Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to be back here again with you a couple of weeks after my last time here, but I won't say any more about that.
The Hotel Association of Canada represents all of the lodging industry across Canada. There are about 8,500 hotels. We employ about 288,000 people. In terms of revenues, last year, we did about $17.5 billion.
I always like to point out, when I come before a committee like this, the tax revenues that are generated by our industry. They total about $7.6 billion right across the board, and about $3.3 billion of that goes to the feds. So I like to say we're the good news industry. We actually help pay a lot of bills and we don't ask for a lot in return.
However—and there's always a little bit of a “however” in there—the lodging industry across Canada still suffers from a critical shortage of workers in particular areas, more often in the remote areas. Think of a resort where you may have three or four thousand bedrooms and a very, very small community surrounding it. I have my colleague Darren Reader with me here today from Banff and Lake Louise, and we can point out, for example, that in a place like the Fairmont Banff, we employ about 400 temporary foreign workers every year simply because there are not the people there to do the work.
We continue to go out and try to engage as many Canadians as we possibly can, and we also try to hire indigenous people. We still have severe shortages.
When the reforms took place in 2014, limiting it to 10% of a company's workforce and looking at what the unemployment rate is and so forth, it just didn't work. Most communities have an unemployment rate that is above 6% and hotels couldn't qualify. We're saying we need to take into account the seasonal-demand nature of our work. As a result of this and as a result of the changes that we saw the minister implement in March of this year, which we commended the government and the minister for making and we said were a really good thing to be doing, at the end of the day, we still have seasonal problems right across the board. That's why we need to be able to have a seasonal lodging worker program.
I mentioned the measures the government took in March outside the 10% cap limit and so forth, and again as I said, we applauded Minister Mihychuk for that. We are pleased that the government is recognizing the seasonality, and we do want to move forward with the development of a program for us.
In closing, we need more than stop-gap measures. We need a long-term permanent solution to what we have right now.
I know that Fort Mac is still at the top of our agenda as it is in a lot of places. Let me just tell you right now that we lost two of our hotels up there. There is an immediate demand for at least 125 workers to go up there and start reopening. When I say immediate, I mean immediate, right now. We don't have them, and we can't get them.
And finally, Mr. Chairman, at any given time, you probably wonder how many people under the old program are actually working in hotels. The number is about 10,000. About 5,000 were in Alberta. Obviously that has changed there, but there are different factors going on. The other 5,000 out of the roughly 290,000 that we have were spread across the country .
I heard my friend talking about the cattle industry, and he said it goes 365 days a year. Well, you know what ? In the hotel business, we don't close our doors unless we're forced to. So what we're looking for from you people is your help so we can keep our doors open.
Thank you very much.