‘Extremely scary’: Business owners, workers concerned of COVID-19 subsidy wind-down
Global News
Programs like the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy and the Canada Recovery Benefit have ended and are set to end be replaced with new ones.
With the federal government set to cancel a plethora of COVID-19 support programs on Saturday, business owners and employees say they’re worried over how they’re going to survive.
Programs like the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy (CERS) and the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) are set to be replaced with new measures in their place.
Though Canada’s devastated tourism and service industry, still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to recover, business owners and employees say that those lifelines are the only things keeping them afloat.
Aleksander Saiyan, the operations director for Toronto Dance Salsa, said that if he hadn’t made use of those programs, his dance studio would have been shut down.
“There’s no way we could have covered the rent, we would have went into a massive debt,” said Saiyan, who made use of the CRB for himself and other government programs for his business.
Dance studios, much like gyms and exercise spaces, were widely considered “grey areas” in what provincial governments decided to shut down during their pandemic-induced lockdowns.
While Ontario’s provincial government continues its gradual re-opening of the economy, including most recently an announcement of full capacity for gyms and restaurants set for this Monday, Saiyan said business is still just a fraction of what it was prior to the pandemic.
Saiyan says the business is now just operating on little more than 30 per cent of the revenue it was earning pre-COVID, and that every “penny” and more that they’ve saved up in previous years has already gone forward to cover bills like rent, electricity and wages.