Thank you for that.
While we welcome any type of new benefit, our concern with the benefits proposed under Bill C-2 is whether workers would actually qualify for those benefits. We're worried that when there are outbreaks in various parts of the country that may be workplace specific, where workers do not have access to things like paid sick time, they will also not have access to this benefit, based on the fact that there isn't an actual lockdown for that particular region. That is going to leave workers significantly short.
The other concern we have is that employers may not necessarily qualify under the hospitality benefits, for example, because they may not have lost 40% of their business or more. However, workers may have lost a shift or two during that week. For a worker to miss a fifth of their paycheck, that's a fairly significant chunk that they have to navigate and negotiate in terms of how they make their rent check and how they put those groceries on the table, so we are concerned that those benefits don't go nearly far enough.