Industry Committee on May 6th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Good afternoon, everyone.

I thank all the witnesses who are joining us today, most virtually.

The meeting is called to order.

Welcome to meeting number 21 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Friday, April 8, 2022, the committee is meeting to study the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of November 25, 2021. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. I believe I saw that some of the honourable members are in the committee room in Ottawa. They are familiar with the current health rules, so I ask that they conduct themselves accordingly.

We are very pleased to have several well-known witnesses with us today. Without further ado, I will introduce them.

We welcome Ms. Vass Bednar, executive director of the master of public policy in digital society program at McMaster University, and Mr. Pierre Larouche, professor of law and innovation with the faculty of law at the Université de Montréal, who will both be appearing as individuals.

We also have Ms. Denise Hearn from the American Economic Liberties Project, who is a senior fellow and co-lead of the access to markets initiative.

We also have Ms. Dana O'Born, vice-president, strategy and advocacy, from the Council of Canadian Innovators. Ms. O'Born will give her presentation last, as she is having technical difficulties that we are attempting to resolve.

Finally, we have Mr. Richard Kurland, lawyer and policy analyst with Lexbase, and Ms. Lauren van den Berg, executive vice-president, government relations at Restaurants Canada.

Thank you all for taking the time to join us on this beautiful Friday afternoon.

Without further ado, we'll start with Vass Bednar, from McMaster University.

The floor is yours.

[Vass Bednar, Executive Director, Master of Public Policy in Digital Society Program, McMaster University, As an Individual]

Thank you so much.

My name is Vass Bednar. I'm the executive director of McMaster University's M.P.P. in digital society program, where I'm also an adjunct professor of political science. I'm also a Public Policy Forum fellow and a senior fellow at CIGI. I write the newsletter “Regs to Riches”.

I'm sharing my speaking time today with Denise Hearn.

[Denise Hearn, Senior Fellow and Co-Lead, Access to Markets Initiative, American Economic Liberties Project]

Hi, everyone.

My name is Denise Hearn. I'm a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and the co-author of The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, which was named a Financial Times best book of 2018.

[Vass Bednar]

As the committee undertakes this study, we would encourage you to focus on the underappreciated or less appreciated challenges that independent businesses are facing in today's markets, particularly in digital platform-based markets.

Of late, I've taken a consumer-centric approach to my own research and advocacy. I've written about how the activity of self-preferencing may be deceptive. I describe the issues associated with hyper-personalized pricing schemes that are opaque. At the very least, consumers deserve to know when they're receiving a personalized price and why.

Consumers are not the only actors that need to navigate increasingly murky marketplaces. When merchants go to compete or shop online, they are traversing their very own hall of algorithmic mirrors.

[Denise Hearn]

The question we're interested in is why it is so difficult for smaller businesses to compete, despite new modern technology that should make it much easier for them to be successful.

As it stands, entrepreneurs must navigate a series of expensive and near-invisible competition issues that are imposed by digital gatekeepers. As small businesses increasingly sell online in platform-based marketplaces, they're dealing with de facto private regulators that dictate terms and impose tolls as middlemen.

For example, Etsy sellers recently went on strike and closed their online stores in protest of rising transaction fees. Meta recently announced that it would take a 47.5% cut of all digital assets sold in its metaverse platform. Amazon now makes the largest amount of its revenue from seller fees, which have risen consistently every year. In April of this year, Amazon hit sellers with a 5% fuel and inflation surcharge to make up for their slower growth in Q1.

However, it's not just digital markets. Grocery store suppliers recently raised concerns over increased fines penalizing late deliveries due to supply chain disruptions that were largely outside of their control.

Through the initiative that I co-lead, Access to Markets, I've had countless conversations with entrepreneurs across industries as diverse as music and entertainment, farming and cloud storage. These entrepreneurs cannot access markets on fair and equal terms due to dominant gatekeepers. This means that they cannot compete based on producing better quality goods and services. Many businesses are justifiably afraid of speaking out for fear of retaliation or repercussions for their businesses.

As of now, small and medium-sized businesses must independently navigate these and other anti-competitive tactics. These tactics can extend to coercive, unfair or unclear contract terms, which are often referred to as “contracts of adhesion”. This means that the contract is a take-it-or-leave-it agreement with inherent power imbalances. These contract terms are increasingly used to weaken the bargaining power of smaller suppliers or counterparties, workers and consumers. Things like mandatory arbitration, non-disparagement clauses, perpetual claims on IP and other such terms can silence stakeholders, limit their legal options or rights, impede fair dealings, restrict the freedom to set prices and extract profits or information from independent businesses.

Businesses also may have their product copycatted or their IP stolen. They're finding few avenues for recourse from the platforms because, in fact, platforms may be the perpetrators of the copycatting.

[Vass Bednar]

Platforms or online marketplaces such as Amazon also compete directly with their third party sellers. They've referred to them as “internal competitors” in corporate documents. Regulators and decision-makers should be concerned then, perhaps, that Amazon's IP Accelerator, which launched in 2019 and came to Canada last year in 2021, is now here. The program matches third party sellers on its platform with trademark and patent law firms, with which it has negotiated set rates to aid sellers in “protecting their brand”.

Canada has a great opportunity, an opportunity to be informed by recently conducted research that considers competition issues facing SMEs such as price discrimination by dominant players, compliance fines, dominant companies using their influence to forestall policy intervention, and dominant companies using incentives that lock-in smaller businesses to their services. We think that significantly improving competition outcomes in Canada for small and medium-sized businesses for firms of all sizes, demands an all-of-government approach that's recently exemplified by the Biden administration's executive order. We can't and shouldn't rely on the Competition Act alone as a sole instrument here.

In sum, there are invisible, or less visible, competition issues that affect small and medium-sized businesses that must be studied in the Canadian context. Your study should also consider the intersections between competition and intellectual property.

[Denise Hearn]

The brief that we have submitted to the committee contains further discussion and areas of opportunity to consider.

We thank the committee for the opportunity to appear and are available for follow up conversations and analysis.

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

I now give the floor to Mr. Larouche from the Université de Montréal.

[Dr. Pierre Larouche, Professor, Law and Innovation, Faculty of Law, Université de Montréal, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank for the invitation to appear before the committee.

I will say a few words about my background, and make a few more general statements about today's topic. I believe the rest will come during the discussion.

I am a professor of law and innovation and assistant dean of program development and quality at the Université de Montréal. More broadly, I am basically a specialist in competition law and economic regulation, or all the laws that ensure that markets produce the expected results.

My most recent research focused on the interaction between law and innovation. I am not very well known yet in Canada because I built my career in Europe. I spent 25 years in Europe, mostly in the Netherlands. I also worked in the United States and Asia. I have been back in Canada for five years.

I will focus my comments on competition law and economic regulation, among the many themes on the agenda for your committee. Since we are focusing today on the SME approach or perspective, I will try to put that at the centre of my comments, while distinguishing between traditional SMEs and emerging SMEs.

Traditional SMEs are businesses that are usually a bit bigger than start‑up businesses. Their goal is to last over time, to keep their place in the market and to grow. A start‑up business is usually a small SME that is seeking fairly rapid growth to reach a level that often allows it to be acquired by a much larger business. I will therefore distinguish between these two cases.

Traditional SMEs are businesses that usually do not exist in a vacuum. It must be understood that they are part of a fabric or ecosystem made up of other businesses, often SMEs, that offer it related services or that are suppliers or clients.

As my colleagues have already noted, the current problem is related to the labour shortage referred to in the documents and, more broadly, to the entire difficult economic context in which we find ourselves. All this makes life difficult for SMEs and has a domino effect on the entire SME fabric and ecosystem. As a result, that pushes SMEs to turn to larger partners for their activities. These are often platforms that will typically offer cloud computing services, platforms for product distribution and so forth. This obviously creates a problem for SMEs, as my colleagues said a few minutes ago, because it creates flagrant inequality between small business based in Canada and platforms that are global in scope and are often based in the United States.

My colleagues referred to problems that arise and that may be due to the fact that the platform controls the SMEs' data, creating dependency and preventing SMEs from going elsewhere. This often makes life difficult, as it does not allow them to truly know what is happening in their own operations.

One phenomenon that we often see with innovative SMEs is the confiscation of innovations by the platform. This is particularly associated with, but not limited to, Amazon. Amazon is well known for using information on its electronic sales platform to see what works and what does not work as well. One or two months after the arrival of a product that works well, it will become an Amazon Basics product, which will be sold in competition with the business that had the good idea. It is therefore very hard for small businesses to do business with platforms on an equal and fair footing.

There are initiatives under way that I would be pleased to tell you about in the discussion. I continue to monitor what is happening in Europe and the United States very closely. I have worked a lot in recent years on initiatives that are under way in Europe and the United States to resolve this problem. The Europeans are further ahead. They have two specific initiatives.

First, what is called the Digital Markets Act will be adopted. Agreement has been reached. In a matter of days or weeks, the law will be officially adopted. That will completely change the legal environment for large platforms, referred to as GAFAM.

There is another proposal, which is not as far along, but that should nonetheless be completed: regulations concerning data. These regulations will also allow businesses to better control the data they share with platforms and allow them to change suppliers, retrieve data and so on.

We could discuss all this, and I would be pleased to give you more details. In short, Canada should draw inspiration from these initiatives.

The reform of competition law in Canada poses two problems. First, in its current state, Canada's Competition Act is already somewhat behind what is being done in the world. I have sent you a document that I recently prepared on this topic. Then, even if we do the same as all the other countries, the fact remains that Europe and the United States are already improving their economic regulations to better resolve the problems associated with the large platforms. Canada must therefore do two things.

I will conclude my remarks by discussing the second type of SME, namely start‑up SMEs. These SMEs must always have an exit strategy. That is their main concern. Either they grow until they are acquired by someone else, or they grow and become large companies. In Canada, the path to growth to become a large company is very difficult to put in place. I believe other witnesses have already talked about this. There is a lack of venture capital, and there are problems associated with growth. The acquisition strategy is therefore dominant in Canada. There, too, we see that there are difficulties. Often, large platforms acquire start‑ups simply to mothball them. In other words, they close them to take the innovation for themselves.

Here again, this is something that has attracted attention in Europe and in the United States. The Americans are a bit ahead of what is being done in Europe, but in both cases, the situation is being monitored very closely and efforts are being made to control mergers, to prevent large platforms from acquiring SMEs solely to get rid of them because they could be a threat to them. Clearly, from a Canadian perspective, this is undesirable. Even a less harmful acquisition, so to speak, could also result in a transfer of technology from Canada to the United States and the closure of a Canadian business.

This is another matter that Canada must address. It should look very carefully at controlling mergers, when a platform acquires a start‑up.

I will stop here. I would be pleased to answer your questions during the discussion. I can do so in English or French. That is no problem.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you, Mr. Larouche.

I would now turn to Mr. Kurland from Lexbase.

[Richard Kurland, Lawyer and Policy Analyst, Lexbase]

Thank you.

Lexbase provides policy and operational information regarding immigration issues as well as Federal Court decisions rendered in the previous 30 days of the month, since 1989. We go to, in the public sector, CBSA, IRB, DOJ, IRCC, among others, the provincial immigration systems and, in the private sector, to most of the immigration bar and consultants.

I'll get to the point, which is the Service Fees Act. Small and medium-sized businesses require work permits to fuel growth, and the work permits have been in a state of decline in terms of processing times to the point where small and medium-sized businesses are suffering.

The Service Fees Act is a little-known law. Briefly, what it does is provide set standard processing times for a government service like an application for a work permit. It has teeth. Non-compliance results in an automatic refund or partial refund to the user directly. In addition, it motivates departments like Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, IRCC, to deliver in a timely manner that is predictable for small and medium-sized businesses.

Right now, the departmental remission policy is authorized pursuant to section 7 of the Service Fees Act in accordance with, if you like numbers, section 4.2.4 of the Treasury Board directive on charging and special financial authorities.

On the recommendation, right now IRCC has had limited use of the Service Fees Act in accordance with this policy. By placing work permits to make them subject to the Service Fees Act, we can motivate government to deliver, in a timely and predictable manner, work permits to small and medium-sized businesses. It's huge if you go to the membership of these organizations in terms of results. That's the first item.

The second item is something called the labour market impact assessment. There's no need for this in the province of Quebec. Quebec is already doing it. This is a classic example of government duplication and waste. Where Quebec is already providing the service, why do it again? You pave the road once, not twice.

The third item—and I'll close after this—is IT, information technology. This little fix will spill over to other departments beyond IRCC. What we need here is an application programming interface. An application programming interface, or API, is a bridge that makes communication possible between independent software programs. You can send and receive data with an API. CRA, Canada Revenue Agency, is already doing this. It has third-party independent software producers outside government that allow end-users, taxpayers' businesses, to directly interface with the CRA system.

We don't have that at immigration and other departments. We don't have that between the array of provincial nominee systems and our own federal government. If we allow that capability, small and medium-sized business don't duplicate their time and effort by sending the same information to two levels of government; it's a waste. As well, in government, you cut down duplication by providing shared information, common information.

I'm sure there will be some questions about this. The IRCC has been notoriously reluctant to give up power and control of its processing times, and that's where we need to go.

For Quebec, the last point would be, frankly, why should people in one province—it could be any province—have slower processing times than other provinces? The Service Fees Act can set standards. You combine provincial and federal processing times into one processing time for a service. If there is variation, say more than 60 days for a temporary status application, or more than three months for a permanent resident application, people have to pay money to the applicant directly—not intragovernment—for failing to provide uniform and consistent processing times.

There's no reason that a province like Quebec, for example, should be prejudiced for exercising Quebec's right in the field of immigration. That's contemplated by section 95 of our Constitution Act. The deal there is that you count the processing times together, Quebec and federal, or British Columbia and federal, or New Brunswick and federal, to provide a uniform and consistent yardstick or metre stick for the delivery of that government service.

I'm ready for questions whenever.

Thank you

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kurland.

I think there are a lot of assistants to members in constituency offices who would find it hard to disagree with some of your assertions.

I now give the floor to Ms. van den Berg from Restaurants Canada.

[Lauren van den Berg, Executive Vice-President, Government Relations, Restaurants Canada]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much, Madam van den Berg, for your presentation.

Just before we start the first round of questions, I'll inform members that Ms. O'Born from the Council of Canadian Innovators had technical issues. She will be back with us on Tuesday, I believe.

Thanks for joining, and we'll see you on Tuesday, Ms. O'Born.

Without further ado, we'll start to open up the discussion with MP Gray for six minutes.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of the witnesses for being here today.

I'd like to start my questions with Restaurants Canada. I understand your reaction to budget 2022, where you expressed the need for the government to conduct a “do no harm” approach to the industry. I agree. We both know that it's been a really challenging situation for many restaurants right now, so I was wondering if there are any specific points in the budget or with recent tax increases that you feel might not be helpful and actually harmful to the industry.

[Lauren van den Berg]

Thank you so much for the question.

Speaking of the “do no harm” policy, I think coming out of this apocalypse...and I call it that not to be facetious but because that's what it's really felt like for so many of our members and small businesses across the country. They have struggled for so long, white-knuckling it to keep their doors open, and now, finally, fingers-crossed, knock on all various wood products, they're going to be able to stay open. Now it becomes a question of how they keep the lights on, and that goes to the labour shortage, absolutely, but it also goes to the cost of rising food prices, inflation and the general cost of doing business when you have a mountain of debt behind you from those rolling restrictions and lockdowns.

When we ask for the government to do no harm we mean that we require a regulatory framework that doesn't impose additional costs on an industry that continues to white-knuckle it. While we're seeing a light at the end of this pandemic tunnel, we're still very much in the tunnel. Patio season is something that lots of our members are pinning all their hopes and dreams on. We're optimistic that we're going to see sales improve, but as I indicated in my remarks, we are still not yet at prepandemic sales levels.

What we're asking is for the government to help rebuild public confidence, not only when it comes to taking the lead in dining out and helping the hospitality sector to return to those prepandemic levels of operations. We need to create the best possible conditions for recovery for businesses that have spent two years either losing money or barely breaking even.

We need a “do no harm” approach when it comes to taxes, fees and regulations whether it surrounds single-use items or a freeze on any other excise duty taxes or a cap on credit or debit card interchange fees. I don't want to call them low-hanging fruit to diminish the impact they're going to have, but every penny counts right now.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Great. Thank you very much. I want to try to squeeze in a couple more questions here.

You had mentioned the costs of many of the products that the restaurants are using, and you did mention really briefly the excise tax, the escalator tax. We heard earlier this week from Beer Canada on this issue and how it's affecting breweries, but we also know that it will affect restaurants, because they would be buying their products and then ultimately the consumers. Would you be able to expand on how this tax hike on beer, and actually on all excise products, will hit the restaurants' bottom line?

[Lauren van den Berg]

Absolutely.

Our concern with the excise tax has been very public and very much on the record since it was first implemented so many moons ago at this point. The problem is that it's an escalator tax, so every year it goes up without parliamentary approval, and it's creating exponential ripple effects on our operational costs, on our bottom line. It not only hits the local farmers and brewers but it has a trickle-up effect that increases the cost of our supplying beverages to guests and consumers.

The budget did indicate a promising first step in the elimination of that excise tax for low-alcohol beer and low-alcohol beverage products—and that's great—but that is a minuscule portion of our business, of the business of brewers across the country. When we talk about a “do no harm” policy, that would be a prime example.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Actually, to continue on talking about taxes, we also know there was a CPP payroll tax increase that went up on January 1, and then also a carbon tax increase on April 1, which adds to transportation costs. What do you think about those taxes also increasing and are those affecting your industry?

[Lauren van den Berg]

Yes, it's a full-stop yes. It feels very much like death by a thousand cuts, and even in the best of times pre-apocalypse restaurants operate in a razor-thin profit margin. They make, on average, maybe 4%, and I think what most Canadians don't know is that for every $10 spent on a restaurant meal, the food service establishment keeps less than 50¢. The rest all goes back into the economy. All of these minuscule taxes, whether it's the alcohol excise tax or an increase in CPP, it's this death by a thousand cuts. When we have that mountain of debt behind us after two-plus years of making those ends meet, even if we can open the doors now, we literally can't afford to keep the lights on.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Great. Thank you.

I have one more quick question. You just mentioned debt, and actually I want to ask you about that.

We know that the CFIB has reported that the average small business took on $170,000 in new debt during the pandemic. What would be the average amount that a restaurant owner would take on? How is this a burden for restaurants as they try to recover and even sustain themselves?

[Lauren van den Berg]

Our numbers indicate something very close to what CFIB has, because many of their members are also restaurants. On average, that's the hole, the pit, we're looking at.

That mountain of debt is coming at a cost literally and figuratively. One of our key asks has been to defer repayment of those loans and to increase loan forgiveness on the part of the government for those costs, because we don't have the dollars. We haven't been able to recoup our lost revenue over the last two years to be able to pay down that debt. This is the life savings of families across the country for these small and medium-sized restaurants. It's your local pub. It's your local café. As I said, we've been stretched to the limit. There's no more at the end of this.

Again, we're optimistic about the patio season, but we can't pay bills with optimism.

[The Chair, Liberal, Joël Lightbound]

Thank you very much.

I now give the floor to Ms. Lapointe for six minutes.

[Viviane LaPointe, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My questions are also for Restaurants Canada.

I was listening to your opening comments, and you'll be interested to know that, in Sudbury, we have a restaurant that just opened with a new robot waiter this week. So we're seeing it everywhere, even in Sudbury.

As a committee, we've heard from witnesses across many sectors that lack available workers. It's a major issue, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. In terms of developing a workforce, we know that young people have different perspectives for their employment. This new workforce has more options and higher expectations. I'd be interested in knowing how your industry takes into account this younger workforce and what they want or need to see in their workplace to incentivize the next generation.

[Lauren van den Berg]

Thank you for the question.

Across the country, we are and historically have been the number one source of employment for young Canadians, for new Canadians and for people looking to build a business and a life for their family. We offer above minimum wage in nearly all jurisdictions across the country, but we also offer the flexibility that a lot of students require with their class schedules. I know that first-hand.

I think what we've been struggling with is that, because of the rolling lockdowns and because of the restrictions, all of our employees and all that institutional memory have had to find other places to go. They absolutely had bills to pay. They had to pay for rent and groceries, and they couldn't afford to hold out for “maybe we'll reopen next week.”

That's a lot of institutional memory, skill sets and investment that businesses made on the part of their staff and their employees to keep the hospitality business up and running. Now those people have found gainful employment elsewhere. Why risk that to come back to an industry that can't guarantee the same level of security? I absolutely get it.