Entrepreneurial Action

The pandemic may have been hard on some businesses and business owners but the figures show it was a failure in extinguishing the entrepreneurial spirit.

StatsCan has just released some numbers on business failures and start-ups through COVID. The findings here in Saskatchewan and nationally are quite consistent – more new businesses were started than closed over the last year and a bit.

In Saskatchewan, the number of active businesses rose every month through the last quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of this year. We had 24,680 at the end of March, about 800 more than six months earlier.

This is the net result after tallying up the number of businesses that failed or were closed through the period against the number of new starts. There were between 1,200 and 1,300 start-ups every month through that period while the failure rate was in the 950 to 1,050 a month. Basically, we were adding in the neighborhood of 100 to 200 net new enterprises to the rolls every month as the notion of being your own boss overwhelmed the challenges the pandemic delivered.