Thank you.
I'm going to continue on that line with Mr. Foley.
I come from a riding that depends heavily on tourism. I'm the NDP tourism and small business critic. As you say, it was the first and hardest-hit sector in the pandemic, and for various reasons it has not fully recovered. Some of those reasons run on from the pandemic and others are totally separate.
In my area, for instance, I had a whole bunch of businesses that were going to be able to pay back their CEBA loans, and then we were burning all summer in the Okanagan Valley. We had travel shutdowns, where the government basically shut down the tourism industry to keep people out. That affected the whole business of labour, which has been a big issue, and housing is a huge part of that. I have hotels that are buying motels to house their employees. It's just a whole pile of run-on things.
I've been working with the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and TIAC to try to get the government to extend that because, like you say, it's not that they can't pay them back. It's that they were forced to pay them back over a relatively short period of time. I'll give you a few extra seconds to expand on that and why the government.... This would keep businesses alive so that they could pay back the loans. This would keep businesses alive so that they could keep the people who work there and provide an opportunity for visitors across the country to enjoy this place.