On Friday, I held a press conference highlighting the plight of small business owners who took out federal CEBA loans during COVID lockdowns. Toronto itself was the victim of over 400 days of lockdowns—one of the longest in the world. The CEBA loan was essential and allowed small businesses to stay open. But now the federal government is undermining their good work by only extending the forgivable portion of the loan by 18 days instead of the requested year. The federal government is behaving as if businesses should have fully recovered from the pandemic, and we know that they have not; this is simply not true for at least two thirds of those businesses.

The Premier must use his political capital to push the federal government and their counterparts to extend the forgivable portion of this loan until the end of 2024. Without this, thousands of jobs will be lost, as we know businesses will be forced to close. Ontario has already felt the majority of the pain as we’ve seen the loss of jobs and the closing of our main streets.

As we have heard from John Kiru from the Toronto association of BIAs, “Small businesses must be at the table for these decisions. Otherwise we are on the menu.”

The state of small business overall can be best described by the recent dashboards of CFIB—51% are experiencing below sales; 57% are carrying pandemic debt; and an average of $107,000 is what small businesses are carrying in debt.

Speaker, we must do more to support small businesses in Ontario.