Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair and committee members, I want to thank you for inviting our association to appear today. Yes, I've been here before, and I'm here again. The Tourism Industry Association of Canada, or TIAC, is the national voice of the tourism industry and has been actively calling for sector-specific support for the tourism economy since the onset of the pandemic.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Falk, for your question. l will go back to saying that opening the borders and giving some lead time as to when we can expect to open the borders is incredibly important for these operators. You mentioned a couple of operators in Manitoba. I was talking earlier today with a group of operators from northern Ontario—the same kind of idea, fly-in fishing camps, resource-based tourism—and they rely 95% to 100% on U.S. visitors.

Finance committee  We have certainly seen an impact on indigenous tourism businesses right across the country. Living here in Ontario, I'm very familiar with the organization Indigenous Tourism Ontario and the work they have been doing to try to support businesses through this pandemic, not only with making sure that staff have been able to be retained and are redeveloping their skills, but also with business supports and additional training.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Easter, for that question. We absolutely are looking at it right now. Our suggestion is for at least until the end of the summer of 2021, but ideally to the end of the year. However, I was talking to my colleagues at Restaurants Canada yesterday, and they were suggesting through to April 1, 2022.

Finance committee  I would agree that vaccines are the way forward for us to get the tourism industry back up and running again. While we're working toward herd immunity here as a country, it would be really important to be able to encourage Canadians to get out and travel across the country. It would be great if the federal government could take a leadership role in one travel policy instead of 13 travel policies.

Finance committee  We've seen in other countries around the world and through our relationship with the World Travel & Tourism Council that from the very beginning other countries have been monitoring and putting in place other testing regimes and contact-tracing options. Iceland is an example. Very early in the pandemic, when they wanted to see a return to travel, they put a testing regime in place.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, Mrs. Jansen. In speaking with small businesses that have applied for HASCAP, I will say that they've been challenged by a number of things. One of them is.... Again, I go back to the viability rate, and certainly they are dismayed by the level of the interest rate.

Finance committee  What I can tell you is that we know, based on the work we've done and the conversations we've had with the industry, that we would have about 60% fewer tourism businesses still surviving today had it not been for the various funding support programs that the government put in place.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. That's a great question. There are a couple of points I would like to make. One is to work with the financial institutions to make sure that they really understand the program. There's a line in the program that says that businesses must be deemed viable by their financial institution in order to be able to receive the HASCAP loan.

Finance committee  It's a combination of both.

Finance committee  I don't at this time.

Finance committee  Absolutely. Travellers are global in nature and we want to make sure that Canada's reopening plans align with what other jurisdictions around the world are also doing. We want to make sure that we're part of that seamless traveller experience and that travel is open to everyone again.

Finance committee  Not that we've seen. We know that the ongoing work around the rollout of the vaccine program, as well as the monitoring and tracking of variants, are things that the government is working on. To our knowledge, at this time there is no reopening plan in place.

Finance committee  No, and we're going to need time for businesses to be able to restock, prepare, market, communicate with their customers and rehire.

Finance committee  Well, certainly the RRRF has had a sector focus on it, and certainly tourism businesses have been encouraged to apply for that funding, but we know that only about 17% of all tourism businesses that have applied for that funding have at this point been successful in receiving it.