The Retail Business Holidays Act and Your Retail Tenants: Which Municipality Decides Whether They Can Open

One Ontario statute, but Toronto is carved out entirely and every 905 municipality can vote itself out. Whether your retail tenants can trade on a statutory holiday starts not with what they sell, but with where the property sits.

I am Arthur Zhao. When an investor asks me to walk a retail plaza before closing, one quiet line item on my due-diligence list is deceptively simple: on a statutory holiday, which of these tenants is actually allowed to open the doors?

Most owners assume the answer is a single province-wide rule, or a matter of qualifying for some exemption. It is neither. Ontario’s Retail Business Holidays Act is layered: the City of Toronto sits entirely outside it, and each municipality in the 905 can vote itself out. So the first question is never what the tenant sells — it is which municipality the property is in.

And there is a 2026 wrinkle worth flagging up front: Victoria Day is no longer a holiday under this Act. A great deal of what you will find online — including some law-firm pages — has not caught up, and stale checklists have a way of migrating into lease exhibits and property-management files.

The 2026 change most sources still get wrong: Victoria Day is out

Open almost any older write-up of this Act and you will see a holiday list that includes Victoria Day. That list is now wrong.

By 2026, c. 2, Sched. 14, s. 1, Ontario repealed clause (c) — Victoria Day — from the definition of “holiday” in s.1(1), effective 2026-04-24. For the purposes of the Retail Business Holidays Act, Victoria Day is no longer a statutory closing day.

I lead with this because secondary sources are almost systematically behind here — law-firm pages, chamber-of-commerce handouts, and the “statutory closing days” schedules that property managers circulate to tenants. If your lease or management documents attach such a list, re-check it now. A stale table should not be driving this year’s staffing.

What counts as a holiday now — the seven statutory days

With Victoria Day removed, the current list of holidays under s.1(1) is these seven, plus a catch-all:

(a) New Year’s Day; (b) Good Friday; (d) Canada Day; (e) Labour Day; (f) Thanksgiving Day; (g) Christmas Day; (h) Easter Sunday; and (i) any other public holiday proclaimed by the Lieutenant Governor.

Two days people routinely assume are on this list but are not: Boxing Day (December 26) and Family Day. Neither is a closing day under this Act. If you need to deal with trading or staffing on those two days, that falls under other legislation or mechanisms — verify it separately at first hand rather than folding it into this Act.

The first fork: which municipality is the property in?

Set the holiday list aside for a moment. What actually decides whether a tenant may open is a geography question. The Act applies in layers, which for a landlord collapses into a short decision chain:

Property in the City of Toronto → the Act does not apply at all;
Property in another municipality → first check whether that municipality has opted out;
A municipality that has not opted out → only then do the s.2 ban and s.3 exemptions come into play.

The next three sections work down that chain, layer by layer.

Toronto: the Act simply does not apply (this is not an exemption)

s.1.1(1) is blunt: this Act does not apply to the City of Toronto, and it does not apply in respect of any by-law of the City or any retail business establishment located in the City. The s.1(1) definition of “municipality” reinforces it — that definition expressly does not include the City of Toronto.

The wording matters. A Toronto store that opens on a holiday is not doing so because it “qualifies for an exemption” — it is because the Act does not reach it in the first place. Calling it an exemption is a category error: an exemption presupposes the Act applies and then lifts the duty, whereas Toronto is placed outside the Act’s scope altogether.

But “does not apply” is not “no rules at all.” s.1.1(2) deliberately preserves one thing: Part XVII of the Employment Standards Act, 2000 continues to apply as it would apply under this Act — so the employee right-to-refuse-holiday-work framework survives in Toronto even though the closing rule does not. Add whatever other municipal operating rules the City may have. For a Toronto property, the accurate landlord framing is: this closing statute does not govern here, but do not assume nothing does.

Other municipalities can opt out — but must build their own closing rule

Outside Toronto, a municipality is not stuck with the Act. s.1.2(1) lets a municipality pass a by-law providing that this Act does not apply to it; once effective, the Act no longer applies to that municipality or to retail establishments in it.

There is a condition that is easy to miss. Under s.1.2(2), that opt-out by-law does not take effect on passage — it comes into force only after the municipality also passes a by-law under s.148 of the Municipal Act, 2001 requiring certain classes of retail establishment to close on holidays. In other words, opting out of the provincial statute is not “anything goes”: the legislature requires the municipality to stand up its own local closing regime to take over.

And even where a municipality has opted out, s.1.2(4) preserves the same carve-in: Part XVII of the Employment Standards Act, 2000 still applies as it would under this Act. The employee right to refuse does not vanish with the opt-out.

The practical takeaway for a landlord: do not guess that a given 905 municipality “must be open.” Whether it has opted out, and exactly how its own closing by-law reads, are questions for that municipality’s clerk and its current by-laws — not for assumption.

Where the Act still bites: the s.2 ban and the s.3 small-store test

If the property is neither in Toronto nor in a municipality that has opted out, the Act applies in full.

The s.2 prohibition: on a holiday, a person carrying on a retail business shall not (a) sell or offer to sell goods or services by retail, or (b) admit members of the public to the establishment; s.2(2) extends the same duty to that business’s employees and agents. Note limb (b) — the ban is not only on selling; simply admitting the public is itself prohibited.

The s.3(1) small-store exemption (three conditions, all required): to trade lawfully on a holiday, an establishment must satisfy all of — (a) the only goods offered for sale that day are foodstuffs, tobacco and articles required for smoking, antiques, handicrafts, or a combination of these (or those goods as the principal business, with anything else sold only as sundries); and (b) no more than 3 persons serve the public at any time; and (c) the total area used to serve or sell to the public, or for public display, is less than 2,400 square feet.

These are joined by AND, and the most common misreading treats them as “any one will do.” A 3,000-square-foot variety store fails the area test even if it runs two staff and sells mostly food.

s.3 contains further exemption categories as well — pharmacies, and additional mechanisms tied to tourism, for example — which this article does not lay out clause by clause. If a tenant may fall into one of those, verify the specific provision at first hand.