We're not opposed to those benefits now ending. We know they ended about a week and a half ago. The piece that we're still very concerned about, however, is the amount of debt that is still being held by small businesses across the country. It's pandemic-related debt, I should say. It was all accumulated in the pandemic through no fault of their own, for the most part, so what are we going to do to help them deal with that debt?
We're already seeing bankruptcy statistics starting to go up. We had a release yesterday from Statistics Canada that showed bankruptcies are starting to increase. They're back to what they were before the pandemic, if not higher. This is only going to continue, and if we want to stop some of the haemorrhaging, we're going to have to think about ways to help those small businesses deal with their debt.
We're not pushing for an extension of the wage subsidy or the rent subsidies anymore. We know that they have to come to an end. Many of our members are open to their ending now, but we still have to deal with the fact that there are businesses struggling with the debt. That's where we'd like to see consideration around things like increasing a forgivable portion of the CEBA loan a bit more, and maybe adding a forgivable portion to the HASCAP. Maybe it's just for those hardest-hit sectors that were shut down for more than x number of days, 300 or 400 days during the pandemic.
There still has to be some recognition that this isn't over for a lot of small businesses.