Of our 3,500 Canadian locations, nearly two-thirds are fully closed and have seen more than 20,000 employees lose their employment. Of the 1,400 that remain open, which are only able to offer take-out and delivery to our guests, sales are down a dramatic 50%.
It is no secret that our industry already functions on an incredibly tight profit margin, typically around 5% to 7%, and so no extravagant accounting is required to understand that without significant assistance, a majority of our small business owners are at serious risk of not surviving this pandemic.
While the reopening date for dining rooms and shopping malls is as yet unclear in most provinces, our focus today is to facilitate and promote a viable business case for our franchisees to reopen for take-out and delivery. For this to occur, we require governments to offer relief programs that will be flexible and accessible to as many restaurant owners as possible, but also extended beyond June to the months following the reopening of dining rooms and malls, where seating capacity will be restricted and traffic reduced.
Canada's emergency commercial rent assistance program, CECRA, while providing some hope to small business operators is clearly too narrow a program, relying on the voluntary participation of landlords, who must have mortgages to qualify, which eliminates some of the biggest landlords in Canada, who do not use mortgages as their financial instrument of choice. It is equally punitive to those business owners trying to keep their doors open, who, while working hard every day, run the risk of creating comparable sales in excess of 30%, a threshold for disqualification of CECRA, which is far too low, in our opinion.
We firmly believe that having small essential businesses open to the public, with proper safety protocols in place, serving their communities, is the best possible scenario for all Canadians. Penalizing anyone who is making that effort every day is simply wrong, and we ask that consideration be given to modifying the program so as to include these open and operating small business owners who manage through grit and determination to reach sales higher than the 30% threshold set to date in CECRA and to expand the qualifying criteria for landlords.
Another key issue for companies like Tim Hortons, Subway, Recipe and many other franchising and umbrella companies like our own, MTY, is the uncertainty of not having our franchisees qualify for CECRA assistance because we risk being considered outside the criteria due to our combined sales exceeding the $20-million threshold. Individual subtenants should be qualified for CECRA notwithstanding the size of their franchisor.
The other principal issue at play, which is preventing our progress, is the different emergency response benefits being offered to Canadians. While we fully support and appreciate all the aid provided in this critical time, we also want the committee to be aware that we have experienced first-hand in the emergency aid the negative effect of people being kept at home rather than accepting available employment. While the decree of isolation was the cornerstone of flattening the COVID-19 spread, one we fully agree with and support, if we want to see our economy reopen, then we must recognize the negative effect the emergency aid programs can have on Canada's productivity and its ability to move us economically past this pandemic.
Conversely, however, extending the Canada emergency wage subsidy program beyond the current cut-off date will encourage a swift return of staff to work and support the financial burden on restaurant operators in particular.
In closing, we want to impress upon the committee the severe impact and fragile state our industry finds itself in today as a result of this pandemic. We respectfully ask the committee to seriously consider modifications to the CECRA program as outlined and to closely consider extending the Canada emergency wage subsidy program to encourage rehiring of staff and financially supporting our small business operators for the benefit of our economy.
Thank you for your time here today and for consideration of our concerns raised.