‘Huge missed opportunity’: Restaurants, small businesses feel snubbed by federal budget

Critics says small businesses and ordinary Canadians were left out of the federal budget.

Ottawa’s 400-page-plus budget released Tuesday was filled with pricey promises, including more than $100 billion for the military and infrastructure.

“There’s a lot of it that kind of mirrors what we were hoping for. Infrastructure is a big issue in our province,” says Rene Legacy, New Brunswick’s finance minister.

But some small businesses argue the budget did little to address Canadians’ cost of living concerns, which impacts how much people can splurge on non-essentials.

“It would have been nice to see a little bit of small business support when there are so many struggles already happening,” says Ellen Giberson, the store manager for Earth Goddess, a Halifax jewellery store. “When the cost of living is so high, there is no room to partake in the pleasures that we have here. And we are seeing that every day.”

It’s a similar story with restaurants across the country where foot traffic is dwindling.

Restaurants Canada calls the federal budget “underwhelming.”

“There was a huge missed opportunity to address the affordability issue that Canadians have been chronically struggling with for a number of years,” says Kelly Higginson, president of Restaurants Canada. “We see that there is nothing in this budget that Canadians can feel on a day-to-day basis.

“Seventy-five per cent of Canadians have said that they’re going to have to cut out small things, like weekly trips to a restaurant, a small purchase on a weekly basis because they don’t have access to that discretionary spending. And that is impactful for the quality of life for Canadians.”

Higginson adds they are also concerned about immigration.

“We have concerns around the drastic cuts and how we’re going to see the allocation of the temporary workers that we need to help support this. The rural, remote, non-urban sectors and the impact of not having access to that and to be a priority sector that it will have on the jobs that those workers help support.”

Louis-Philippe Gauthier, the Atlantic vice-president with the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, believes there are positive takeaways from the budget.

“The accelerated depreciation is a good measure that the government put in place that will help businesses. From that perspective, the ability for business owners to get access to more capital gains is going to be positive as well,” he says.

But Gauthier adds more could’ve be done.

“Where is the support to help businesses either from a cost perspective and or from an opportunity to reinvest? So having no fiscal measures to help businesses, in reducing their taxes, is a miss in our opinion.”