Mr. Speaker, for more than a year now, I have been talking with women across my riding and across the country, many of whom are the main breadwinner of the family and have been faced with juggling the responsibilities of child care during imposed school closures with keeping their small businesses afloat. They have not been able to access income support because their industry does not qualify.
Particularly impacted are the many independent travel agents across the country, who worked tirelessly to assist travellers with repatriation flights at the beginning of the pandemic and later with attempts to get refunds for trips that would no longer be taken.
There are over 24,000 travel agents in Canada, over 75% of whom are women. Around 90% of travel agents are currently laid off. Many earn their income entirely by commission and are faced with commission clawbacks. These ladies worked long hours with no pay to ensure that they fulfilled what they considered was their responsibility towards their clients. They received no compensation for the hundreds of hours they spent working to re-book flights and attempting to get refunds for as many of them as possible. These travel agents did it because they are passionate about providing quality service from start to finish.
I have heard many on the government side reminiscing today about how we are now at the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. This serves to highlight the fact that they were not paying attention when this catastrophe actually started and why Canada has been consistently late from the very beginning.
As a matter of fact, it was clear that there was already trouble last year in January, not March, when my local Chinese dance association cancelled its New Year's celebration in Langley to protect our community—yet, following that clear warning cry, our health officials told us not to worry, that there was no need for masks and no need for travel restrictions.
The next clear sign that all was not well happened on the Diamond Princess at the end of January, not March. While the Liberals were busy twiddling their thumbs, independent travel advisers were getting frantic calls from their customers who were being quarantined on the ship. These courageous women worked hard to calm fears and get answers from wherever they could. We only need to look to them to understand how little the government was doing back when it could have made a huge impact on ensuring it was protecting our borders and our airports much earlier.
My sister is an independent travel agent with CruiseShipCenters. We have been struggling together with the impact of COVID since January, not March. She and her colleagues have moved heaven and earth to get their customers home safe. What did they get in return? Nothing. There was no support and no recognition, just dead air.
Just recently she was in the office celebrating her 20th year in the travel business. Her colleagues brought balloons and games to try to put a brave and cheerful face on what has been a horrendous year of incredible stress and no financial help. As they were about to cut the cake, the Liberal government announced that there would be no cruises into Vancouver until March 2022. Everyone burst into tears.
This was completely out of the blue and absolutely avoidable, had the Liberal government not been asleep at the wheel from the start.
There is another example: the many women entrepreneurs who run our local dance studios. They face the decimation of their industry despite their incredible efforts to pivot under the new COVID protocols, which changed without warning from day to day. They tried to encourage their thousands of students with the hope that their dance dreams would not be dashed. In the end, many of them have had to close their doors under the pressure of a year-long lockdown. Bills piled up, festivals and competitions were cancelled, student enrolment declined, staff moved on, and hope dwindled.
This week we are honouring these women in our communities who have fought to keep their small businesses open during a once-in-a-lifetime disaster. Their dedication to the health and wellness of our neighbourhoods is something more valuable than we can truly appreciate. However, they are reaching their breaking point. Help cannot be delayed any longer.
Today we have an opportunity to do more than just post something on social media in support of women. Today we can work towards providing solutions for those job creators who find themselves most impacted by lockdowns.
Lauren van den Berg, from Restaurants Canada, recently told the finance committee that thousands of restaurants are staring down the barrel of a gun. She said:
Two decades of growth were erased in two months at this time last year. Essentially, our industry fell off a cliff and then broke both legs. The truth is, we're still struggling. Prior to the pandemic, the food service sector was Canada's fourth-largest employer. We directly employed 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 380,000 fewer jobs in the Canadian food service sector than there were in February 2020.
For restaurant owners and so many other small businesses, this motion for immediate sector-specific measures to help the hospitality industry cannot come soon enough. People are at the end of their rope, and it is starting to fray.
I cannot say how frustrated I was yesterday to learn that our Prime Minister had the gall to virtue-signal yet again with an announcement that his government's recovery plans will be crafted to help women bounce back from the shutdown. Here we are, more than a year into the pandemic, and only just yesterday we finally heard the government admit that in fact we are not all in this together. No, as a matter of fact: Women, and women entrepreneurs especially, have been hardest hit from the very beginning. How is it possible that only just now is it dawning on the Liberals that they need to focus their support programs on those who have been falling through the cracks from day one?
The report published Monday by the Labour Market Information Council states that women were more severely impacted in this recession than any other income group, and to this day they are the furthest away from recovery. I have been shouting this from the rooftop for months.
Another thing we were recently told at the finance committee is that the average small business owner has taken on $170,000 in debt that is not even bank debt. Many of these businesses are small family-run operations. The owners have been struggling day by day to keep the doors open. Family members are called on to pitch in with busing tables, serving customers and washing dishes while caring for children and aging parents. They have been stretched to the maximum. They are losing sleep and they are losing hope. Now, on top of all that, they bear a heavy debt load as well. Through no fault of their own, this pandemic will stretch on much longer in Canada than in our other G7 partners. Slow vaccine procurement and a refusal to ensure a robust system of tracking and tracing have ensured that people will have to endure far longer than necessary. The government has failed miserably.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business stated that one in six independent businesses across Canada is at a significant risk of closing. That means there could be 181,000 fewer small, independently owned and operated businesses across the country, businesses that go bankrupt or wind down permanently, directly as a result of COVID and the damage sustained due to lockdown. That would represent 2.4 million Canadian private sector jobs being taken out at the same time.
We need to stop the bleeding now. Businesses need certainty. They need to know what they can expect. They need to be able to plan.
Then, without warning, the Liberals announced that they do not even plan to table a budget. Budgets are the most basic of planning devices that every entrepreneur knows they need to have. Without a plan, they are simply planning to fail. The current government has failed to produce a budget since 2019. That is two full years of spending chaos. We have been told by the PBO that the Liberals are spending so much so fast that they cannot even track it, yet they made sure to set aside extra funds for CRA audits of small businesses in the midst of this disaster.
I am begging the government to put itself in the shoes of small business owners, hard-working families who have sacrificed everything to keep their dreams alive. These desperate Canadians are looking to the government for real support, not another expert panel headed by a journalist turned finance minister who has no idea what it is like to build a business from scratch.
From the very beginning, the opposition has had to clean up these messes that the Liberals keep making. It blows my mind that more than a year into this pandemic, it takes another opposition motion to compel the government to do what industry leaders and small business owners have been calling for all along. I am assuming that the government has had the same stakeholder meetings with airlines, the tourism and hospitality industries, and organizations that represent small businesses that we on this side of the House have also had, and all they got from government was a complete lack of urgency.
It is this lack of urgency, the current government's catalogue of mistargeted programs, and its failure to give the provinces any options but lockdown that led to the prolongation of this pandemic for Canadians. We are going to be locked down for months longer than the rest of the world, and we need answers. Canadians deserve better.