Government Operations Committee on June 14th, 2021

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Okay, great.

Just as a comment, the office of small and medium enterprises helps a lot of Canadian organizations be able to soft land, working with the Government of Canada. I can tell you that a number of PPE manufacturers in my riding were connected to the Government of Canada through OSME.

That doesn't take away from your experience. We are here to listen, to thank you and also see how we can move forward.

I have one more question before I pass it on to my colleague.

Can you give me a sense of the investment that you made in transferring or retooling your operation and the cost of the raw materials, i.e., the alcohol that you had to use for making the sanitizer? Do you have some rough numbers?

[Gerry Guitor]

If you like, I'll go first.

All costs in, we probably spent over a million dollars.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

That's including the retooling as well as the material.

[Gerry Guitor]

Yes. For retooling, we had to buy some capital equipment in order for us to produce. It was also the opportunity lost from the spirits business and then, of course, buying all the excess materials, bottling, finding suppliers and just basically to retool.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Dyck, go ahead.

[Tyler Dyck]

Yes, I would say it was very similar in nature.

Of course, both of our distilleries on the craft side are probably on the larger side of the craft side, the artisanal side, if you want to call it that. With a lot of our other distillers, there might be only four people in the distillery, so their retooling costs probably would have been in the tens of thousands of dollars, and then they would have lost alcohol that they could normally sell for $50 a bottle. They are making it into sanitizer to either give away, or maybe someone is going to pay $20 a bottle for it, so they are at a loss on top of their actual production. Then there are all the personnel hours to make it, because you first have to ferment, then distill and then produce the sanitizer. That could be a month's worth of work before you get to that downstream step.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you for that.

I yield the rest of my time to my colleague Mr. Drouin.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Jowhari. I appreciate it.

Mr. Guitor, I have a question for you. First of all, I congratulate you for speaking French in Toronto. As a Franco-Ontarian, I commend you.

I am fortunate to represent the riding in which Beau's Brewery is located, which had a lot of surplus alcohol and whose beer barrels were about to exceed their expiry date. The brewery worked extensively in partnership with Green Beaver and Dunrobin Distilleries. Together they produced an average of 20,000 litres of hand sanitizer per week. However, their clients, the City of Ottawa and the National Capital Commission, are organizations that are not as large as the federal government.

There was talk of 20,000 litres per week, but were you able to produce 100,000 or 200,000 litres per week?

[Gerry Guitor]

Yes. We had the capacity to produce as much hand sanitizer as was required. We, too, went through the same situation. We had breweries in the Toronto and Peel regions giving us their mash, which we could process. Our production capacity was large. Even from a microdistillery, we are able to produce in large quantities.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Fine.

You said earlier that people were calling you to ask if you could produce 100,000 litres of hand sanitizer. Did you do business with these people or did you refuse to do business with them?

[Gerry Guitor]

In the beginning, we did business with them. We hired staff. We had an industry. In the beginning, the whole team agreed to a pay cut. We even reduced the price of our spirits to help the community. Then we tried to provide hand sanitizer to our community.

So when these people offered us this business opportunity, I thought we could create even more jobs and we could do anything. For the first three or four weeks, we listened to them. I was offering them prices and working with them, but eventually the collaboration disappeared. At the same time, we applied...

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Were these people telling you they had good contacts?

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Thank you, Mr. Drouin.

[Gerry Guitor]

Yes.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

All right.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Robert Gordon Kitchen]

Mr. Guitor, I was allowing you to go on. With that said, I want to be respectful of your time and also respectful of our officials, interpreters and administrators, who have done a tremendous job in adding to our point here. I think we could have gone on for hours and hours because your information was so enlightening and helpful to the committee, so we do appreciate that.

I want to thank you for participating with us today.

Committee members, I want to let you know, just so the committee is aware, that we are inviting Canada Post to appear for us next week to discuss its annual report. I wanted to give you a heads-up on that.

With that said, I declare today's meeting adjourned.