Thank you very much.
One of the purported goals of Bill C-2 is to support the tourism and hospitality industry. If you take independent travel agents as a case study, about half of the folks who are represented by the Association of Independent Travel Advisors have been very clear that they were being paid under the Canada recovery benefit program as opposed to any of the wage subsidy programs.
There's a reason for that. It's because they work for themselves. It's an industry that's about 85% women. A lot of them work out of their basements. Many of them continued to work in the early days of the pandemic helping their clients secure their rebates or travel vouchers. Many of them are working now to help as folks start to contemplate vacations and, in the interim, create bookings. Of course, they won't be paid until people actually take the trip.
This bill really doesn't provide any ongoing support for them. We know they are getting close to a time when they can support themselves financially, but this bill is an admission that this is a sector that has not yet recovered, and yet there's no help for those folks.
I'm wondering. What was the decision? What was the discussion around choosing to proceed in a fashion that would exclude such a high percentage of people in an industry that the government itself has said it wants to continue to support?