Yes. I've been telling new business owners who have been contacting me in huge numbers to just stick with it, that the government is serious about this. The Prime Minister himself promised to do something for new business owners back in May of last year.
A full calendar year later, during a worldwide pandemic, the government has not moved on this measure. Meanwhile, most of the provincial support programs, many of them admittedly with tons of problems, from the NDP in British Columbia to the Conservatives in Ontario, have fixed this issue and allowed access to new business owners.
It is more complicated, but it's not impossible. We've laid out several ways that the government can do that: removing the requirements for a business number before March 1, a payroll account number before March 1. If they don't have a comparable month in 2019 because they weren't around in 2019, allow them to at least compare themselves against the industry average, say for a restaurant in Manitoba, and use that as the amount to get the subsidy.
These are businesses not set up with the full understanding of the pandemic behind them. These are business owners that often started in 2019. Some of them have laid out $400,000 or $600,000 to invest in a brand new 100-seat restaurant that was supposed to open in March 2020, but delayed because of pandemic restrictions until June, and opened with a trickle of business income, and have not had a nickel of federal support despite the Prime Minister's personal commitment to do that. That's why I'm so unhappy about this.