Fort Mac businesses need $200M cash injection to recover, says chamber president

Fort McMurray business leaders are calling for an immediate cash injection of up to $200 million to help get them back up and running in the wake of the devastating forest fire.

Speaking on the Tuesday edition of Alberta at Noon, Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce president Bryce Kumka said going five weeks without revenue after the city was evacuated has hit small and medium sized businesses hard, especially as they were already struggling to deal with the province's faltering economy.

"It could be as high as $200 million in the short-term, as far as assistance for small and medium sized businesses," he said.

"We wanted to kind of keep it at a reasonable cap of about $250,000 a month of income.

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​"The medium and large size businesses have more resources available to them and ability to be a little bit more resilient so we really wanted to help our small entrepreneurs.

"In Fort McMurray we have a large number of home-based businesses, a lot of that is based on the fact our accommodation costs for real estate are very expensive, so a lot of businesses that would normally have a storefront don't because the rents are too high."

Normally the ones offering a hand, Kumka said it's tough to be on this side of the coin.

"Fort McMurray is a very giving community and I think it's going to be challenging for a lot of people but at the end of the day it's going to be a necessity, not a want," he said.

The money is needed immediately to be effective.

"We're looking for some direct income replacement grants," said Kumka.

"In other disasters we've seen short-term or bridge loans, unfortunately they haven't (been) overly effective.

"Some of the statistics that came out of the 2013 Calgary floods were that about a third of the businesses didn't re-open after the floods and then a third of those didn't survive the next two years, so bridge loans and tide-you-over money didn't really assist.

"Canada has never seen a $6 billion loss before and that's kind of a conservative number from what I'm told from the Insurance Bureau of Canada, we won't really know for another couple of years what the total impact will be."

Housing another concern

With housing already hard to come by in Fort Mac, the fire has made finding accommodations even more difficult. 

"The majority of homes in Fort McMurray are damaged by smoke in varying degrees, from fairly minor to fairly significantly," he said.

"The same thing with multi-family and condominiums, so  lot of our staff don't have anywhere to go. The hotels are up and running but they're running at capacity now.

"The cleaning process is slow, it's not a quick thing, it's a full smoke remediation process.

"It's not about getting a bucket of soap and giving it a good scrub, there's a process to make sure we're not going to put people at risk from a health perspective."