wellbeing and no income.

Our 3 gym locations have had to close due to shut down due to COVID 19. We have a training team who are all without pay right now.

As a fledgling business within the health and wellness business, not being able to operate during this time, is putting a heavy load on whether we will be able to keep our doors open when this is over. We need relief and support during this time to try and stay afloat.

Our physiotherapists are not able to see any patients virtually for fear they will lose their eligibility for CERB.

I am unable to work due to social distancing measures. My practice is predominantly acupuncture therefore I am currently unemployed

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, we have shut the doors to our gym and frozen all members membership dues. Because of this, we have zero opportunity for income from the gym that we have leased.


Our monthly rent & government TMI (government taxes, maintenance & insurance) payments are in the tens of thousand per month. To date there is no government assistance for fitness centres or the contractors that work out of our facilities. There is no forgiveness from landlords and the insurance companies have a ’no micro-organism clause’ meaning they will not assist in any work stoppage for COVID-19.


Gym owners and being hit twice, we are making no income, but we are also expected to pay out lease payments and TMI as if we were still allowed to have our doors open.


No gym small or large will be able to withstand the mounting dept that will be created for the owners in our industry. To date that only government assistance is for us to get loans to pay the landlords and government for our closed studios. Just a few months closed could cost us anywhere from 60-100K plus (on top of making no income).


We collectively request a rent & TMI freeze for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am aware that the City of Brampton is already doing this, or something similar. It’s tough enough dealing with making no income (with a brand new baby) and not being able to assist the amazing trainers that work out of our facility, please don’t additionally send us into soaring dept with the only recourse being taking huge loans to pay back potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Please allow us and our contractors to come back to jobs to keep the economy healthy versus having us all shut down and taking away all the jobs that provide, as well as the important services of health that we provide to our community.

This COVID-19 crisis is hard on everyone, but none more so than small businesses in the fitness, retail and hospitality spaces. We (BOLO) are a large class-based gym and social club downtown Toronto with a 7000 sq ft footprint, that also includes a full café, a salon, sauna beds, and cryotherapy. We service almost 10,000 members and have created a health and wellness hub that many members have described as their home-away-from-home. As things stand, we are unlikely to survive this crisis. We have a massive amount of rent, taxes, maintenance, insurance, software, and utility bills, for which we have no relief. As a small business owned by a young, local couple with no big financial backers or support – we have zero capacity to take on the debt that is accumulating during this government mandated shutdown. Deferral may seem like a generous offer but believe us when we say that our young business will not withstand carrying forward any interest, loans or payments in addition to the overhead we already shoulder. We can only hope that the leaders of our city, province & country will step in to ensure that our business (and businesses like ours) will still exist when this is over so that we can continue to support our community, and continue to employ our 35 young staff members, and contribute to the overall economy.

Being an entrepreneur is hard. I know that and after running Brass Vixens for almost 15 years, I have been through a lot of good times and a lot of bad times. This pandemic unprecedented to say the least. I voluntarily shut down my studios before the order came from the government, I know it was the right thing to do, it is better to over react than under react. I realize this is the first pandemic for all of us (hopefully the last!!!) and though I do appreciate the government is doing what it thinks is best, there is a huge disconnect happening right now for small businesses. Our businesses MUST be shut down, I accept that. I can go without, I can pivot my business, I can go into debt personally to keep my business going, I am happy the government has a loan program in place to help small businesses like mine. What seems brutally unfair is why my business is shut down and I am at a standstill but my landlord’s businesses take no hit. Why does my government think it is ok to stop revenue from so many small businesses, give us what seems like help but our biggest stress and worry is to our landlords. Why is their business not interrupted just like the rest of us? Why is there no rent freeze? I will never recoup the money I am losing being closed. We are all making sacrifices, aren’t we? With this current program it seems like some of us are sacrificing a lot more than others. We need a rent freeze.