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Restaurant owners in North Bay desperate to hire staff

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After months without indoor dining, restaurants can welcome guests inside starting Friday.

Under provincial rules, there’s no limit to the number of patrons, as long as tables are spaced two metres apart.

CTV News spoke with local restaurant owners in North Bay and while they’re all excited to get one step closer to normal, they’re struggling to hire staff.

"We’ve never seen this at this level -- I’ve been in the restaurant industry for almost 20 years," said Silvain Rivet, owner of Syl’s Neighbourhood Kitchen.

"We have not seen the applications, people applying. We’ve increased our wages, added benefits and it just becomes more and more difficult."

Rivet has hired an immigration consultant in hopes of attracting more people from all over the world to come and work in northern Ontario.

"We’re in the process of hiring a chef from Bangladesh through the immigration consultant," he said. "These people want to work and want to come to Canada."

Over at Lou Dawgs Southern BBQ, located in the city’s downtown core, owner Ryan Ivy said he was fortunate enough to keep the majority of his staff working throughout the pandemic, and only needed to hire a few bodies for the summer.

But hiring just a couple positions was still difficult.

"t’s always a little bit of work to find the right people," Ivy said. "I just found this year especially there was an overall shortage of resumes coming through the door. Usually I get 30 resumes or so; this year I think I received approximately a half a dozen."

Ivy said the lack of interest in working at a restaurant has something to do with people finding different career paths.

"There’s been a large exit from hospitality to other industries as people were looking for a little more security from the startups and shutdowns from our economy throughout the pandemic," he said.

Restaurant owners in North Bay also told CTV News the problem may be worse than it seems. Some restaurants have had to modify their hours while others are no longer open seven days a week, all due to staffing shortages. 

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