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.
“The businesses that reported the largest declines in gross profit were client-facing ones, such as food service and drinking places, hotels, and offices of dentists and physicians,” said the StatCan report, as first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter.
In addition, the federal agency said transportation and warehousing, administrative, waste management, and remediation services were also “among the most severely impacted.”
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“Output contracted sharply in these industries during the initial lockdown, anywhere from about 30% to 60%, and had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2023,” the agency added. “This was due, in part, to successive waves of public health restrictions.”
The provinces and territories started to declare public health emergencies in mid-March 2020—days after the World Health Organization characterized the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic on March 11.
Tight restrictions countrywide followed, including a month-long lockdown in April 2020. Over the summer that year, restrictions on social mobility began to ease before being tightened again in the fall when the provinces and territories reported a rise in infection rates. In December 2020, restrictions were “tightened to levels similar to those from the height of the first wave,” said StatCan in a 2022 report that measured the correlation between COVID restrictions and economic activity.
The agency’s Feb. 18, 2024, report says retailers, and to a lesser extent builders and manufacturers, similarly saw “large output declines” of roughly 20 percent to 25 percent during the initial lockdown, though they recovered more quickly when those initial restrictions were eased.
“The recovery in construction activity, in particular, was buoyed by a surge in demand for single-family homes and home renovations following the lockdowns in April 2020,” the report said.
Bankruptcies
Bankruptcies began to accelerate in mid-2022 and reached a high of over 1,200 by the first quarter of 2024, compared to a low of about 250 in the third quarter of 2021 and about 400 to 450 per quarter throughout 2020, said StatCan’s Feb. 18 report.
“This corresponds to a period of rapidly rising interest rates and elevated input costs, as well as the end of CEBA program forgiveness (first quarter of 2024),” analysts wrote.
The report drew data from sources that includes Export Development Canada, administrator of the CEBA program; the banks and other financial institutions that provided loans to businesses; the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy; and StatCan’s own business register.
The CEBA program was opened for applications from April 6, 2020, to June 30, 2021. The original deadline for repayment to qualify for partial loan forgiveness was Dec. 31, 2022. The deadline was extended to Dec. 31, 2023, as “the Omicron variant of COVID-19 necessitated further public health restrictions,” StatCan said in its report. The deadline was later further extended to Jan. 18, 2024, “in recognition that the end of December is a busy time for many businesses.”
Businesses unable to meet the deadline were allowed an extra two months to refinance the loan but would lose the one-third loan forgiveness amount. At the time, the federal government also launched a three-year term loan at 5 percent interest per annum that businesses must pay back in full by Dec. 31, 2026.
Ottawa paid out $49.2 billion to 898,271 businesses across the country through its CEBA program. Among those borrowers, 6,343 eventually declared bankruptcy by the end of September 2024.
StatCan said 18.8 percent of CEBA loans (about $9.2 billion of the $49.2 billion) currently remain outstanding and are due to be repaid by the end of December 2026.
A survey on business conditions conducted by the agency from October to early November 2023 indicated that “one-fifth (19.9%) of businesses reported not knowing if they would have the liquidity or access to credit to repay the loan” by the 2026 deadline, while “14.5% of businesses do not anticipate having the liquidity or access to credit needed to repay the CEBA loan” by then.
Jennifer Cowan contributed to this report.
