With four out of five business owners in Manitoba concerned more COVID-19 lockdowns could impact their business in the fall the CFIB is calling on Canada’s premiers to adopt a Stay Open plan.

Jonathan Alward explains it’s about giving businesses and their staff, consumers even, confidence to know that we’re not going to resort once again to lockdowns or very very restrictive measures to deal with what might be a rise in case numbers again.  He says we have so many more tools now at our disposal that we didn’t have back in March 2020, most Manitobans are fully vaccinated, we have better masks and people by and large are relatively comfortable wearing masks in the work place or when they’re visiting a store as an example and we have lots of access to rapid testing which is another tool.

Alward says 87 per cent of independent business owners want their provincial governments to adopt a Stay Open plan to avoid further lockdowns.

This comes as the nation’s top doctor Teresa Tam announced the country is in the fourth wave of COVID-19, which includes surges of the more contagious Delta variant in Western Canada.