How many businesses are created and lost every year, and where the surviving stock actually sits — the entries-and-exits half of this picture is only published nationally; the stock half is published province by province.
Headline figure
81,030
Average number of small businesses created in Canada every year between 2017 and 2021, per ISED’s Key Small Business Statistics 2025 — 18,480 in the goods-producing sector and 62,550 in services. Over the same period an average of 74,509 exited annually (16,880 goods, 57,629 services).
What the data says
A "business dynamics" figure is a flow — how many appeared and disappeared in a period — and it is a genuinely hard number to collect, because it depends on payroll-based administrative records catching up with reality. ISED's own release reports the flow nationally, by sector, on a multi-year average basis (2017–2021) rather than a single current year, which is itself a signal of how much the underlying data needs smoothing before it is reliable enough to publish.
Rather than force a province-level flow number that no primary source carries, the reliable province-level view is the stock table: how many employer businesses currently operate in each province, split by size band. That is real, current, and directly usable for market sizing — it just answers a slightly different question than "how many opened this year."
| Province / territory | Businesses | Per 1,000 adults |
|---|---|---|
| Ontario | 418,322 | 31.6 |
| Quebec | 233,235 | 31.6 |
| British Columbia | 173,246 | 36.3 |
| Alberta | 139,514 | 36.3 |
| Manitoba | 34,239 | 29.2 |
| Saskatchewan | 33,903 | 35.4 |
| Nova Scotia | 25,386 | 28.3 |
| New Brunswick | 20,631 | 29.2 |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | 12,824 | 27.9 |
| Prince Edward Island | 5,339 | 36.2 |
| Territories (combined) | 2,882 | 29.1 |
Source: ISED, Key Small Business Statistics 2025, Table 1, citing Statistics Canada's Business Register and Table 17-10-0005-01; data as of December 2024.
Openings and closures are gross flows; growth is a narrower, more useful signal for a sourcing thesis. The same ISED release tracks employment growth among high-growth firms from 2019 to 2022 and finds it concentrated in information and cultural industries (7.5%), mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction (6.9%), and professional, scientific and technical services (6.4%) — three sectors with very different capital intensity and very different acquisition profiles. On the export side, 53,448 Canadian establishments exported goods worth $712.8 billion in 2024, of which SMEs contributed 37.9% of the total value — a reminder that “small” and “domestic-only” are not the same thing when sizing a target’s addressable market.
Combine this with the national size-band breakdown to bracket-size a specific province and buyer profile, and with business insolvency filings across Canada to see the exit side of the cycle that this release cannot break out by province.
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