After three months in strict lockdown to protect against the spread of Covid-19, the Government of Manitoba opted to loosen restrictions to allow for some businesses to open their doors and allow customers in. Less than a week later the province issued another public health order to put formal restrictions on interprovincial travel.
The border restrictions began on January 29, and ask that anyone entering Manitoba from anywhere in Canada for non-essential purposes to go into self-isolation for 14 days. Along with the restrictions came exemptions, that for most part, allow anybody who regularly travels to the province for work, business, or otherwise to avoid the two week quarantine.
This is the second time Manitoba has implemented border restrictions to prevent the spread of Covid-19 through interprovincial travel—the province previously had similar rules in place with exemptions for regular travellers in the early spring of 2020.
For border towns where interprovincial travel can have a major impact on business, the implementation of the 14 day quarantine could have an effect on local economies going forward.
The pandemic has hit the hospitality sector about as hard as any industry and although the border restrictions may play a role in reduced customer traffic from Manitoba, Red Barn owner Dan Davidson says it’s hard to pinpoint exactly one reason under the Covid-19 umbrella as to why sales are down at his Moosomin restaurant.
“It’s tough to say how Manitoba’s restrictions impact us,” he said. “January was a little worse off sales wise compared to what we would have seen in November and December, but there’s so many factors in that—like being after Christmas—I just can’t put my finger on the reasons behind it. Obviously it’s Covid, but the decreases are a little bigger in January and I don’t know exactly why. January is generally just a terrible month, the worst of the year no matter how we look at it—January, February, and March are usually by far our worst. So it’s even worse than before, but it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what difference that (Manitoba’s lockdown) actually made compared to just Covid-19 in general.”
With his restaurant located right on the Trans-Canada Highway in a border town, Davidson says many of his customers tend to be travellers and the pandemic has caused much of that business to drop.
“Typically the larger part of our business is transient,” he said. “It runs over half of our volume—if you’re talking annually. It boosts us up a lot in June, July, August, and September are even busier then. Between the highways and the hotels—if I can call that transient—a good bit of our annual volume comes from those spots and so we haven’t seen that with Covid. Highways are nothing like they used to be because people aren’t travelling so we lose all of that opportunity.
“As far as locally, you might be kind of doing the same—maybe a little less because people aren’t moving as much—but people still want to get out when they can here. I’d say the biggest part of the decrease is that extra stuff we usually have, but we don’t have.
“We maybe get a little bit of it, but it’s nothing like we’re used to. All in all, I just get excited for May. I kind of have that date in my head and I have for awhile, I’m crossing my fingers that we have enough vaccinations by then that we can at least kind of get moving again. The mine gets all their construction going at the beginning of May and the hotels get busier because of that—I’ve kind of got May down as the point where things will start turning the corner for us hopefully.”
Covid-19 has caused declines for all kinds of businesses and that will continue for the foreseeable future—especially in a hub community like Moosomin that generally attracts people from outside of the area—but Davidson isn’t sure how quickly things will return to normal once the vaccine is accessible to the general public.
“It’s so tough (to point to one factor of Covid),” he said. “We have hockey tournaments taken away which takes away other teams which takes away people and people using the hotels—typically we’d have teams staying at the hotels during certain tournaments.
“Usually the high school would have their volleyball and basketball tournaments, there would be Christmas party catering, mine catering—we did a lot of catering there—and that kind of stuff is just gone because everything needs to be packaged now and there’s no buffets. There’s so many factors and so as they start loosening the restrictions, we’ll wait and see because obviously it’s not going to fall back into how it was.
“You can look at it two different ways, you can say, ‘new habits have been formed so will the way people do things be different?’ Or are people going to actually have some saved money and be going stir-crazy that everybody is going to go crazy and the economy’s going to boom? I’ve given it a lot of thought and read lots of articles and I truly don’t know which one it’s going to be, we’re going to have to wait and see. I think it would be moreso on the boom side because we’re social creatures and we can’t stand not socializing which I think will help. On a positive side, the way I look at it is we’re lucky here with the mine construction. That’s the number one thing, because it’s the one activity I know even with slight Covid restrictions is going to happen and that just brings outside money into our community and that benefits everybody, I don’t care who it is, that benefits everybody.”
Despite how hard 2020 was, Davidson is expecting 2021 to be even tougher with less help from the government and potentially another full year of trying to operate with restrictions while the uncertainty around when the vaccine will become accessible remains.
“It’s not great (operating with restrictions),” he said. “We have a lot of staff and we haven’t really had any layoffs during operations so we’re trying to do our best and keep it going. I have found that we have to get a little tight in January and February with our hours because the subsidies aren’t there anymore. We are finding that our losses are bigger right now than they were before, I think a lot of restaurants are going to see that the programs earlier on were better and its gotten weaker.
“This is when restaurants—or anybody that’s struggling with lower sales—are going to find it’s a little harder right now. The losses will be bigger now than they were before and it’s just going to be who can handle losing that kind of money and start up again.
“That’s going to kind of be the test for everybody in the cities or anywhere, I don’t care where it is, 2021 could end up being harder than 2020. If there’s a lot of payments not made and they’re advertised as being put into 2021, there’s extra debt load taken on, tax time is going to come around and whenever they ask for the CERB cheques—it’s all taxable income and they’re going to be looking to reclaim it and how many people are going to be hit with that?
“There’s going to be a lot of factors in 2021 that we’re going to have to keep our eye on, you never know what’s going to happen to people and if it’s going to take money out of people’s pockets. There’s a lot of factors in 2021, there’s going to be more factors and less money being pushed around by the government.”
