Regardless of their political colours, Canadian small business owners are breathing a sigh of relief now that the federal election has ended.
“Businesses like stability,” said Steven Coates, who owns Better Motion Group, a product design firm in Aurora, Ont. “Whether it be access to government programs for innovation, or tax rates, you just want to have a plan and know that the rules for the plan are not going to change.”
Since the Liberals’ minority government in 2004, there has been no guarantee that small business policies would remain consistent from year to year. On top of that, small business owners constantly worried that political parties were more concerned with preparing for another election than assisting the driving force of Canada’s economy.
“Having a majority is important from a policy point of view,” said Jeremy Laurin, president and chief executive officer of VentureLab, a Markham, Ont., outfit that works closely with entrepreneurs to foster their growth. Now that election fears can be cast side, the Conservatives should be able to buckle down on the “good, important and meaningful work that we need to be doing,” such as delivering a budget that confirms what types of grants and programs will be available.
However, small businesses aren’t heaping praise on the Conservatives specifically. Their confidence stems from the structure of government rather than the party in power. All three federal parties had vague small business platforms during the election campaign, so entrepreneurs don’t know what exactly to expect from this government.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t know what they want.
To start, they would like to see some action behind the Conservatives’ designation of 2011 as the Year of the Entrepreneur. “I’m not sure what that means,” said Debbie Bondar, founder of Calgary’s FACE Atelier Cosmetics. “A lot of lip service is paid to the importance of small business in an economy,” she said, but adds she hasn’t seen much action to back it up.
“When I started my business and went for help, I got a CD,” she said.
Sandra Folk, president of the Language Lab in Toronto, feels the same way. She worries that the government could easily use the catchy slogan as a smokescreen and do very little behind the scenes.
“I don’t think we’ve seen … many concrete changes that have come out of the year of the entrepreneur,” she said.
Some disagree. “I do think that there’s real credible work that’s being done with hard deliverables and measurements,” Mr. Laurin said, but some of the work happens behind the scenes so it doesn’t garner much attention. For that reason he wasn’t worried that small business wasn’t a dominant theme in the election.
Yet there is one complaint that is almost unanimous: Small business needs the government to cut red tape.
“You could retire before you ever figured out all of these government programs,” Mr. Laurin said. “It’s all really well-intentioned … but it doesn’t help me if I don’t know how to get connected to it.”
Part of the problem is that small business programs are offered under all levels of government and various portfolios. “It is an incredibly disjointed set of programs out there under different ministries,” Mr. Coates said. “You spend too much time as a small business chasing this stuff.”
He also takes issue with the government’s limited ability to help small businesses. “Governments are inherently risk averse, which is counter intuitive to funding new innovation, new products and new research,” he said. He’s had government workers flat out tell him they don’t really have the means to help him.
Governments seem to have noticed. To try to correct the problem, they are supporting programs such as Mr. Laurin’s VentureLab that operate at arm’s length and serve businesses in their community. “Instead of government coming forward with more programs … they’re putting what I call feet on the street,” Mr. Laurin said.
Big programs aside, small businesses say their prosperity boils down to economic fundamentals, and the government certainly has influence over them.
“I’m not unreasonable,” Ms. Bondar said. The government “can’t control the cost of oil. They’re not OPEC. But they should be able to control the value of the Canadian dollar, interest rates, inflation and [preserve] the ability of Canadian businesses to expand globally.”
