Source: The Patriot Light | AWK Network | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
Canada’s small and medium-sized businesses lost about $60 billion in the first year of pandemic lockdowns, says the country’s national statistical agency.
In a report published on Feb. 18, Statistics Canada said about 47 percent of all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)—businesses with annual salary expenses of less than $1.5 million—“experienced a drop in gross profit, totalling a loss of nearly $60 billion” from 2019 to 2020.
“The pandemic was most challenging for client-facing industries,” says the report, which examines how Ottawa’s Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) program may have influenced SMEs’ survival rates during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and restrictions.
The CEBA program, created on March 27, 2020, paid businesses up to $60,000 in interest-free loans that would qualify for partial loan forgiveness if repaid by a set deadline.
“The businesses that reported the largest declines in gross profit were client-facing ones, such as food service and drinking places, hotels, and offices of dentists and physicians,” said the StatCan report, as first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter.
In addition, the federal agency said transportation…
