Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to present today.
For those unfamiliar with the Retail Council of Canada, we represent over 70% of core retail sales nationwide. Our members are drawn from grocery, pharmacy, general merchandise and specialty retailers, both in bricks-and-mortar stores and online.
Normally, retail is Canada's largest private sector employer, albeit one that has been battered by three waves of COVID. When it is fully operational, more than two million Canadians work in our sector.
We've noted from these hearings, and prior iterations of these hearings, that several witnesses have treated the meetings as an opportunity to advance their budget recommendations. I hope to be able to address some of that during the Q and A and know that members were presented with a written copy of our submission a few weeks ago.
I want to focus my remarks on the stated topic, which is the federal government's programs to deal with the economic impact of the COVID pandemic.
Briefly stated, these programs have been the main lifeline for our industry. While we've suffered a significant number of closings and job losses—some never to return—those impacts would have been far worse but for the roles played by CEWS, CERS and CEBA, among other initiatives. We want to express our appreciation both to the government for its leadership and to the opposition parties for working collaboratively in a minority Parliament to ensure that support was provided in a timely and generous way.
We also acknowledge that the policy-makers have listened closely to industry and to the Retail Council specifically as to how the programs work in practice, refining them and, at least on CEWS and CERS, fundamentally redesigning them through several iterations.
No one had experience with these types of sweeping measures prior to COVID. Consequently, the early stage versions were rapidly designed and, with that, rather blunt instruments—generous if you qualified, but with an all-or-nothing aspect to them.
The addition of sliding scales and the elimination of some of the arbitrary thresholds were huge improvements to CEWS, as was the addition of measures to deal with businesses that were most heavily affected or in lockdown. The change from CECRA to CERS was a complete rethink of the rent subsidy, and a vastly improved one as to who qualified and the removal of the landlord approval hurdle. RCC also appreciates that the government listened to our suggestion to allow for up to $1,000 a month of earnings for CERB recipients, boosting the incomes of Canadian families and avoiding the problem of outbidding retailers for some of our own part-time employees.
That's not to say that the current generation of these programs is perfect. For example, recent changes to shift reference months to 2019 have been very helpful overall, but they don't work well for new businesses that were nascent or not yet under way in 2019. Presumably, we want to encourage these new businesses, not exclude them from support.
Similarly, we continue to question whether it's fair that a single location with a $100,000 rent bill should be treated differently than another entity with two $50,000 locations even though the two enterprises may be of a similar size. There are also issues with the lockdown provisions requirement to demonstrate revenue loss enterprise-wide.
The list could go on, but it's probably best to say that the programs should be subject to constant reassessment as to how they are working in practice and when and how to ramp them down in a way that is sensitive to the cumulative impact of the pandemic.
On this last point, we believe there is an imperative for Statistics Canada and for government generally to gather better real-time data on our industry and, we presume, on like industries.
Thank you again for the opportunity today and for the hard work that parliamentarians are doing on programs to help citizens and businesses cope with the economic effects of the pandemic.