(ODRP) in order to revitalize the downtown retail areas of smaller communities throughout the province. Typically, this involved the construction of new downtown malls to compete with growing suburban shopping opportunities. However, author Rod McQueen wrote in The Eatons that there was no business case or market analysis to justify the construction of these downtown malls. Many residents noted that the enclosed facilities represented the antithesis to the one unique aspect of downtown shopping, street-related stores. Often the new downtown mall had a "vacuum cleaner" effect of attracting the stronger street boutiques away from their neighbourhoods to become tenants in unstable shopping centres. The lack of free parking in the downtown area was the number one impetus for residents flocking to suburban malls which had free parking, which did not help the cause of the downtown malls whose garages charged fees, collected by the municipalities who usually financed the construction mall garages. Suburban malls furthermore had the inherent advantage of conveniently located at where the city's population was relocating towards, including better access to arterial roads and freeways. Conventional wisdom held that only larger cities, with populations of 200,000 or greater, had a wealthy enough clientele to support upscale department stores such as Eaton's or Hudson's Bay (the latter which only participated in the Galleria London location), while communities with populations of 100,000 or less were already well-served by existing retailers, such as discount stores Zellers and Woolco, and the lower-end department store Sears Canada (which only participated in three ODRP locations). Nonetheless, in a highly criticized business decision, Eaton's became a partner in the program, and its stores served as the anchor tenant in many of these malls. As stated in The Globe and Mail newspaper,The history of retailing is filled with tales of merchants who were brilliantly prescient in their location choices, and others who totally misread their markets and fell flat. In the 1970s, the T. Eaton Co. became a textbook example of the latter when it built huge department stores in the increasingly empty downtowns of small Canadian cities; far from reviving the cores, the stores failed as consumers kept taking their business to suburban malls.Major retail chains attracted to new downtown malls left as soon as their initial leases expired, while Eaton's bankruptcy filing and reorganization in 1997 resulting the in the closure all of its downtown locations in Ontario except those in Toronto and