News Analysis
Canada’s unemployment rate of 4.9 percent in July is a historic low, with over a million job vacancies, but underlying the headline statistics, small business has been struggling in the pandemic recovery as job growth migrates to government and larger firms.
Public sector employment is up 10.8 percent in the three years from July 2019 to July 2022, but private sector employment is only up 3.2 percent, according to Statistics Canada data. Self-employment is actually down 7.2 percent over those three years.
Also, employment in workplaces with over 500 employees is up 17.1 percent, whereas employment in workplaces with under 100 employees is up just 1.2 percent.  
“It should be a concern for not just governments but all Canadians, because having a thriving, small, medium-sized business sector is what protects you from the multiplication of monopolies or oligopolies that are generally not so good for the consumers,” Simon Gaudreault, chief economist and VP of research at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), told The Epoch Times….