Atlantic bubble will reopen next week
Hospitality industry welcomes move, but says recovery will take time
Brenda O’reilly says she’s happy to see the province open its borders to Atlantic Canadians again, but the hospitality industry has a long way to go before it gets back on its feet.
“What it does, though, is it gives people the confidence. So any time that borders are opening, the Atlantic bubble is going on, people feel more confident that we’re getting to the other side of this,” she said. “Consumer confidence is very important.”
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland announced Tuesday they are opening their borders to Atlantic Canadians again on June 23, effectively reviving the Atlantic bubble that was in place most of last summer and fall.
P.E.I. will still require regional visitors to have at least one dose of vaccine to escape self-isolation requirements. New Brunswick is already open to Newfoundland and Labrador and P.E.I., but it’s not clear whether restrictions on Nova Scotian visitors will remain in place.
“The epidemiology across the region is showing similar numbers, which allows us to ease the border restrictions,” Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang said in a news release. “We will be watching the situation closely; however, as we have done before, we will move quickly if we see case numbers on the rise.”
In this province, Premier Andrew Furey said the announcement was an exciting moment for Newfoundland and Labrador.
“We have been hoping to get to this day for quite some time, and I thank all residents for their continued patience as the COVID-19 pandemic has required us to react swiftly and definitively,” he said. “I join my fellow premiers in looking forward to welcoming travel in our beautiful region.”
HIT HARD
O’reilly, chair of Hospitality NL, said less than 20 per cent of the Canadian tourist population coming to Newfoundland is from Atlantic Canada.
“The majority of the tourists that we get from the rest of Canada come from the Alberta-ontario market,” she said.
Expectations are much higher for July 1, when the province plans to drop its travel ban completely, allowing fully vaccinated Canadians to enter without self-isolating.
“I think at the beginning we’ll see a lot of Newfoundlanders coming home to see their families that they haven’t seen in over a year,” O’reilly said. “I think we’ll see people who own summer homes or real estate here coming. So I think you’re going to see lots of friends and family at the beginning.”
But it will take much longer for the industry to heal, she said.
“The industry has been dramatically affected. Our revenues have been decimated, but our expenses have not. As a matter of fact, we’re probably worse off right now going into this summer than we were last year, because we’ve incurred extra debt. We really haven’t got enough help from any level of government.”
A big obstacle now is finding workers, she said. They’ve lost confidence because shutdowns hit their industry the hardest.
“Public health does come first. I’ve always said that and I do believe it,” she said, “but we get shut down and then all of a sudden our employees are devastated as well as we are. So they’re losing confidence in our sector.”
It will take time for workers to get back on board and for people to overcome their fears, she said, and every bit of positive news helps.
“I don’t think people are just going to jump back on planes again,” she said.
“We need those positive signals like the Atlantic bubble, like opening up to Canadians in July.”