It doesn’t seem likely that businesses in Belleville will be able to get around the provincial rules preventing them from opening on statutory holidays.
Belleville’s Economic and Destination Development Committee discussed the possibility of a Retail Business Holidays Act by-law on Thursday, with some local shops interested in being allowed to open, but City Clerk Matt MacDonald told them there are a lot of boxes to check to make that happen.
Included in those, MacDonald says the business in question would have to be near a tourist attraction and that all businesses within a two kilometre radius of that attraction would also have to agree to open.
He says another option is for the province to designate the entire municipality as a tourist area, but “that is used in a very limited capacity for larger areas”.
Economic Development Manager Karen Poste also brought up the added difficulties for businesses who do open on holidays, as they’d have to pay employees time and a half or double-time, with a small survey finding that there isn’t much confidence in tourism numbers being high enough to make that money back.
MacDonald says he’s not trying to prevent any business that wants to open from trying to do so, but wants it to be known that “the bar is very high” to make that happen.
