Restaurants will need continued support long after reopening: Restaurants Canada

As restaurants slowly begin to reopen, a group that represents the industry says they’ll need help to stay open.

“We are one of the first sectors impacted by the COVID restrictions and we’re certainly going to be one of the last ones to recover,” said Mark von Schellwitz, the vice-president of Western Canada for Restaurants Canada.

Von Schellwitz joined Gormley to explain why he’s calling on the federal government to introduce a restaurant sector-specific support package.

He said the number of restaurant jobs in the province is about three-quarters of where it was before the pandemic, adding there are about 9,200 restaurant jobs that still haven’t recovered. Von Schellwitz estimates it’s going to take until 2023 for restaurants to return to 2019 sales levels.

“We still are nowhere near out of the woods yet,” said von Schellwitz. “Even with Saskatchewan’s reopening plan, it’s going to be a couple of months still until we get back to some sort of semblance of normal.”

Restaurants Canada is asking for the federal government to extend the rent and wage subsidy for restaurants to April 2022. Von Schellwitz said restaurants have tight profit margins and it’s going to take a long time to repay the debt that has been accumulating over the last 14 months.

“Rolling this back right now, over the course of the summer, our fear is we’re going to have another second wave of restaurant closures and the layoffs that’ll go with them,” said von Schellwitz.

Before COVID, there were roughly 2,700 restaurants in Saskatchewan. An estimated 10 to 15 per cent of them have closed, according to von Schellwitz. However, he said that’s tough to quantify because while some are permanently closed, others are closed temporarily.