The CEO of Tourism Kamloops says it is still a big challenge to find people looking for work in the industry.

Bev DeSantis says it is why she thinks there needs to be some kind of an incentive to get people back to work. Speaking on the NL Morning News, she notes it could be similar to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) which helped support people last year when they were not able to work because of COVID-19.

“We have some programs that were put in place and I initially very much agreed with these programs to ensure that people still had the necessities of life during layoffs and illness and whatever was happening with COVID. But now as we migrate to opening, those programs are not shifting,” she said.

“We need to do something to incentive people to get back to work.”

DeSantis previously told NL News that the tourism sector lost a record number of workers because of COVID-19 with many indicating they would not be coming back.

“We have accommodators that are to capacity not because hotels and motels are full but because they don’t have housekeeping staff to clean so there are floors that are closed,” she added. “We have restaurants that don’t open sections because they don’t have sections because they don’t have people to work for them.”

“You know, we have long waits because we don’t have cooks and chefs.”

The President of the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce, Dan Carroll, told NL News in June that with B.C.’s restart plan underway, there is optimism that the labour issues will improve at least to where things were pre-COVID.

“We’re keeping an eye on the federal hiring grant, and we’re constantly working with the city and interest groups to see what we can do create a better environment in Kamloops to attract and keep workers,” he said.

For DeSantis, the priority is to get Canadians back to work as quickly as possible, but notes 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.

“I would like to see something where the government actually turns that money to businesses to continue to subside employees and get them back to work and migrate the payment for people to stay at home to a payment to business owners,” she said.

“It is so we can get out workers back to work again and incentivize them to be contributing parts of society again.”