As B.C.’s tourism industry looks ahead to a summer re-start, an acute labour shortage exacerbated by the pandemic remains a big problem.
Tourism Kamloops CEO Beverley DeSantis says while there may be pent-up demand for travel – as it stands – the industry lost record numbers of workers and many won’t be coming back.
“We need an attraction program that we’ve been working on to get people back. We need to work with the government to incent (sic) people to come back” she said on the NL Noon Report. “It’s great that the government has extended the wage subsidy for our industry and other industries to help support getting people back even though the business may not be there, we can allow for that training.”
DeSantis says some outside the box thinking will be required to bring workers back but notes they’ve had to do it before.
“September 11th was a tough on for us, and SARS was another one,” she said. “There has been nothing to this extent and this long of a recovery in my lifetime or career. However there were learnings from all of those.”
She notes tourism is an industry that fairly routinely faces challenges due to everything from illness to the downturn of an economy, or even the eruption of a volcano half-way around the world. Prior to the pandemic, the industry was facing worker shortages in all manner of job descriptions, a problem that sharply deteriorated further due to travel bans and other health restrictions.
“This industry has been decimated by COVID. Even though we’ve been planning for a year-and-a-half for the launch, it’s here now and we’re kind of seeing we have these heavy steps in front of us” DeSantis added. “For example restaurants can now have indoor seating but do they have the staff capacity and the resources to do so? They’ve gone through some real challenges and so have our accommodators so far as good staff leaving the industry not just because of COVID but for good.”
Still she says, the tourism and hospitality sector has proven resilient over the years and she is optimistic COVID has given the public a new appreciation for the industry.
“I think prior to this it was the department of fun and frivolity and maybe people didn’t understand the importance of tourism. But now as we move into this week it’s tourism week and we’re talking about the importance of tourism, I think we have a lot more support both from the government and communities,” DeSantis said.
For her, the priority is to get Canadians back to work as quickly as possible, but other strategies may have to be implemented to overcome the scale of the problem, such as dipping further into the temporary foreign worker program to fill gaps.
“We’re used to being slapped around a little bit so this isn’t our first rodeo having to start over again. We will do it. We will entice people back to what is an amazing industry to be a part of,” she said.
