Small businesses in BC face longer road to economic recovery

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says small businesses across BC including the north will continue to struggle even as the recovery from the pandemic continues.

This is contrary to a Scotiabank survey where 55% of large and medium-sized businesses polled believe they’ll return to pre-pandemic levels in the next six months.

Senior Policy Analyst for BC, Muriel Protzer spoke to MyPGNow.com, who noted their February survey painted some much different results.

“12% of small and medium-sized business owners indicated that it would take between six and twelve months for them to return to usual profitability. Looking even further, an additional 32% said that it would take over a year to get to usual profitability.”

“Six percent of all businesses in this survey indicated that they may never be able to be profitable again. While they are seeing the hope and light here at the end of the tunnel and are optimistic for recovery but it’s a much longer timeline. Not only do small businesses make up the majority of our private sector economy they also have a very different reality than some larger businesses.”

In addition, the slow vaccine rollout in BC is making small business owners worrisome.

“We have seen a slow rollout of vaccines happening in the province and there is a lot of anxiety from everyone in British Columbia about getting the vaccine out there in a timely fashion and making sure that we can return to normal as quickly as possible,” added Protzer.

She adds it’s crucial federal and provincial support programs like the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, the Canadian Emergency Bank Account, and the BC Business Recovery Grant (recently extended) continue for the foreseeable future.

“It will be very important for these programs to be further extended past June and we have already seen the indication from small business owners that these programs are extremely important for their survival and definitely going through 2021, those programs will be of great importance.”

According to the Small Business Recovery Dashboard, 65% of businesses in BC are fully open while less than half are at or above normal staffing (45%) while 35% of businesses are either at or above normal revenues.