Good Afternoon All.
Following yesterday's announcement by Premier Ford regarding the temporary moratorium on commercial evictions, Councillor Fletcher released the attached statement. We share the concerns expressed in her statement and your Board will continue to advocate for changes to the CECRA.
I was also speaking with a couple of BIA members this morning about the various funding programs and their various deadlines. Here are the parameters for the CERB and the 75% Wage Subsidy programs:
CERB:
This program is retro-active to March 15/20 and available until October but each person is only eligible for funding coverage to a maximum of 16 weeks. So if you have staff members on this program and they signed up in the early weeks you need to start watching the number of weeks they have been covered before they reach the maximum of 16 weeks.
75% Wage Subsidy:
This program is also retro-active to March 15/20 and runs to August 29/20. It covers 24 weeks - which is basically 6 months (March to August). The initial issue with this program was that when it was released most businesses were closed and didn't have any staff to subsidize. It's only recently that some business owners have been able to use this program. For those of you who haven't applied for this program you may want to consider getting your applications in sooner as opposed to later.
I've included our government members in the top send line of this email. For our Federal members: Julie Dabrusin and Zachary Nixon - I'm hoping that the government will consider extending the wage subsidy past the end of August. As you know Toronto has not been able to move into Stage 2 yet and even when we do our businesses will not be able to rebound back to their pre-Covid revenue levels for quite some time - certainly not by the end of August. The extension of this Wage Subsidy program is crucial for our small businesses.
Thanks,
Susan