The rush to reopen seats inside bars and restaurants was clearly a costly mistake
Big number: 1.5, the percentage of Toronto’s GDP made up by eating and drinking establishments, according to 2017 data. These establishments are a small part of the city’s economy, but have represented a significant source of COVID-19 spread.
As Toronto’s COVID-19 case numbers continue to rise to new and distressing levels, I keep coming back to the same question: What was the deal with the provincial government’s big rush to reopen indoor seating in bars and restaurants?
Every day we get further into this second wave, it looks more and more baffling. In the summer, in the middle of this public-health crisis, just weeks before Queen’s Park needed to execute a logistically challenging back-to-school plan, who decided letting people sit inside bars and restaurants was the priority? What could possibly justify that?
Don’t tell me it was all about the health of the economy. Many of Toronto’s bars and restaurants are beloved and it’s hard to imagine the city without them. But they make up only about 1.5 per cent of Toronto’s GDP, according to 2017 data. The economic success of Toronto and Ontario does not hinge on indoor dining.
You know what it does hinge on? It hinges on not having hundreds of people a day getting infected with a respiratory virus. It hinges on the schools staying open so parents can work full time.
Being able to go inside a building and have a drink and a plate of nachos is not the thing that is going to bring fiscal prosperity back.
That isn’t to suggest that governments should have just let these businesses languish. Just the opposite. The pandemic has been devastating for their collective bottom line. Something needed to be done. But the solution the provincial government came to — letting bars and restaurants fully reopen when Toronto entered Stage 3 on July 31 — looked odd at the time. It looks downright irresponsible now. On Friday, Toronto Public Health released data showing that 18 of 45 recorded community outbreaks of COVID-19 in Toronto between Sept. 20 and 26 were linked to bars, restaurants or entertainment venues.
Contact tracing suggests individual bars could be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of potential exposures. At Regulars, a King West joint, Toronto Public Health says 600 people could have been exposed to someone positive for COVID-19. At Yonge Street Warehouse, a venue near Ryerson University, exposures could have been as high as 1,700.
Those aren’t the kinds of numbers you deal with by reducing how many people can be inside a bar, or the number allowed to sit at each table. The increasingly complex series of restrictions foisted on bars and restaurants seem largely arbitrary and almost impossible to enforce — and it’s hard to see how they could be truly effective.
And that leaves the owners and operators of these businesses in a tough spot. They’re not being told to close indoor seating — though Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa did make that recommendation to the province on Friday — but they’re also increasingly being blamed for the resurgence of the virus and targeted with extra rules.
Before too long, the restrictions and rules placed on them will make staying in business unprofitable anyway. It’s going to be hard to make a profit when the government is telling you all your customers need to wear haz-mat suits.
So let’s listen to de Villa and cut to the chase. The provincial government should close indoor dining again in places like Toronto and Ottawa that are seeing a lot of transmission.
They should also come forward with a generous financial rescue package that will keep these businesses afloat as they offer takeout, delivery and — for those who like to say “the cold never bothered me anyway” — patio seating.
Any money spent by government to help out bars and restaurants will certainly work out to less than the amount that would be spent in health-care costs alone dealing with a prolonged and stubborn second wave.
It won’t be easy on restaurant and bar owners. But it was never going to be. Optimism is not a strategy.
With their relatively tiny GDP footprint, the path to economic recovery does not rely on letting bars and restaurant stay open. It relies on doing whatever it takes to keep the number of cases down until a vaccine or treatment is available. It relies on making the tough decisions to keep people safe.