Industry committee  Thank you very much. Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to testify today. The hotel industry represents more than 8,000 hotels, motels and resorts. We employ more than 300,000 Canadians. We play an essential role in the Canadian economy, and

Industry committee  The good news is that we have started to see some uptake in our resort hotels this summer, but those hotels are operating at half-capacity. For example, I'm at the Château Montebello today and it is running at 48% occupancy, so that is its maximum. All of our urban hotels are re

Industry committee  It actually is fairly consistent across the country. It's just bad everywhere. Unless you're in a resort community, it's bad. Everyone is running a loss. I can certainly provide the committee with a more detailed breakdown, if you'd like to see those numbers. I'd be very happy t

Industry committee  The two key issues that we're dealing with in terms of survival for the hotel sector right now are access to liquidity and our employment issues, so I guess the short answer is not really. There's been one loan program in Quebec, but it's nowhere near the kind of liquidity we wou

Industry committee  I'd also go with maybe, but probably not.

Industry committee  Thank you for the question. Speaking strictly from the hotel sector, there are two key challenges here. One is that the actual regulator for the banks, which is OSFI, has not rewritten regulations for COVID, so that means they're using an old set of regulations for COVID. You ha

Industry committee  There are two answers to that question. One is that I think the government had to proceed with broad-based programming support, and we now find ourselves in this moment in time when tourism and the hotel sector look very different from every other sector. Every other sector is al

Industry committee  Absolutely.

Industry committee  Yes, with pleasure. The hotel industry is asset-based, so when you go to the bank and you apply for a loan, it's not like you rent the facilities and they only look at cash flow; they look at the actual value of the property. As I indicated earlier, the biggest challenge is that

Industry committee  Oh, I think it needs to be recommended. I think it needs to go through the financial institutions. We have studied this at length over the course of the last three or four months. We have been working very closely with Minister Ng's office and Minister Joly's office, bringing in

Industry committee  I would say that you are absolutely right, but that's not true just of the bed and breakfasts. In fact, most of Canada's hotel industry is owned by a comparably small business in a community. I think probably all the MPs on this call would know a local hotel owner who has investe

Industry committee  You're absolutely right. It's going to be the smallest members who go under first, and, based on our members' survey, it will go up from there. There's a direct correlation between cash flow, in terms of when it runs out, and the size of businesses. If there is nothing done, we a

Industry committee  We'd like to see support in each of those areas. Liquidity needs to be fixed. We have a matter of weeks ahead of us. Then we do want to see forgiveness within those loan programs, but we need the infrastructure in place first. Thank you for the opportunity to, once again, unders

Industry committee  We have not specifically surveyed on that topic either, but I know the Conference Board of Canada has, so we'd be happy to send that to the committee.

Industry committee  First of all, our industry has put in place a program called Safe Stay. It's North America-based. It's incorporating all of the public health recommendations into hotel practices. But to answer your question directly, one of the things the government can do to help is to help us