Thank you.
At the top of our presentation I certainly want to urge passage of Bill C-2. I think it's important to say a brief word to situate how we see this bill in the context of the Canadian economy, particularly with the fall economic statement coming next week.
Businesses have repeatedly made clear to us that compounding additional uncertainty and burdens on their competitiveness is not an option. Just to name two of the challenges we've heard about in companies, there is the continuing application of the automatic escalator on excise taxes for alcohol products, as well as retroactively applied digital services taxes which would scope in Canadian companies and risk retaliation from the United States. There are many, many challenges I could go on about, but certainly, in a period of economic uncertainty, we are also seeing a very fragile recovery for our members.
Although the macroeconomic job numbers are positive, with employment at 186,000 jobs higher last month than it was pre-pandemic, there's certainly a lot of work to be done. Accommodation and food services employment is still at 16% below its pre-pandemic levels, or roughly 200,000 jobs, according to Statistics Canada's November labour force survey data.
The last piece of context that I think is particularly germane to the discussion about the hardest-hit sectors and the travel and hospitality industries is the public health restrictions that are still being imposed upon these businesses. Provincial rules continue to constrain the capacity of businesses to operate, and certainly no company opened with success predicated on operating at only half capacity. As for tourism, certainly no operator in any of your constituencies would have opened with an assumption for success based on not being able to access foreign tourists as part of their business model.
Canadians continue to face a fairly fluid landscape, it's fair to say, with respect to our travel restrictions. We, unfortunately, don't have clear data to outline how decisions are made. Certainly, while public health is always paramount, I think it's fair to say that the rules remain complex across different modes of transportation, country of departure and length of trip. The current rules do act as a disincentive to travel, which I think means that companies that are in the travel and hospitality space are operating with one hand behind their back.
In the most recent Canadian survey on business conditions, over 55% of the accommodation and food services businesses said that they expect their profitability to decrease in the next three months.
This isn't to go down a deep tangent on issues that aren't related to the question at hand with Bill C-2, but certainly I think it's quite important to help set the context for the discussion on the importance of this bill.
Now I'll turn to my colleague Alla to speak a little bit more to the specifics about the legislation.