Madam Chair, thank you so much.
When it comes to the restaurant industry, I could write a book on it. I was associated with the restaurant industry for 30 years until recently. I was a director of sales for one of them that had hundreds of restaurants and we always had issues with labour.
When we were opening new stores up north in Ontario, we were taking the labour from downtown Toronto and putting them in hotels. That problem still exists today.
This morning I got a call from a McDonald's franchise owner in my riding of Markham—Unionville. He owns seven restaurants between Richmond Hill and Markham. “Can you advise the government”, he asked me, “that the restaurant industry was overlooked by the government?” These are servers or cashiers in the restaurant industry. “They should be part of the new announcement made last week.”