AI Analysis: Experimental estimates for business openings and closures by employment size for Canada, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas, seasonally adjusted

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's experimental dataset (Table 33100722) tracks monthly business openings and closures across Canada from January 2015 to December 2025, covering 89,040 valid records across 8 business dynamics measures, 32 industries, and 6 employment size categories. The data reveals a strongly right-skewed distribution — with a median of just 921 businesses versus a mean of 16,606 — reflecting the dominance of small businesses alongside a few very large aggregates. The most significant disruption in the entire decade occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when the opening-to-closing ratio collapsed to a historic low of 0.338 in April before rebounding to a historic high of 1.789 by July.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 89,040 valid records spanning 132 monthly periods (January 2015 – December 2025), with business counts ranging from as few as 12 to as many as 940,350.
• The distribution is heavily right-skewed, with the mean (16,606) nearly 18 times higher than the median (921), and a standard deviation of 78,145 — driven by large national aggregates versus small regional or size-specific breakdowns.
• April 2020 recorded the most extreme anomaly in the dataset: an opening-to-closing ratio of just 0.338, meaning only 1 business opened for every 3 that closed during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns.
• The pandemic-driven collapse was followed by an equally dramatic rebound — July 2020 posted the highest opening-to-closing ratio of 1.789, nearly 2 openings for every closure, as businesses rapidly reopened.
• Outside of the 2020 pandemic period, the opening-to-closing ratio remained near 1.0, indicating a structurally balanced business environment across the rest of the 2015–2025 decade.
• 'Continuing businesses' recorded the highest median values among all 8 business dynamics measures, while 'Temporary closures' showed the most distinct and weakly correlated behavior relative to other measures.
• 50% of all observed business count values fall within a narrow band of 219 to 4,576 (IQR of 4,357), confirming that the vast majority of granular regional and size-specific estimates represent relatively small business counts.