BRAVE FACE IN COUNTY
Businesses urge reopening
With a growing number of storefronts sporting “For Lease” signs and others “on the brink of collapse,” small-business owners in the last two Ontario municipalities still ordered to remain closed rallied on Tuesday, asking for support and demanding to be permitted to move to Stage 2.
When Tracy Mitchell had to close down His & Hers Hairstyles in mid-march due to the COVID -19 pandemic, she thought her Kingsville salon and its seven stylists would be open again in a few weeks. More than 100 days later, it remains closed — even though she still has to pay the bills.
“I’m paying the bills out of my retirement — now I’ve got to work until I’m dead,” she said at the downtown protest attended by almost 100 people in face masks.
On a hot and sunny summer’s day when the streets and sidewalks are normally clogged with visitors and shoppers enjoying the destination tourist town, there were plenty of locked doors and only a trickle of traffic.
“We’re the only regional economy in Canada which cannot open for business,” said Kingsville businesswoman Heather Brown.
She and other speakers, while emphasizing the importance of the local agri-food sector, pointed out there have been very few COVID-19 cases outside of the farms.
Yet, said Lisa Bradt, a Leamington businesswoman who spoke at the rally, “the agricultural sector remains open and small business suffers.”
The local economies of Kingsville and Leamington, said fellow businessman Trevor Loop, depend on the vitality of their small businesses, but the province has pointed to recent spikes of COVID-19 cases at local farms as the reason for holding those two communities back from the recovery underway in the rest of Ontario.
“As small businesses, we are the backbone of our community in which we all live, raise families and work,” said Loop. “We have the best interests of our communities at heart.”
The province’s decision last week to allow Windsor and neighbouring communities to proceed to Stage 2, but without Kingsville and Leamington, was “divisive and continues to be a catastrophic decision,” said Kingsville Mayor Nelson Santos. “It is urgent to the survival of our small businesses — let us move on to Stage 2,” he added.
Leamington Mayor Hilda Macdonald said that, as a former small business owner herself, “I’d be scared to death” to be in the position her town’s businesses find themselves in.
Elaine Sanders, owner of The Look Hair Studio in Kingsville, said health authorities need to separate and isolate infected workers at the farms which have COVID -19 outbreaks and let the urban cores reopen. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by senior governments to help Canadian workplaces get through the pandemic, Sanders said small businesses such as hers are among those that “fell through the cracks” and are ineligible for such assistance. Meanwhile, the expenses keep piling up.
Mitchell said six others depend on her business for their livelihoods.
“I’m trying to keep my shop open so others have a place to return to,” she said.
Tuesday’s protest came 106 days after Ontario ordered the closure of all restaurants, bars, cafés and other non-essential businesses where people gather. Local leaders had expressed hope late last week, after conversations with Premier Doug Ford, that there might be good news at the start of this week, but then came a startling spike in new local COVID -19 cases, almost all of them migrant workers on farms in the two towns.
Santos said the long shutdown has many independent small businesses “pushed to the edge.”
In addition to permission to move to Stage 2, the local business owners are also petitioning senior governments to inject extra stimulus funding and provide other help to the two towns, now stuck weeks behind the recovery efforts of other municipalities, including those just a few minutes’ drive away.
Local MP Chris Lewis (C—essex) and MPP Rick Nicholls (PC— Chatham-kent Leamington) were in attendance and both promised to convey the messages and pleas of the local small-business owners to Ottawa and Queen’s Park.
Lewis, who is from Kingsville, said he’ll be in the House of Commons next week and “bringing these questions directly to the prime minister.”
Asked whether he, too, believes Kingsville and Leamington deserve extra supports, Nicholls, who is a member of the party in power, told the Star he’s already raised the issue with his government.
“What can we do to help Leamington and Kingsville?” he said.
“What can we do to help the small guy?”