Adding stat holidays to calendar year costing businesses: BC Chamber of Commerce

Before the province announces its Budget 2023 in the coming days, the BC Chamber of Commerce is calling on governments to support struggling businesses. 

President and CEO Fiona Famulak said, be it small or medium businesses, folks are having trouble staying afloat amid rising and new taxes and mandatory benefits. 

“We need government, with the support of all MLAs, to develop policies and initiatives aimed at making B.C. a more friendly and welcoming place to run a business,” she said in a statement. 

Without addressing the cost of running a business in BC, Famulak said it will ultimately impact communities for the worse. 

“Communities need healthy businesses, healthy businesses help to drive healthy communities. Healthy businesses help to create jobs, they help all of our British Columbians who are employed to put food on the table, to pay for their bills, have a lifestyle that they want to etc,” she explained to Daily Hive. 

One of the ideas the BC Chamber of Commerce is proposing is when a statutory holiday is added to the calendar year, another “perhaps less important” holiday should be removed. 

“When they declared the stat holiday, there’s no revenue impact to the government itself. It’s purely a cost that’s put on the shoulders of businesses,” Famulak explained. 

By replacing a statutory holiday instead of adding a new one, she said, that can create some “balance” to business costs. But this is just one example where governments can help manage costs.

“Additionally, we are calling for government to address the unnecessary delays in permitting decisions which are impacting our natural resource sectors and hindering investment opportunities in B.C.,” Famulak added in the statement.

According to a recent survey of BC Chamber of Commerce members,  87% of respondents said they are feeling the pinch because the cost of doing business increased in the last year. Meanwhile, 78 per cent said the “costs of labour” have worsened.