Canada’s small and medium-sized businesses lost about $60 billion in the first year of pandemic lockdowns, says the country’s national statistical agency.
In a report published on Feb. 18, Statistics Canada said about 47 percent of all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)—businesses with annual salary expenses of less than $1.5 million—“experienced a drop in gross profit, totalling a loss of nearly $60 billion” from 2019 to 2020.
“The pandemic was most challenging for client-facing industries,” says the report, which examines how Ottawa’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program may have influenced SMEs’ survival rates during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and restrictions.
The CEBA program, created on March 27, 2020, paid businesses up to $60,000 in interest-free loans that would qualify for partial loan forgiveness if repaid by a set deadline….