It's nice to see you again, honourable Chair, and also committee members. Thank you so much for inviting us to present today.
We provided a PDF of our presentation, if you would like to follow along with that.
There are over 24,000 travel advisers in Canada, and half of us are independent travel advisers. What that means is that we are small business owners. We are self-employed and the majority of us are sole proprietors.
The two key pieces of information we want to give you at this point are that 100% of our revenue comes from the commissions we earn from our travel suppliers and that 85% of all travel advisers are female. We know that women have been the hardest hit in this pandemic, and our industry is no exception.
We have been told that we're all in the same boat, but we don't believe that's true. We believe we're all in the same storm, but in many different boats, and we believe that our boat is sinking much more rapidly than a lot of other boats out there.
Part of that is because of our delayed revenue stream. We're not like an industry that sells a product and gets paid a commission cheque the following month. In our line of work, it takes between five and 11 months from when a customer makes a booking of a trip until we actually get paid for the work we have done on that booking.
If we want to assume that travel restrictions would be lifted by the end of June, and if a client came and made a booking on July 1, we would not receive any revenue from that booking and the work we've done until as early as mid-November of this year, or, more realistically, as late as June 2022.
Our first reality is that we have been without revenue for one year. We know it's going to take five to 11 months from the resumption of travel before we start to see any revenue from future bookings.
We are asking the government for sector-specific aid, because we know that the CRB is not meant to be a long-term band-aid solution. There are other countries that are already in their second round of sector-specific aid for their travel advisers, and we believe that Canada needs to follow suit.
Here's another reality. Even though we have been hindered from earning any revenue, we are business owners. We have been continuing to operate our businesses and are as busy as ever, because we are supporting our clients. When they needed to be repatriated to Canada, we were there to do that for them. When they needed assistance with their cancellations, we were there to help them. As they have been issued their future travel vouchers, we have been processing those for them and we are continually reworking those files. As they have needed assistance with insurance claims, we have been busy providing that assistance.
Although we have been quite active in our businesses, the reality is that we are slipping through the cracks because, other than the CRB, only a very small percentage of independent travel advisers have been able to receive any funding from the federal government. The CRB was designed to put food on our table and help us pay the rent, not pay our business expenses.
There's another piece to our puzzle, and that is that we know the airlines need financial assistance. They are the backbone of our travel economy, and we need them to be financially viable. We also support the option of consumer refunds. However, in November, when the former transport minister announced that airlines would not receive any bailouts unless consumers were given refunds, there was a huge trickle-down effect. WestJet and WestJet Vacations, and then Air Transat and Transat Holidays issued notices to us saying that our clients would not receive a refund until we paid back the commissions that we, the travel advisers, earned on those bookings.
In some cases, those commissions were earned by us in 2019. They have already been taxed, and there's no way that we can pay them back, nor do we believe that we should be paying back those commissions, because they were revenue earned for services we provided to those large corporations.
We need assurances from the government that bailouts will only be given on the condition that travel advisers' commissions are protected. We're asking for the government to set up a fund in the amount of $200 million to facilitate this. Until travel restrictions are lifted, consumer confidence will remain low, and we believe that if the government is going to continue to impose these restrictions, aid must be given immediately to our sector.
We're asking for your support for commission protection, first of all, to ensure that bailouts will only be given on the condition that our commissions are protected. Commission clawbacks are forcing many travel advisers into bankruptcy.
The second thing we're asking for is sector-specific aid for independent travel advisers to help keep our businesses afloat. Please ensure that our businesses, and we, won't continue to fall through the cracks.
Thank you very much.