Glen Tymchuck opened his restaurant, Hogtown Smoke on Colborne Street, in Toronto back in 2017 – a lifelong dream that slowly turned into a nightmare due to one setback after another.In 2019, the City of Toronto unexpectedly began construction outside the restaurant. After four months of work, Tymchuck arrived at his restaurant one morning in May to find a gaping hole 10-feet deep right outside the front step.Emergency sewer repairs forced water shutoffs and the restaurant lost thousands of dollars in business.“No one compensates a poor small business for that,” Tymchuck told CityNews.Less than a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the already crippled business hard.“Restaurants were already struggling. Then finally COVID hits and we were first to close down,” said Tymchuck. “I had dumped my entire life savings into the restaurant. I mean everything I’ve had since I was a kid I saved up for this. So to lose it all is absolutely devastating.”Following the closure, Tymchuck claimed his business losses with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) but is facing yet another obstacle. “In my case, I lost almost $1.5 million. So I’m claiming half of that towards business losses… they looked it over and they denied me,” he said.The CRA provided a number of reasons for the denial including questioning whether the business is closed for good and whether it was in fact a Canadian business.The agency also says Tymchuck failed to provide loan documents from shareholders while filing his losses.“I can tell you that no small businesses are keeping a shareholder loan ledger… you can’t punish a small business because they didn’t have a small loan ledger,” he said.The CRA says it is simply following the law and states that Tymchuck has failed to provide several other documents needed to prove a loss under the Income Tax Act, but Tymchuck says that’s not true.“Short of taking a lie detector test, I’m not sure what more I can do,” he said. He is now taking the CRA to court and while he knows there is a chance he will lose, he says it’s one he’s willing to take.“I have to go to the bitter end, whether I can afford lawyers or not, I have to keep fighting. I don’t want other people to have to do what I’m doing. It’s not fair what they’re doing,” he explained. “I want to win this case because it’ll prove that, the good guy, the small guy finally won against the big government.”Due to an ongoing backlog, the lawsuit that was filed last year won’t make it to court until 2027.If you have an issue, story or question you’d like us to look into, contact us.