Good afternoon. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, for having me today. It's lovely to see some familiar Zoom faces.
Recognizing that the breadth and scope of this committee study is quite diverse, I'd like to use my time here today to focus on our industry's most burning priorities: labour shortages and inflation.
I'll walk you through a quick overview of what the restaurant industry has gone through since the start of this apocalypse and what that means for our local economies across the country as Canada begins to rebuild.
Restaurants and the many small and medium-sized businesses that make up the Canadian food service sector are a critical pillar of our culture, economy and local communities. Before the pandemic struck, our industry comprised over 98,000 establishments from coast to coast to coast, contributing 4% to the country's GDP and serving about 22 million customers each and every day. In fact, prior to the pandemic, the food service sector was Canada's fourth-largest employer, directly employing 1.2 million people.
However, our industry lost more jobs in the first six weeks of the pandemic than the entire Canadian economy lost during the 2008-09 recession. No other industry has come close to facing this level of shortfall. There are still more than 195,000 fewer jobs in the Canadian food service sector than there were in February 2020. Meanwhile, most other industries have nearly fully returned to or are above their prepandemic levels.
The reality is that food service is very labour-intensive. Finding any staff, let alone staff with applicable skills and experience, was already becoming very difficult for our sector, even before the pandemic started. After more than two years of unprecedented challenges and repeated dining closures, restaurants across the country are still struggling to secure enough staff to maintain regular operations.
In our most recent of the restaurant outlook surveys, results indicate that the vast majority of food service establishments continue to have sales below prepandemic levels, and chronic labour shortages are making it much more difficult for operators to meet the growing demand of hungry guests. While some restaurants are looking to add more technology and automation in the coming years, solutions like robot servers are not on everyone's menu, if you'll pardon the pun.
The reality is that many of these exceptionally tech-forward solutions simply wouldn't provide the human interaction and personalized level of service that guests expect when dining out. After all, we take hospitality very seriously.
At the same time, though, our survey results reveal that between labour shortages and rising costs, many food service operators don't have a choice. Investing in new technology and automation might be the only way they can survive. To help the restaurant sector overcome pre-existing labour shortages that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Restaurants Canada has developed a national food service labour strategy, which I'm happy to share in full with this committee following our discussion here today.
I also want to recognize that while the recently announced amendments on the TFW program are a great first step, some of the most critical amendments for our sector are only valid for one year. As an application process can take from 12 to 18 months from start to finish, that's just not enough runway in the business cycle to ensure a sustainable solution to this labour crisis.
Adding further fuel to the fire in trying to rebuild a business after over two years of rolling lockdowns and restrictions, inflation is skyrocketing. It's projected to be an ongoing and increasingly worrisome trend. There are real concerns that grain, especially feed, which directly affects food prices, will continue to push costs up. The ongoing invasion of Ukraine threatens to further weaken grain markets, and we've already seen hoarding of feed commodities, which is having a punitive impact on food prices for our members. That's in addition to the drastic price increases for key proteins like chicken at 10.4%, beef at 16.8% and pork at 9.3%.
This is all having a very real and very tangible impact on our members. Nearly all of our survey respondents, like 96%, reported some disruption in the supply of food. In response to these supply disruptions, more than half of our respondents are reducing the number of items on their menus, and nearly half of quick-service restaurants and 40% of table-service restaurants expect that supply-chain disruptions to their businesses will only worsen over the next six months.
That's why inflation is right behind labour shortages when it comes to what keeps my members and my team up at night.
I know I've thrown a lot of numbers at you here today, and I am of course more than happy to share them with this committee in detail, but I'd like to close out my official remarks by saying that while restaurant operators are innovative and resourceful, the COVID-19 crisis has absolutely stretched their resiliency to the limits. For nearly two years now, the over 90,000 small and medium-sized businesses that make up our critically important sector have been fighting to keep their doors open, and they deserve federal support programs like the national food service labour strategy that will help them continue to contribute to the social and economic fabric of their communities.
Thank you.