Tourism and hospitality advocates know what they would like to hear from federal politicians campaigning for votes in Canada’s April 28 election.
BIV spoke with many executives in those sectors and heard repeatedly that they want the federal government to recognize the value of tourism.
To demonstrate that, many suggested changes to tax policies, funding methods and immigration levels.
Another idea is to have a minister whose sole responsibility is tourism.
Many said the government needs to sustain or increase funding for Vancouver-based Destination Canada, which is the nation’s destination marketer.
Destination Canada told BIV in an email that it received $123.3 million from the federal government in the year that ended March 31.
Tax, immigration, labour top issues for sector
Restaurant owners were not sure how to react last fall, when the federal government announced plans to stop collecting GST on various specific transactions between December 14 and February 15.
Restaurant meals were briefly tax exempt.
While some restaurateurs grumbled about having to reconfigure point-of-sale systems twice within a few months, the consensus at the end of the tax holiday was that the initiative drove spending.
“They should permanently cut the GST off restaurant meals,” BC Restaurant & Foodservices Association CEO Ian Tostenson told BIV.
“It gave psychological comfort to people. For some people that five-per-cent reduction in cost meant the difference between whether to go out and spend a bit of money or not go out at all.”
He pointed to Liberal leader and Prime Minister Mark Carney during the campaign promising to eliminate the GST for first-time homebuyers who purchase homes worth $1 million or less.
That promise demonstrated that Carney was willing to change how the GST would be applied, he said.
Others in the tourism and hospitality sector have similar ideas.
Vancouver Art Gallery’s board chair Jon Stovell told BIV that he would like to see the government eliminate the GST on admission tickets to the gallery.
Stovell’s day job is CEO at Reliance Properties, which announced last month that it would partner with Montreal’s Germain Hotels and convert an office building at 1111 West Hastings into a 180-room hotel, which the two companies would co-own.
“Having the GST off hotel visits could be good,” he added.
The GST is applied to domestic passenger travel so undoubtedly those who operate bus or train services would also like to have their products exempt from GST.
BIV emailed Rocky Mountaineer CEO Tristan Armstrong to ask if he would like train travel to be GST-free, but he did not respond by deadline.
Tostenson often hears restaurant owners grouse that they cannot find qualified staff—particularly cooks—even when they offer wages that far exceed minimum wage.
Various federal government moves have exacerbated this problem, executives say.
One policy stance that made hiring harder was Ottawa’s move to slash the number of workers eligible to come to B.C. under the province’s Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), he said.
B.C. administers that program, but the federal government determines the maximum number of workers eligible to take part.
Ottawa this year is only allowing 4,000 workers to enter Canada and work under the program. That is a 50-per-cent cut from the 8,000 such workers it allowed last year.
Tostenson said he wants the federal government to restore that higher cap on the total number of workers eligible to take part in the PNP program.
He also has a side beef with the provincial government.
What is making matters worse for the hospitality sector, he said, is that B.C. no longer prioritizes cooks and other hospitality workers in its PNP program. Instead, it prioritizes health care workers among other professions.
Tostenson would like Victoria to once again designate around 600 positions within the PNP annually to specifically be hospitality workers, he said.
The federal government does not play a role in determining which lines of work eligible participants in the PNP perform.
It does, however, control other aspects of immigration.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau in October said his government would reduce the number of new Canadian residents classed as permanent residents this year to 395,000—down 21 per cent from a previous target of 500,000.
Trudeau said his aim was to then further reduce the number of new Canadian permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026, and 265,000 in 2027.
His stated rationale was that having fewer permanent residents would help flatten Canada’s population growth, which has helped push up housing costs.
A consequence of making it harder for newcomers to become permanent residents is that it is a deterrent for them to come to Canada at all, Tostenson said.
Trudeau’s government has separately been reducing the number of new international student study permits it offers.
In 2024, for example, it approved 360,000 of these permits, down 35 per cent from 2023.
“Schools that have hospitality programs, with the changes in immigration, will fare badly,” Destination Vancouver CEO Royce Chwin told BIV.
“If we can’t allow people to come to Canada for tourism hospitality programs, we are concerned that those programs will fold, and we will have a workforce that is not going to be able to meet the demand that the federal tourism strategy offers.”
Range of other policy tweaks needed
Canada’s minister of tourism has tended to also wear other hats.
Pascale St-Onge remains in the role in the caretaker cabinet in place during the election campaign.
She is also minister of Canadian heritage and the minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec.
Previous tourism ministers have often also been responsible for small business.
“They’ve always shared the duties with something else,” said Walt Judas, CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of BC.
“We need a dedicated minister with the ability to develop or enable an overall tourism growth strategy.”
Judas added that the federal government should take what he called a “deep dive” into the aviation sector.
High airport rents hurt the sector, he said.
“The federal government takes a lot from airports across the country but does not necessarily invest anywhere near the amount needed to prop up a lot of airports that could use some infrastructure improvements,” he said.
Airports also need more federal funding for security workers and to have Nav Canada increase its number of air traffic controllers, he said.
Judas said Ottawa’s investigation into aviation should include how it can help national airlines to ensure carriers can fly unprofitable routes to smaller communities.
Connecting remote communities to each other creates tourism opportunities and helps forge a feeling of national connectedness, he said.
That is why Judas would also like the federal government to support more bus routes between remote communities.
“There are services that no longer exist, that Greyhound used to have,” he said.
The need for more hotel rooms in Metro Vancouver has long been a high priority for many tourism advocates.
B.C. has the highest average hotel occupancy among provinces, while Vancouver’s hotel occupancy rates and average room rates regularly top CoStar’s monthly calculations for major centres across Canada.
A 2023 Destination Vancouver report said Metro Vancouver needs 10,000 more hotel rooms by 2030 to meet projected demand.
BC Hotel Association CEO Paul Hawes, who assumed that post in February, said one thing the federal government could do to encourage hotel development would be to have Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) change mortgage financing rules.
Were CMHC to reduce the required percentage of hotel units in mixed-use developments to 50 per cent from 70 per cent, more of those developments would be viable to complete, he said.
