Why the pandemic is spurring the rise of small business lobbying efforts

Business owners banding together to voice concerns about being unfairly singled out for closure or onerous restrictions

Financialpost.com
Dec. 4
Raizel Robin

Ashley Perri’s Skinprovement Medi Spa and Laser Clinic lost all its in-person business -- which makes up the bulk of her income -- when the COVID-19 lockdown began last March, forcing her to immediately transition her Vaughan, Ont., business to an e-commerce model.

To help market the decision, the 34-year-old who has fresh-scrubbed good looks and an ebullient personality began producing the kind of lively, fun skin-care videos that are taking social media channels by storm. She appeared smiling, her face slathered in various masques, dancing to a punchy soundtrack.

Perri also came up with innovative, feel-good marketing strategies such as the “Mask Challenge,” which encouraged customers to take a picture of themselves in a facial masque, tag Skinprovement and post to Instagram with the hashtag #ThanksHealthHeroes. Skinprovement has 14,700 followers on Instagram and managed to do a brisk business online.

The change in selling tactics was huge, a big hustle, but it still only resulted in a small fraction of the income she normally made, given that 80 per cent of it is derived from services done in her clinic, on the face.

Skinprovement was finally allowed to reopen in June, and Perri and her staff suited up in full personal protective equipment (PPE) and showed it all off on Instagram. But regulations still required clients to keep masks on during procedures, which was problematic for the ongoing health of her business.

Perri saw the new provincial regulations as unfair. Why could people from different households eat, unmasked, at the same table indoors at a restaurant, but she wasn’t allowed to work on a client’s face while she was clad in full PPE?

She felt her industry was misunderstood, since skin-care clinics had long been taking great pains to control infections given the sensitive nature of their work. Furthermore, spa sessions are one on one, and there are no large gatherings.

“Our business is touching people’s faces,” Perri said. “We were clean before COVID. I’m a certified phlebotomist. I know how to deal with blood. I know how to control infection in our salon.”

She decided the government needed to hear her industry’s specific concerns more directly: She created a petition on Change.org, she put up a website, a call to action for the industry, and she cold-called hundreds of other skin-care specialists.

“These are my competitors. I said, ‘We don’t have a voice and I think it’s time we come together,'” she said.

Not content to go through established industry groups such as the Canadian Federation for Independent Business, business owners such as Perri in industries ranging from personal care to gyms to retailers have been busy forming lobby groups and stepping up their efforts to voice their concerns about being unfairly singled out for closure or more onerous restrictions than other sectors receive.

Such campaigning can be successful. This summer, former National Ballet dancer Kristen Dennis, who owns the Leslieville School of Dance and Music in Toronto, spearheaded an effort to get dance studios reopened that ended up with more than 65,000 signatures on a petition. The Ontario government eventually relented and allowed them to open.

Yukichi Hattori, owner of Calgary-based Hattori/Williamson School of Ballet and once a longtime principal dancer at the Alberta Ballet, is one of many studio owners now trying to do the same thing with a letter-writing campaign in Alberta.

“Different industries use different strategies,” Paul Thomas, adjunct professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, said.

Thomas has done extensive research on lobbying in Canada and the United Kingdom. He cites the Keystone Pipeline lobby as an example of a big lobby group, but one that faces its own challenges.

“For most of the country, the pipeline is something that happens ‘somewhere else,’” he said. “A huge strength of the estheticians is that there’s one in every constituency.”

The grassroots approach can be as effective as using a larger organization to champion your cause, such as the CFIB.

“The CFIB is much more about broad regulations (that affect small business), about minimum wage, for example,” Thomas said. “The concerns of any one group, like estheticians, wouldn’t be the organization’s focus.”

The oil industry lobby is in the news every week, while small independent business owners in other sectors have to fight much harder to have their stories heard

Of course, the oil industry lobby is in the news every week, while small independent business owners in other sectors have to fight much harder to have their stories heard.

Perri’s story is probably not unfamiliar to many of those she called upon.

She’s a mother of three kids, aged five, seven and nine years old, and her husband is a teacher. To save money on courier fees, she started driving around the Greater Toronto Area to deliver skin-care products herself or just as often as a family outing, after a day of producing videos and homeschooling the kids.

“I drove 8,000 kilometres delivering products,” Perri said. “I became a long-haul truck driver.”

Wary of going into debt, Perri decided not to take out the $40,000 small business loan offered by the federal government. Still, she spent $10,000 buying PPE for her staff and followed all public health protocols when COVID-19 came along.

Through the contact tracing she did at her own salon, she knew there hadn’t been a single COVID-19 case associated with her clinic. She also didn’t see any evidence from public health authorities that skin-care specialists were a source of spread.

But the problem was that up to 60 per cent of cases during Ontario’s second wave had no known epidemiological source, according to the Ontario Science Advisory Table. Without a firm grip on where and how the disease was spreading, public health authorities made the decision to close nonessential services, regardless of the potential threat, or lack thereof, they posed.

Realizing she needed to make her voice louder, Perri wrote a template for a letter to politicians and sent it to 90 of her competitors who agreed to join her. Every day, they sent letters to 35 politicians and policy-makers at various levels, including the provincial government, local members of parliament, mayors and public health units in the GTA.

The letters asked for answers: Why was her industry being disproportionately affected? To date, there has been little response from most of the politicians on the list, save for Vaughan Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua, who agreed to meet Perri and a group of skin-care specialists soon.

The lack of response disappointed Perri, but without knowing who would take their call, the group had cast the net wide. Some politicians, such as Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliot, were an obvious choice. Others, like Education Minister Stephen Lecce, less so.

Gabriel Hardy struggled with this very problem back in the spring, when COVID-related lockdowns closed his business, Gym Le Chalet, in Quebec City.

During the first months of lockdown, and over the summer, his gym offered personal training services online and some outdoor group classes. But he knew the model was unsustainable and his suspicions were borne out as attendance drastically decreased when the weather began to get cold and the days became shorter.

Hardy is leader of the Quebec chapter of the Fitness Industry Council of Canada and his own gym trains several professional athletes, including NHL players.

The first thing he had to do when addressing politicians is figure out which politician would take his call. No one admitted that gyms were their responsibility.

But in October, when the owners of 200 gyms, dance, yoga and martial arts studios threatened to open despite being in a provincially mandated lockdown (the 700 members of Hardy’s organization distanced themselves from the rogue studios), he observed that it was Isabelle Charest, the Minister of Education, who also oversees sports and recreation, who eventually responded.

This told him everything he needed to know.

“They see us as a leisure activity,” he said. “Or a fun sport. It’s not healthy for them. The idea was, it’s leisure, sports, it’s relaxing, you have a great time. But it’s not important and urgent.”

Like Ashley Perri did for skin care, Hardy recognized that he needed to change the perception politicians had of the fitness industry.

“They see gyms as a fun thing to do … places to socialize and look good, full of people from Pumping Iron,” he said. “This is the kind of perception we want to change.”

The FIC’s message to politicians must be focused on the public benefit, Hardy said, not gym owners’ tales of woe.

“It can’t be ‘Poor us, we’re closed and we’re losing money,’” he said.

(The message) can’t be 'Poor us, we’re closed and we’re losing money'

The FIC’s message is instead focused on the cost of being sedentary, which is associated with many chronic ailments such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, underlying conditions that worsen a case of COVID-19.

“We see gyms as places where people should be spending more time,” Hardy said. “We’re here to be strong associates with the government for health.”

Hardy also proposed a list of protocols he hoped members would be keen to adopt upon reopening, if they hadn’t adopted them already.

Offering a compromise is a crucial step, Thomas said. Lobbyists should understand what the government is asking for, whether it’s a cap on the number of clients or new distancing rules, before engaging.

“Businesses asking the government for changes need to decide what they’re willing to accept in order to gain something,” he said. “Politicians are more likely to accept turnkey solutions.”

Being confrontational or rebellious, such as the way Adamson Barbecue in Toronto flouted lockdown regulations, or the rogue studios in Quebec threatening to open, may be a tempting way to attract public attention, but are unlikely to end well for businesses in the long run.