Over the July 1st weekend — after hundreds of hours of lost business hours due to COVID-19 lockdowns — Barry Taylor did what once would have once been unthinkable.
Taylor, director of operations at The Ballroom, at 145 John St., shut his doors and gave his hard-working staff at the downtown Toronto pub-music-bowling venue the long holiday off.
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“We really aren’t used to doing long stretches of work anymore,” he said. “They went two years without working, and now we’re throwing them into the fight.”
According to Statistics Canada’s job vacancies data, there were over 1 million job vacancies in the country in June and the accommodation and foods services had the highest vacancy rate with 171,715 open positions.
Just over 387,000 job vacancies in all sectors were in Ontario, and the hardest hit included food and accommodation, retail and construction, all prominent portions of the City of Toronto’s economy.
Lawvin Hadisi, a spokesperson for Toronto Mayor John Tory, said a big part of the city’s recovery involves the success of the hospitality and tourism sector.
“We know the restaurant industry needs workers and Mayor Tory and the city are trying to do what they can to help,” she said. “The labour shortage is something faced by many other cities across North America right now, and the mayor continues with efforts to convince people to return to work as well as his efforts to attract people and investment to Toronto.”
The mayor has supported fostering a strong talent pool through educational institutions that specialize in hospitality and an openness to immigration, she said.
“But most of all we need to convince those still out of the labour force to return and expedite the resumption of immigration which is so beneficial to our city including in addressing the labour shortage,” Hadisi said.
Taylor described the shortage of staff as a puzzle that can’t easily be solved with higher wages and shorter hours as those are already being addressed by the industry.
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It’s not just wait staff because chef and management positions have also become more difficult to fill, he said.
“I don’t know where everybody is,” he added.
Employees don’t like the commute into or the cost of living in Toronto, he said.
And if they make the effort, they want to work at the busiest restaurants, not those surrounded by mostly empty office and condo towers, he said.
The 2022 Ontario budget focused on luring workers into trades with tuition breaks and other perks, but there were no special incentives or programs to help the recovering hospitality sector, he said.
It didn’t help that the restaurant industry was largely vilified throughout the pandemic as if going out for a meal was a bad thing, he said.
Taylor, who has 35 years in an industry having started in the kitchen, said a broad-based hospitality intern program for high school students — and similar creative thinking — would definitely help an industry that can be extremely rewarding.
“We used to always say everybody’d be a better person in this world if they’d worked just a month or two in the restaurant business,” Taylor said.
aartuso@postmedia.com
