It would be my pleasure.
In the hotel industry—the hotels that would be in all of your ridings—there's a misconception that this is a franchise model. The brands that you might see on those hotels don't actually own those assets. If that asset is generating revenue, they would take a percentage fee. It's a service arrangement, where they would take a percentage fee on top of what the asset would be making.
No one's making money during COVID, so, effectively, those brands—it's really a marketing agreement—that sit above those assets are stagnant. If you go down to the asset level, and you're now looking at the people in your community who own those assets, you probably know a lot of them and who they are. They have invested their livelihood into the local hotel. They purchased that hotel and that hotel is expensive. It's a large asset.
Over the course of COVID they've had to keep the lights on. You can't just shut a hotel down. You need to have insurance, you need to keep the lights on, you need to have maintenance and you need to have a core set of employees. Fixed costs have been the single biggest challenge for these operators, because there has not been enough money coming in the door over this sustained, 19-month period to pay for these assets.
The CERB program, which didn't include hotels originally, but did in the second iteration, has provided a percentage of support. There are still losses every month, but that's critical. The other piece is, obviously, our employees, who are the lifeblood of this industry. The wage subsidy program has been absolutely instrumental.
To be very clear, every single month, most of these properties are running a loss, which is why we are so deeply concerned about this winter period until the spring.