MPP Sarah Jama asked to leave Ontario legislature for wearing keffiyeh
MPP Sarah Jama was asked to leave the Legislative Assembly of Ontario by House Speaker Ted Arnott on Thursday for wearing a keffiyeh, a garment that is banned at Queen’s Park.
Canada Day has kicked off the unofficial start of summer, and the tourism sector is hopeful the first season in three years largely free of COVID-19 restrictions will marshal a much-needed boost for a pandemic-stricken industry.
It has been slow to bounce back as new COVID-19 variants and public health measures deterred domestic and foreign travellers, but as cases drop and restrictions lift there are signs of recovery across the country.
Some tour operators are scrambling to find staff to fill a surge in demand and hotels are reporting occupancy rates near pre-pandemic levels.
"This summer will be the summer of recovery," said Catherine Callary, vice president with Tourism Ottawa.
Canada's tourism industry GDP was down nearly 50 per cent in 2020, according to Statistics Canada, compared to an economy-wide 5.4 per cent drop.
And while there is optimism, the most recent Statistics Canada numbers show the recovery is far from complete.
Domestic tourism activity, which compiles data such as travel movement and spending, was down 20 per cent this March compared to 2019. And international tourism activity was 57 per cent behind pre-pandemic levels.
Callary estimates Ottawa lost out on $3 billion in the tourism industry over the pandemic. The demand for hotel rooms, however, has bounced back and now sits around 15 per cent below pre-pandemic levels, she said.
"Tourism operators are not going to be able to recoup the lost revenues from the past two years. Those are not revenues that they can recoup. But we can move forward, we can recover," she said.
Off the coast of Newfoundland, whale watching boats loaded with tourists are back in Atlantic waters. Mike Gatherall, director of Gatherall's Puffin and Whale Watch south of St. John's, said business is booming.
The 38-year-old family business had a banner year in 2019, Gatherall said. But 2022 is exceeding those numbers.
Bookings are up nearly 40 per cent, he said.
"(This year) so far, has actually been quite busy. A very healthy rebound, certainly, for our operation," he said.
Government support and some prudent financial planning helped the business retain its staff throughout the pandemic, Gatherall said. But challenges still remain.
The rising cost of fuel is making it more expensive to operate the boats. And he says a shortage of rental cars could make it hard for would-be customers to make the trip from the city to the rural coast.
In the Toronto-area, hotel occupancy surpassed 80 per cent in June for the first since the pandemic started, said Destination Toronto executive vice-president Andrew Weir.
While leisure travel is expected to drive this summer's recovery, he said it could be years before the city sees the full return of large-scale conferences. Those events are a big boost to local business, whether it's florists, caterers, or audio-visual companies, Weir said.
"Until both of those engines are firing at full steam, the visitor economy won't have fully recovered," he said.
Longtime Toronto walking tour guide Jason Kucherawy said his company, Tour Guys, was inundated with requests in April from local school groups arranging field trips for May and June.
He had to turn down some requests this spring as he scrambled to find guides, after the business had scaled back to a skeleton operation during the pandemic.
The company ran tours in Ottawa, Hamilton and Toronto for 15,000 people in 2019, a record year for the 14-year-old company. By 2021, just 500 people attended a tour.
But so far 1,000 people have joined a tour this May and June alone, he said.
"And we're just getting into our peak tourism season. So I know that looking ahead, we've got a lot of bookings now for July and August, as people are planning their trips to Canada. And most of our business, for us, it's Americans. That's three-quarters of our business," said Kucherawy, who serves as president of the Tourist Guide Association of Toronto.
U.S. residents took 759,600 trips to Canada this April, eight times more than April 2021, but less than half of the 2019 trips, according to the latest Statistics Canada numbers on international arrivals.
American visitors are also slowly starting to return to one of the most iconic tourist attractions on the Prairies, said West Edmonton Mall general manager Danielle Woo. But with inflation raising the cost of travel, she said the mall has seen much of its business from the "staycation" crowd, either from within Alberta or nearby provinces.
"I would say at this point, we are definitely where we were or better than we were pre-pandemic as far as what the mall feels like as a whole," Woo said.
The Skwachays Lodge in Vancouver, an 18-room boutique hotel and art gallery run by the Vancouver Native Housing Society, made just one booking in all of January 2021, said Caroline Phelps, who runs the lodge's Indigenous artists-in-residence program.
The hotel catered mostly to in-province customers before the pandemic, but the return of cruise liners to the B.C. coast has attracted a new set of tourists, she said.
"For the rest of the summer, we're getting booked. Even during the weekdays," Phelps said. "We have a lot of cruise ship travellers that stay."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 28, 2022.
MPP Sarah Jama was asked to leave the Legislative Assembly of Ontario by House Speaker Ted Arnott on Thursday for wearing a keffiyeh, a garment that is banned at Queen’s Park.
Two teenagers have been charged with second-degree murder in connection to an alleged homicide near the Halifax Shopping Centre earlier this week.
Bob Cole, a welcome voice for Canadian hockey fans for a half-century, has died at the age of 90. Cole died Wednesday night in St. John's, N.L., surrounded by his family, his daughter, Megan Cole, told the CBC.
Here's what you need to know about why movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's rape conviction was thrown out and what happens next.
When Gen-chan arrived at a zoo in Japan in 2017, no one questioned whether the then-five-year-old hippopotamus was a boy. Seven years later, zoo staff made a surprising discovery: Gen-chan, now 12, was female.
A rural Manitoba school trustee is facing calls to resign over comments he made about Indigenous people and residential schools earlier this week.
The B.C. Humanist Association has threatened legal action against the City of Vancouver for allowing prayers at council, following a similar warning issued earlier this month to a smaller community on Vancouver Island.
A London man has become the first person in Canada to receive a robotic assisted surgery on his spine. Dave Myeh suffered from debilitating, chronic back pain that led to sciatica in his right now and extreme pain in his lower back.
Honda is set to build an electric vehicle battery plant next to its Alliston, Ont., assembly plant, which it is retooling to produce fully electric vehicles, all part of a $15-billion project that is expected to include up to $5 billion in public money.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.