Canada faces a 91% business disappearance rate. Lisa Cashmore explores the entrepreneurial decline and the essential support systems needed to help builders thrive.
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
I’ve spent over 20 years in the trenches of our innovation ecosystems, witnessing firsthand what it takes for a founder to start and sustain. When I look at the Canadian entrepreneurial support landscape today, I’m optimistic. There is an incredible enablement infrastructure available to back founders as they build. However, I’m also concerned when I look at the statistics on declining entrepreneurship. Much more work is needed if Canada is to continue to thrive as a nation of builders.
There are about one million small businesses in Canada. This sounds like a great number. However, over an average five year period, we see just over 100,000 new businesses created and over 91,000 disappear. This is a disappearance rate of over 91%! With roughly 2.7 million self-employed Canadians as of January 2026 (the same level recorded 17 years ago) the data reveals a significant long-term decline in relative entrepreneurial activity.
While the reasons for Canada’s entrepreneurial decline are complex and many, and I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, I can say from decades of experience as a practitioner in the innovation space: It has never been more important to focus on the mechanisms that enable entrepreneurship.
My journey has taken me from managing community engagement at Blackberry during its most explosive early expansion to leading venture services and the scaleup platform at Communitech, and then to working in private equity, investing in purpose-driven impact entrepreneurs.
Through it all, my focus has remained the same: designing the strategy, support systems, and programs that transform high-potential ideas into action. It would be fair to say I’m obsessed with creating the mechanisms for success that enable business development and growth.
In this blog, I'll share my perspective on:
The architecture of support: How hubs drive success
Innovation hubs, incubators, and accelerators serve as an essential infrastructure for entrepreneurship by providing the strategy, roadmaps, and systems that founders often lack internally. These organizations typically support founders at every stage, from early ideation through to scale. Critically, the best ones ensure that growth is built on a solid foundation — helping entrepreneurs validate real problems before jumping to solutions.
At NorthGuide, this is the work we do every day. We view our role as 'enabling the enablers,' helping these hubs design curriculum and delivery models that meet founders at the right stage of their journey. It's a model we've now taken beyond Canada's borders, including the three-stage incubator programs we designed in Barbados. We practice what we preach, designing programs to be iterative, with clear KPIs, so they can be refined as founder needs evolve.
Networks don’t build themselves
Meaningful connections are the lifeblood of startup success. But building a network isn't something that happens to entrepreneurs - it's something they have to actively invest in. The founders who thrive are those who show up consistently, build relationships before they need them, and engage authentically across their ecosystem with peers, mentors, potential customers, and collaborators alike.
This is where great support organizations can play a powerful role if founders lean into them intentionally. The best of these organizations act as networks of networks, opening doors across multiple sectors and geographies that would take years to unlock alone. Smart founders recognize this and look beyond the connections they can build on their own, leveraging these organizations as a force multiplier for their growth.
The long game
A strong launch generates excitement, but it's long-term strategy that determines whether a business survives the marathon of entrepreneurship. In the early miles, it's tempting to focus on what's right in front of you - the next customer, the next milestone, the next obstacle. But founders who never lift their eyes to the horizon can find themselves running out of road when the race gets hard.
It's easy to get caught up in reacting to AI, to tariffs, to whatever the latest disruption happens to be. But the entrepreneurs who build lasting businesses are those who plan with enough foresight that they aren't constantly caught off guard. Strategic guidance should help founders build that foundation so they're making deliberate decisions, not just responding to whatever comes next.
This is particularly true in Canada, where the challenges of building and sustaining a business are real and well documented. The founders who will move the needle aren't just the ones who launch boldly. They're the ones who build wisely.
Ultimately, there is no silver bullet for reversing Canada's entrepreneurial decline. But after more than two decades in this space, I'm convinced that the path forward lies in building better systems; ones that meet founders where they are, connect them to the right networks, and equip them with the strategic foundation to go the distance.
The infrastructure is needed at every stage
What gives me hope is that the infrastructure to do this exists and is growing. The real work is ensuring it reaches every founder who needs it, at every stage of their journey.
And yet, even as we focus on nurturing the next generation of builders, there's another dimension of this challenge we can't afford to ignore. Canada is facing a massive wave of baby boomer business owners approaching retirement. Without succession plans or acquirers in place, many of those businesses simply won't survive the transition. That's not just a loss for the owners who built them; it's a compounding threat to the entrepreneurial fabric of our economy. It's a topic I'll be exploring in a future post, and one I think deserves a lot more attention than it's currently getting.
