Malls in Nanaimo: shopping centres, plazas, liquor stores and cannabis

Woodgrove Centre opened on the north end of the Island Highway in 1981 with two department stores, Eaton's and Woodward's, at either end. Neither name survives there. Woodward's went bankrupt in 1993 and its space passed to The Bay; Eaton's closed in 1999; The Bay moved into the old Eaton's space and then, in 2025, closed along with every other Hudson's Bay store in the country. The mall outlasted all three.

That sequence is a fair summary of how shopping in Nanaimo works. The malls in Nanaimo are strung along the Island Highway, they change tenants more often than they change address, and a handful of them double as transit hubs. This guide walks the main centres from north to south, then turns to two kinds of store that the City treats differently from the rest: liquor stores and cannabis stores.

Why a city of Nanaimo's size has this much retail

The City's economic development office describes Nanaimo as the regional retail and service hub for central and northern Vancouver Island. Its figures, based on 2023 data, say retail is the city's largest employment sector, with 7,762 residents working in it, about 15 per cent of the labour market. Another 1,368 people work in wholesale trade, and 880 businesses hold a wholesale or retail licence, about 13 per cent of all business licences in the city.

The office gives two reasons. Nanaimo is the largest urban area north of Victoria and sits on every major transportation corridor on the island, and it is a gateway to the mainland through its ferry terminals. It also says retailers can reach a population of more than 265,000 people within an hour's drive.

The same July 2023 breakdown counts the stores by type. Clothing and accessories shops are the biggest group at 89, followed by food and beverage stores at 78 and health and personal care stores at 67. Florists number 27; book and news dealers, 36. Thirteen businesses are listed as marijuana stores, medical and recreational together.

Woodgrove Centre and the north end

Woodgrove Centre, at 6631 Island Highway North, is usually described as the largest shopping centre on Vancouver Island. It has more than 150 stores. The mall's floor area is harder to pin down: its Wikipedia entry gives 724,713 square feet in its main text and 751,713 in its summary box, and both figures sit well above the 530,000 square feet the centre had before a 2000 expansion.

That expansion reshuffled the anchors. The Bay took over the former Eaton's store, and the old Bay space was demolished for a Walmart, which opened on July 11, 2002, the day after Walmart closed its store at Country Club Centre. On September 1, 2020, Central Walk, led by Weihong Liu, bought Woodgrove from Ivanhoe Cambridge. The Bay store closed in 2025, after the Hudson's Bay Company filed for creditor protection in March and liquidated its remaining stores by June 1. Toys "R" Us, a Woodgrove tenant since 1994, closed later the same year.

Woodgrove is also a transit node. Woodgrove Exchange is the northern end of the Rapid Line from downtown and the meeting point for the Intercity route from Parksville and Qualicum Beach. The VIU Express route continues past Nanaimo North Town Centre via Uplands Road before it reaches the exchange, which makes North Town the mall most bus riders pass on the way to Woodgrove. North Town has its own history: in 1985, as Rutherford Mall, it hosted the Remembrance Day display that grew into the Vancouver Island Military Museum, and on May 3, 2025, its tables filled with member-grown plants for the Nanaimo Horticultural Society's spring sale.

Country Club, Brooks Landing and the middle of the city

Country Club Centre sits where Bowen Road meets the Island Highway, at 3200 North Island Highway. It describes itself as a centre of local businesses with ample parking, and its interior shopping stays open until 8 p.m. on Friday nights, according to its own site. Country Club Exchange beside it is a stop on several routes, including the NRGH route that runs past the hospital and the Country Club/Downtown route that links it with Terminal Park Mall and downtown.

Brooks Landing Shopping Centre, at 2000 North Island Highway, has the most candid history of any of them. Its owner, the Terracap Group, says the centre was first built as an interior mall and suffered persistent vacancies, so it was converted into an outdoor, grocery-anchored centre. Terracap bought it in 2004 and says occupancy has stayed close to 100 per cent since. The tenant list it gives includes Save-On-Foods, Staples, Home Hardware, Tim Hortons and The Landing Liquor Store. Terracap places it about a kilometre from the ferry terminal, on the main access road.

If you are driving downtown rather than to the highway malls, expect to pay: parking in downtown Nanaimo costs $0.25 for 12 minutes at the street meters, and the city's parkades charge $0.75 for the first two hours.

Harewood, University Village and the south end

Harewood's history runs back further than any of its stores. The name was in use by at least 1913 for a small mining village. The Harewood Coal Mining Company was set up in 1864 to explore coal south of Nanaimo near the Chase River valley and had stopped operating by 1869; in 1884 Samuel Robins of the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company bought the Harewood Estates and divided them into five-acre lots for miners' families. Lots like those housed the families who worked for Nanaimo's coal companies.

Harewood sat outside the city for decades, run as the Harewood Improvement District from the late 1940s. City records show new letters patent issued for the amalgamated City of Nanaimo on January 1, 1975, and an order in council dissolving the Harewood Improvement District on July 10 of that year.

Today the neighbourhood includes Vancouver Island University and the Colliery Dam trails, and its shopping is spread across smaller centres rather than one big mall. The Harewood bus route runs from downtown through Harewood and University Village to the university, and the Cedar/VIU route links University Village with South Parkway Plaza and Cedar. The Cinnabar route also stops at South Parkway Plaza on its way out from downtown. A photograph of the neighbourhood dated December 2003 is captioned Harewood Mall, but no current source consulted for this guide lists a shopping centre trading under that name.

The table below places the centres that current sources confirm, with the transit routes the regional system lists for them.

How the City handles liquor stores

British Columbia's liquor licences are issued by the provincial Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch, not by the City. The City's part is land use, and it is strict. Its liquor licence page says every liquor retail store in Nanaimo requires site-specific zoning, so opening or moving one will most likely mean a rezoning application, judged against Council's criteria for licensee retail stores. A grocery or independent wine store that wants to sell wine, cider or sake may need both a rezoning and a provincial wine store licence.

The stores themselves come in two kinds. BC Liquor Stores are run by the province's Liquor Distribution Branch, a chain that began in 1921 when British Columbia ended prohibition in favour of government sales. Accounts of the exact opening date differ by a few days within June 1921. Since 1988 the province has also allowed private retail liquor stores, which is why a mall such as Brooks Landing can list an independent liquor store among its tenants. British Columbia's drinking age is 19, set by the Age of Majority Act since 1970.

For wine, cider and beer made on the island, the producers' own shops are often the most direct source, and Vancouver Island wineries, cideries and breweries operate from Saanich and Cowichan north to Qualicum Beach.

Cannabis: a separate chain and a rezoning for every store

Cannabis became legal across Canada on October 17, 2018. Nanaimo had prepared: Council set up a Cannabis Task Force on December 18, 2017, and on October 1, 2018 amended the Zoning Bylaw to regulate the sale, production, processing and distribution of cannabis. Under those amendments a cannabis retail store is a site-specific use, so each location needs a rezoning. Production and processing are allowed in the industrial zones.

The City's process starts with the province. An applicant has to apply to the Liquor and Cannabis Regulation Branch first; the City will not accept a rezoning application until the branch confirms it has received one, and it ends the rezoning if the province drops its review. The two processes then run side by side, followed by a City business licence. Signs need provincial approval before the City will consider them.

The province did not put cannabis on the shelves of its liquor stores. It created a separate chain, BC Cannabis Stores, operated by the same Liquor Distribution Branch, which sells both in stores and online. The first store opened in Kamloops at 10 a.m. on October 17, 2018. CBC reported that it was then the only government store in the province, that about 80 products were on sale, and that Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth put online sales at around 1,000 in the first hour. The chain now runs 39 stores across British Columbia, according to its Wikipedia entry; private licensed stores make up the rest of the legal market.

The age rule matches alcohol. You must be 19 or older to use, buy or possess non-medical cannabis in British Columbia, and the province publishes a map of legal stores alongside guidance on spotting illegal ones. Whether a government-run cannabis store operates in Nanaimo itself is not stated in any of the sources reviewed for this guide; the City's 2023 count of 13 marijuana stores does not separate public from private.