Second lockdown putting more strain on northern workers, small businesses

Most of Christina Lapossie's shifts at the front desk of a Sault Ste. Marie hotel are eerily quiet these days.

She is one of the few employees still on the job, and the rooms that are usually filled with hockey teams, snowmobilers and convention-goers are mostly empty. 

"There's always that worry that one day you could walk into work and be told, 'Go home, we have no work for you right now,'" says Lapossie.

"But that's across every industry right now, I believe."

She says about 75 per cent of the hotel staff have been laid off since March, although a few housekeepers did come back when business picked up in the summer.  

Scott Florence, the executive director of the Sudbury Workers Education and Advocacy Centre, says they're trying to help several older workers who expected to get called back in the summer or during holiday shopping season.

"There are employers who are using this opportunity to quote un quote 'clean house', to get rid of employees they don't like for whatever reason," he says.

Florence says those reasons include hiring younger workers who get paid less and claim fewer health benefits.

He says normally workers can file for what's known as "constructive dismissal" with the Ontario Ministry of Labour and get severance pay, but that isn't happening during the pandemic. 

Derik McArthur, a director with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 175, says some grocery stores and pharmacies in the north are actually hiring during this second wave. 

But he says other workers affected by this latest lockdown could use a government assistance program, similar to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB, that the federal government offered in the spring.

"We've seen government bail out corporations, and this is a great moment when the government bailed out the people and helped people directly," says McArthur.

"How long people can last? That's the magic question. I'm not sure."

Sales at Chat Noir Books in downtown New Liskeard are down 70 per cent, but with a good Christmas season, plus some drive-through and online business, co-owner Jennifer Fournier has managed to keep all three of her employees on the job. 

But she and her husband are taking a closer look at their personal finances. 

"It's a little scary," says Fournier. "We certainly have been trying to live below our means."

Fournier says after being closed in the spring, they renovated the store for physical distancing and re-opened in July, only to close the doors again five months later, with the lockdown that started on Boxing Day. 

"Yeah it's not good. We're trying to be positive. We're lucky that we're able to be open in some capacity," she says. 

"We tried to look from the beginning at the scenario of it not getting better quickly."

Cambrian College business professor Brian Vendramin says he knows of several Sudbury businesses that are currently looking at shutting down or selling. 

"There are a number of small businesses that are just COVID-fatigued," he says. 

"(They) have eaten into their credit lines and some are even using their own credit cards to pay their employees. So it becomes an emotional decision."