Experimental estimates for business openings and closures for Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas, seasonally adjusted — AI AnalysisCanada's business dynamics from 2015 to 2025 show steady overall growth, with active businesses rising 8% to nearly 940,000, but a widening concern as closing businesses grew at more than twice the rate of openings (+25.6% vs. +11.3%), signaling an increasingly challenging survival environment. The Key Findings

Active businesses grew 8.0% over the decade, rising from 870,071 in January 2015 to 939,731 by November 2025, reflecting a net positive but moderating business environment.

Closing businesses outpaced openings in growth rate — up 25.6% (from 36,134 to 45,401) versus 11.3% for openings (from 42,407 to 47,215) — narrowing the gap between new and lost businesses to historically thin margins.

The COVID-19 shock of April 2020 produced the dataset's most extreme outlier, with closures spiking to 331,995 and only 1 business opening for every 3 that closed (ratio of 0.336), followed by a sharp rebound with openings peaking at 191,416 in July 2020.

Active businesses and continuing businesses are perfectly correlated (r=1.0), while opening and reopening businesses (r=0.9962) and closing businesses and temporary closures (r=0.996) move in near-lockstep, indicating the entire business ecosystem expands and contracts simultaneously.

The data is heavily right-skewed — the median value across all 28,758 records is just 1,416 versus a mean of 26,240 — driven by large national aggregates reaching up to 940,287 for active businesses, while most records reflect smaller regional figures.

Explore this analysis on Canada Data Explorer | Datastam