To your first point, the City restraining a property owner's right to develop land within zoning constraints: the City is doing precisely what its mandate requires, which is to ensure that commercial development within the city meets certain objectives relating to employment quality and sustainability, to environmental impact, and to social impact. And it has to balance both the short and long-term considerations on these objectives (e.g. trying to attract hundreds of sure-fire low-paid retail jobs versus fewer--and more uncertain--higher paying jobs, or ensuring land is available for business activity which otherwise would move to the surrounding suburbs versus letting it be quickly repurposed for a shopping mall). In other words, "profitable use" by the proprietor is only one point among many on which the City must base decisions.
To your second point, that "local merchants have stopped offering the products the locals want", I can only say that within a radius of 2KM of Queen/Pape, there are (among larger stores) Loblaws "No Frills", Carpet Mill, Beer Store, LCBO, A&P "Basic Foods", Shoppers DrugMart, Zellers, Winners, Home Depot, Loblaws "Super Centre", Canadian Tire, Price Chopper, and I'm probably forgetting some. And most of these are in the medium and low pricing segment of the market, with reasonably good car access/parking. What is missing are medium sized commercial premises along Queen E. where a supermarkets, etc., like IGA would certainly do good business, since not everyone has or uses a car in the neighbourhood to do shopping, and the streetcar service along Queen E. and Gerrard E. makes for efficient "Main St" style shopping.
Finally, the idea that the only alternatives for this land are a shopping mall or "film studio that panders and depends on Americans and sits empty for half the year" is really indicative of the quality and ambition of the strategic business thinking in this city! Quick buck artists, waiting for the inside edge on public money whenever possible...
As for characterizing criticism of Chinese factory labour practices as "garbage", maybe we should think about the full range of consequences of "the west [...] simply outsourced[ing] the manufacturing of the goods we want to the lower cost market", not just exclusively about its economic rationality, the reality is probably not all black or white. Tanneries have to go somewhere, nobody is suggesting rebuilding one south of Eastern, but we might think about where and how our leather is being made in China.
