Juno News - October 16, 2021The little guy is always an afterthought for the government
Episode Stats
Words per minute
182.07784
Summary
It's another example of the little guy being an afterthought in Ontario and other jurisdictions. We have seen that time and time again, whether it's in Ontario or just in other jurisdictions, where they are not putting the small business, the individual, in front and center.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
a lot of justifiable frustration at the Ontario Ford government recently when it came to the issue
00:00:10.200
of capacity restrictions. A lot of people were really upset to learn that the government had
00:00:16.540
told large facilities that cater to professional sports, big concerts, that they'd be allowed to
00:00:22.600
open at 100% capacity. So we're of course talking about thousands of people, many thousands of
00:00:28.960
people at a hockey game or at a concert, but, but small businesses, small venues, restaurants,
00:00:35.720
independent restaurants, they would still be stuck at 50% capacity. What on earth was going on here?
00:00:42.860
Well, these smaller outlets, they were really upset. They lobbied the government. They complained.
00:00:48.020
They got a meeting that they thought a cabinet minister would be at. Turned out there was no
00:00:51.420
cabinet minister at it. They were not getting their grievances heard by any decision makers.
00:00:56.180
That story made the news as well. Eventually the government clued in and realized, come on,
00:01:01.600
this just can't hold anymore. And they say they're going to change it. They announced they would bring
00:01:05.640
about the changes and those places would have their capacity restrictions lifted as well. Long
00:01:10.940
overdue. And you got to wonder what on earth was going on here? Where was the logic, the science,
00:01:15.940
the fairness? What I think was going on is this was just yet another example of the little guy
00:01:21.960
being an afterthought. We have seen that time and time again, whether it's in Ontario or
00:01:27.720
just in other jurisdictions where they are not putting the small business, the little guy, the
00:01:33.220
individual as someone who's front and center. People who are not, I don't know, not connected. Maybe
00:01:38.380
they don't have the right lobbyists to get their voices heard or to get their voices to be taken
00:01:43.400
seriously. You know, you're always told, oh, just another couple of weeks, just another couple of
00:01:47.880
months, do this, do that out of an abundance of caution, so on and so forth. And I think there's
00:01:52.260
been other businesses, organizations that have been able to lobby as to why maybe rules should
00:01:57.400
be a little different for them. The little guy always happened to get stuck with the most aggressive
00:02:03.180
restrictions. I will never forget when the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, they said,
00:02:08.320
look, then this was a time when retail was flat out closed in Ontario. You could not go into small
00:02:13.560
retail outlets for in-person shopping. They said, can we please change this to make a rule
00:02:18.180
three people, maximum of three customers in a store. Made total sense, I think. Why not? Just a
00:02:25.320
question of fairness, particularly when you still saw at places like Costco and Shoppers Drug Mart,
00:02:30.640
were there hundreds of people in there? Yes, there were. And the government never, never agreed to that
00:02:36.280
very reasonable request from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. So yet another example
00:02:41.460
of how the little guy is an afterthought, whether it was a year ago or, well, the fact that it's still