Justin Trudeau urges countrymen to support small businesses

‘Small Businesses are the backbone of the Canadian economy employing 70% of the Canadian workforce and 54.2% of the economic output produced by the business sector’ said Pramod Goyal, President of Indo- Canada Chamber of Commerce (ICCC) during its observance of Small Business Week, and added,

“With the right information and guidance, small businesses are easy to start and sustain.”

Emerging as the largest organization of Indo-Canadian small business owners, ICCC had been organizing the Small Business Symposium to observe the Small Business Week. But unfortunately, this year, the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown has forced the ICCC with just a webinar.

With no signs of abating the pandemic continuously ravaging the global society and the global economy, the extermination of small businesses across the world is at risk.

But according to a survey conducted in late September 2020 by Ipsos for RBC Small Business, Canadian small business owners are counting on their resilience and optimism to help them weather the COVID-19 storm.

These inherent strengths and optimism of small business owners in Canada revealed by the statistics about their future is largely true of small business owners globally, said Goyal and added that he is reminded of the compact line of the Irish poet and humourist Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” and most of the Canadian small business owners, most of them are looking at the stars.

Offering a glimpse into the characteristics that help to define Canadian entrepreneurs, nine in ten (87%) business owners say they can recuperate quickly when faced with setbacks (compared to 72% of the overall Canadian population), and most (88%) are confident in their ability to deliver creative solutions to solve problems (compared to 73% of the overall Canadian population).

“Small businesses are the foundation of our communities and the backbone of our economy,” said Mary Ng, Canada’s Minister of Small Business, Export Promotion & International Trade.

Represent an incredible 98 per cent of all Canadian businesses, said Mary Ng, small businesses employ near 8.5 million hard-working Canadians to keep our communities and our economy vibrating.

The growing confidence of small business owners is mainly due to the information technology, in maintaining client relations, keeping books of accounts, and storing records on the cloud, enabling small businesses to compete with large conglomerates and emerge victoriously.

Mandated to create opportunities for small business owners, ICCC facilitates entrepreneurship to all levels of government, federal, provincial, and city, encouraging small businesses including remodeling and forming a business plan, identifying the potential market, arranging the seed capital, sustaining growth, and expanding to other markets.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj)