Finance committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to join you today. As I sat down to prepare my remarks, I was struck by the unique challenge that faces the hotel sector, and indeed this committee and the federal government. We face a balancing act. On the positive side, we have

Industry committee  I will, with pleasure. You are correct that there is a misconception about the hotel industry. When you see one of those brands, you assume that this big American chain owns that property and has access to all sorts of liquidity. The reverse is true. These are all Canadian-owne

Industry committee  They're critical infrastructure, yes.

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

Industry committee  I can jump in on that. Yes, there are two issues with insurance. One is that hotels that had paid business interruption insurance are not getting covered, so that's a big challenge. The other challenge is that the insurance companies are now telling us that, effective December,

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