It's absolute devastation. The hotel industry would be considered the anchor business of the tourism industry. It supports commerce and the movement of people, and it's critical for communities that rely on tourism. That's the first thing you do when you plan a trip—you book the hotel.
It impacts Canada's ability to bid on international events and bring them back to Canada, because we would not have the capacity. The downtown cores are hurting so deeply. They're sitting at 90% revenue loss, on average, over the course of the last 15 months. It's devastating.
Just for the hotel sector alone, we're talking about more than 300,000 jobs that would be at risk. Also, 70% of the industry going down means that for the northern and rural or remote regions of the country that have one or two hotels, which are required in order to get essential services up there, we now start getting into significant questions of access if we allow this infrastructure to break down.
I want to remind the committee who owns these hotels. Often people think it is the Marriotts and the Hiltons that own these properties. It's not. It's people in your communities. I'm sure you know them, because they've all been banging down your doors for the last number of months.
Most of this industry is owned by a small business, someone who has invested in the local hotel. They may have a chain that is referenced on the hotel. That's a marketing agreement. There's a true franchise structure in the hotel industry. These people have invested their livelihoods into the local hotel, and they're going to lose everything if we don't have a system in place or if we pull the system prematurely, before these businesses can get back on their feet.