That would be great. I would really appreciate that. In particular, I'm hoping that my arguments here have swayed my opposition colleagues to support the amendment that I put forward.
Perhaps I can continue to make my best effort to bring you onside to the amendment. At any point, I hope you would express your willingness to support it, if I'm successful. I can only try my best. I understand that we all have our own perspectives and our own interests, etc., but I hope we'll get the support of some opposition members.
At any rate, I'll go back to my argument. That seemed like a long tangent. I want to continue to make my argument.
The hotel industry was impacted specifically in most of our urban centres most dramatically. I have here the statistics that were gathered by the hotel industry. This report here, from October 2020, is by CBRE Hotels, the world's leading hotel experts. It's specific to the Canadian impact of COVID-19. It's a substantive document. Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Niagara Falls, Halifax, Toronto airport, Calgary airport, Montreal airport and greater Quebec City were the areas where the hotel industry was the most impacted and we saw the biggest declines.
In addition to all of the situational factors I mentioned, there were also influences on recovery that kind of mirror some of those situational factors. They demonstrate what the hotel industry is saying will really impact how quickly they can recover. I've heard locally that the hotel industry and some of the other industries don't expect to recover for quite some time. It may take them two years or more to recover from the pandemic. This was their perspective after the first wave of COVID-19, in some cases, so I would say that this has only extended the hardship and the recovery time it will take for those industries to come back in full effect.
Again, we talk about this stuff, and it tends to almost dehumanize. It's not intentional, but when we talk about it, it's.... We're talking about businesses here, but what does it really mean when it comes down to it? There are people and families at the heart of these businesses. It's people's livelihoods we're talking about. I really think it's about paying attention and taking the time to really understand these impacts on people and families and communities and local economies. I'm talking about industries, and I'm bringing stats and information, but again, it's about the lived experience of families and workers and business owners. They're hanging on by a thread, at this point, if at all. I think some of them are not.
Part of this is due to the pandemic wave after wave and the fatigue that comes with that. I've maintained from the very start of this... Well, I wouldn't say it was from the start. That might be a little too arrogant of me to say. I would say that somewhere along the way, I think between the first and second waves, or just as the second wave hit us, we came to realize that going through wave after wave of a pandemic is not the best public health or best economic approach. It's not.
In terms of mitigation versus elimination, I saw a recent study out of France, I think out of a university there. I have it somewhere here in my piles of paper. The study shows that the countries and jurisdictions around the world that focused on COVID elimination fared the best from a public health perspective. They also fared the best from an economic perspective, by far. It's undeniable, based on the evidence.
What's interesting is that in this case, we see differences of value, philosophy and so on between different parties at different levels of government, and we see a different approach at different levels. This has created more inequity in the impacts and, in some cases, multiple waves of the pandemic, which have exacerbated the initial impacts.
There has been an exponential impact and hardship on the families and people in the community I represent. They've expressed this to me over and over again. I can't tell you how many calls I've had with local business owners who are at the end of their rope and are hanging on by a thread. By that I mean that in many cases they've had to borrow money and access our government supports. Although we've continually extended them, most people are saying that supports are literally keeping them afloat. If supports come to an end prematurely or the pandemic continues for much longer, they don't know how they're going to survive and keep their businesses afloat. Really, the livelihoods of many small businesses are at stake.
I myself am a business owner of 12 years. I started a business with $160 to my name and grew it over 12 years to a sizable firm with 11 staff and 30 contractors. It was a full-time 24-7 job, and it was gruelling and hard work to be an entrepreneur and grow a company. It's one thing to own a small company and keep it at the same level. It's another thing to try to build a bigger company.
You make plans as an entrepreneur to earn enough profit, even if it's just a bit as a small company, to reinvest back into your company so you can have better staff, can provide more training and professional development, can offer benefits and can do all kinds of things for the people who are the heart of your company. Some businesses can also invest in new equipment. Depending on what kind of company you have, sometimes you have a higher reliance on equipment and there is a need for operational expenses to increase. Those are big investments. There are all kinds of planned investments that entrepreneurs have as they try to build a business, and we should think about how these plans are shattered right now for our entrepreneurs and small businesses, for the family-run businesses that are struggling through wave after wave of the pandemic.
There's so much uncertainty for these folks. A lot of it has to do with the evolving science. Our understanding of this virus is evolving. I know that at times opposition members feel very frustrated with the fact that they want answers. I think Canadians do too. I'm not patronizing anybody when I say this; I really understand the frustration. We want to know the solutions right now. We want predictability and the answers right now. The reality in a pandemic, in an evolving crisis, is that we don't have that information and don't have certainty. That is really uprooting. It causes a lot of anxiety out there, and I can really empathize with how this impacts the businesses in our communities. Many of them have anxiety about reopening. When are travel restrictions going to be lifted? They have so many questions about economic recovery, about whether their customers are going to feel safe and whether there's going to be predictability in the future.
If you go back to what I was saying earlier about planned expenditures and growth, plans are integrated into the families of small business owners. This is as much about the growth of their company as it is about their livelihood. These things are so closely tied together. When you're the owner of a family-run business, you have a very close connection between your business and your family.
I can think about the optometrists I've talked to, or the accountants in my community, or the hair salons and the small shops along the main street corridor. All of them are these types of businesses. There's the local cleaner. There are so many of them. They don't all fit into one bucket. They're all these really committed, hard-working, entrepreneurial-type people who have taken on great risk to do something they love and believe in. Often, it's not really for profit, at the end of the day. It's for the stability of their family. They really are the ones who are impacted by this pandemic.
I've talked about the many workers and individuals who have been affected by this pandemic and the inequities across our society in terms of how that's played out. Today I'm really focusing on the small businesses and the hardest-hit industries. I want us not to forget that the economic hardships on them have been truly challenging at multiple levels, so I will continue.
In the food service industry, Restaurants Canada gathered statistics in October 2020 as well. They produced those. It took a little time to do the analysis, I'm sure, but I think just in general the food service industry really experienced a deep impact. They claim to be the hardest hit, and I think they are. I think maybe some other industry groups may say they are the hardest hit, but I don't think it's worth arguing; they're all the hardest-hit industries. There's no doubt in my mind that they are all in need of attention, support, empathy and targeted measures to help them recover. I think the only way we get those is by listening to them and by valuing their perspective. Again, taking the time to prorogue and listen to those stakeholders I think was essential for our government. I fully support taking that time.
Some 800,000 food service workers were laid off or had their hours cut to zero during the first wave of the pandemic. While many industries could bring people back to work, they were hovering at between 1% to 10% below pre-COVID employment levels as compared with February 2020. There continues to be a significant gap in the food service industry. They are one of the hardest hit for sure, with employment 21% below February 2020 levels. Those were statistics from October 2020 or just before then.
Again, I'm trying to use information that was relevant at the time of prorogation. In this case, I think the data that was analyzed had covered the summer of 2020 but was analyzed into the fall. It was still really relevant. I know that these associations were in dialogue with our government at the time and I'm sure they gave us the feedback. Although I wasn't in those conversations with the national associations, I was definitely hearing the same things in my local community from my chamber of commerce and the local chapters of some of these associations.
Over half of restaurants planned to, and still probably plan to, reduce their table service. This is a huge deal, obviously, for them. Many of them, of course, will want to open as soon as they can open patios so that they can earn some revenue.
This, to me, really inhibits. Social distancing really has an impact on them, because when you get the business model of a restaurant that often had pretty razor-thin margins.... I've done about 15 different business plans for restaurants, catering and café businesses of different kinds. I mentioned the one earlier that the YWCA runs in downtown Hamilton called At The Table café. It's a café and catering business and wholesale baking business. What I can tell you from doing very detailed financial analyses of these types of businesses is that they do have very thin margins.
It looks like my Internet might be slowing down. Am I coming through clearly, Madam Chair?