The president of BC Restaurant and Food Services Association is in favour of the province limiting how much delivery services like Skip the Dishes, Uber Eats, and DoorDash can charge restaurant owners.

These companies can charge a restaurant up to 30 per cent to bring you your dinner.

Speaking on NL Newsday with Jeff Andreas, Ian Tostenson said once you consider the rest of their expenses, restaurateurs are barely breaking even.

“At 30 per cent, there’s very little left for the restaurant owner,” he said. “To use an example, there’s a $50 order at a restaurant, by the time they’ve paid their labour and their packaging and their commissions and stuff they might make $2 on that order.”

A private members bill from Surrey-White Rock MLA Trevor Halford stalled in the Legislature but Tostenson said he was hoping to see some movement soon.

“I know for a fact that this week we’re going to hear some news on this one and I don’t know what the news is but I’m very confident that it’s going to be really good news and possibly a Christmas miracle for our industry,” he added. “Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City – they capped the fees because they said these are big global companies taking advantage of the fact that restaurants are operating at limited capacity.”

“When we’re operating at these restricted capacities and people are not going out anywhere near what they have in the past this December to restaurants, we’re going to rely more and more on take out and delivery so I think we’re going to hear something this week that we’ll be quite happy about.”

A Christmas miracle it was – Solicitor General Mike Farnworth announced today that the government has put a temporary 15 per cent cap on food delivery fees which will remain in place for three months after the COVID-19 Provincial State of Emergency is lifted.

Editor’s Note – This story was updated to reflect the announcement made by the BC Government with respect to the cap of 15 per cent on food delivery fees.