Finance committee  The labour challenge in our sector is acute, as I've indicated. It is the single biggest barrier to our growth. The biggest challenge with the immigration system, whether people are coming in the short term or they're coming in permanently, is that the in-demand workers we need in our sector are not allowed in through that system.

Finance committee  Yes. That is accurate.

Finance committee  Certainly I don't, for the hardest-hit sectors. We have been on life support for the last two years. We had absolutely no way of operating over that time period. If the government had not chosen to invest in our employees so that we could maintain those relationships and had not chosen to invest in the fixed costs support, we would have lost all the assets across this country.

Finance committee  Hi and good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to appear today. My name is Susie Grynol. I am the president and CEO of the Hotel Association of Canada. The tourism and hospitality industry shut down for two years during COVID. We did our part to keep Canadians safe.

Finance committee  Yes, I think there are a lot of different options we can look at to incentivize travel and stimulate, for lack of a better term, the sector in the recovery period. Certainly, there's providing credits against hotel rooms to make sure they're more affordable, and providing travel credits and other forms of incentives.

Finance committee  We share the same goal. The first issue I heard about from hotels when this crisis hit was, “We're so worried about our employees. We need to take care of them. We need to have them back.” That was their biggest crisis. They're the backbone of our industry and that remains at the forefront.

Finance committee  It is a real mixed bag at this point. One of the challenges is that these programs are in their early days, their infancy, and so the banks are telling a lot of our members that we just need to sort of wait and see whether or not they will actually qualify. In addition to that, we're also hearing, unfortunately, that we're just not a priority sector, which is a real problem.

Finance committee  On the first point, which is the carve-out that the U.S. has achieved, I think that just makes sense here in Canada because of the structure that you're referring to where you have a concentration of hotels that would be owned by one family, in the case of Niagara, or a couple of families.

Finance committee  Yes, thank you. With regard to the government's response, we are in a pandemic. These are unprecedented times and certainly uncharted waters for both government and industry. I think our government has done a very good job of communicating to the general public how it is managing the situation.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The hotel industry in Canada has been decimated by the COVID-19 crisis. We were hit early, and we have been hit hard. In a 48-hour period, our occupancy dropped by 80%. In the weeks that followed, we laid off 80% of our workforce, representing more than 250,000 workers.