As a non-partisan association, I encourage all parties to talk about CEBA loans often, until such time as businesses are able to repay them. This is a big deal. These are not small loans for a lot of small businesses: $40,000 or $60,000.
When the CEBA loans were first issued, it was a very helpful program. However, we thought that the pandemic would last a couple months and that we'd get back to normal. As the pandemic restrictions stretched on for two years, business owners were running out of time. To be fair to the federal government, we were delighted when Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, extended the deadline to repay the CEBA loans by a year, from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023. Sadly, though, many of our members right now feel like the recovery phase from COVID started at the beginning of this year. Now they have very little time to repay these loans. Most have not paid a nickel back.
We'd love to see some additional forgiveness. We're suggesting raising that to 50% of the loan. More than anything, we need more time for businesses to repay these loans in order to keep the benefit of the forgivable portion and the interest-free protection.