N.S. Restaurants in ‘Despair’ As People Cancel Reservations Amid Omicron Outbreak
HALIFAX – Brendan Doherty wasn’t long into his Tuesday afternoon phone interview before politely pausing the line of questioning to take another call.
“Sorry about that, there was just another cancellation on the other line,” the co-owner of The Old Triangle Irish Alehouse said upon returning.
He then immediately began answering the question posed to him about how he currently feels after Monday’s provincial Covid briefing.
“Despair would be the first word I would use,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“The announcement [Monday] and then the nonstop phone calls afterwards. It was giving us flashbacks to some pretty dark times over the last two years.”
By the time Doherty was talking to Huddle over the phone, the popular Halifax pub had more than 300 people cancel holiday bookings spanning the next two weeks.
“It’s probably going to go up to 450 by the time I go home for the day,” Doherty said.
The Old Triangle has cancelled 13 staffing shifts this week due to the cancelled reservations, but the pub is hoping to not have to lay off staff before or after the holidays.
On Monday, Premier Tim Houston and Dr. Strang announced 114 new cases of Covid-19 in Nova Scotia. Most concerning is that 40 of those cases involve the new Omicron variant.
For restaurants and other businesses, the 50 percent capacity rule is back in place. But what may be more devastating for small operators banking on a Holiday boost – consumer confidence has clearly taken a nosedive with yesterday’s announcement.
“The general line we hear is ‘Dr. Strang said we should cancel.’ That was the message most people took from the briefing yesterday – people should cancel holiday gatherings,” says Doherty.
“Every time cases hit, we’re the first to take a punishment. We’ve gotten very little help from the province throughout the entirety of the pandemic – and we’re getting zero at the moment.”
The Old Triangle, sadly, is not an outlier in seeing cancelled reservations. Luc Erjavec, who represents Restaurants Canada in the Atlantic region has been getting calls and emails all day from restaurant owners reporting lost Christmas business.
Erjavec said one operator has reported cancellations worth $150,000 in lost revenue. Given how restaurants have suffered financially over two years, this situation has come at the worst possible time.
“After two years, operators are physically, financially, and mentally exhausted. We thought we were getting to the end of it, and here we are all over again,” says Erjavec.
“It’s a compounding effect of the length of time, the lack of supports and the restrictions are just compounding to make it a perfect storm. Absolutely terrible, there’s no other way to describe it.”
“What’s next, locusts? I guess we already got the plague.”
Adding to the misery is the federal government’s recent decision to end the much-needed wage and rent subsidies for businesses, replacing them with a new program where funding only kicks in if a business reports a 40-percent decline in revenues.
A Restaurants Canada survey discovered that 80 percent of restaurants wouldn’t qualify for this program because the 40 percent threshold is too high.
“The federal government has to wake up and smell the coffee and realize that what they’re trying … will not help restaurants, they just set the bar too high. They have to reverse course,” said Erjavec.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Nova Scotia restaurant industry took the lockdowns and restrictions in stride. Seldom did an owner or representative express frustration or disagreement with a government’s public health decision.
But now there is clearly frustration in the wake of Monday’s Covid-19 briefing.
“We’re supposed to be living with Covid, and I just don’t know what that means based on the restrictions that came in yesterday,” says Doherty. “Our Christmas season has just been decimated.”
“Depending on how long these restrictions stay in place, and this tone from the province continues, this could be devastating.”
Erjavec agrees that something needs to change in how we handle outbreaks of cases.
“We cannot just keep going over and over again doing the same thing; open-shut, open-shut every time there’s a new variant,” said Erjavec.
“What’s the long-term plan? Because we were all told vaccines would bring us back to normal, but it doesn’t seem that way…There’s a little bit of a loss of trust in terms of where we’re going.”
Derek Montague is a Huddle reporter in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].