Canada’s 57% collapse: The missing entrepreneurs behind our growth crisis

Canada’s 57% collapse: The missing entrepreneurs behind our growth crisis EDITORIAL 24 JUNE 2026 i The country that built Shopify and Lululemon is now producing fewer builders than at any time in four decades. The data should alarm us EDITORIAL BOARD ARTICLE SUMMARY KEY STATS Between 2000 and 2022, the number of self-employed Canadians with paid employees—the founders most likely to scale, hire, and challenge incumbents—fell by 57 percent, from 3.0 to 1.3 per thousand working-age adults. As Falice Chin documented in The Hub, this quiet collapse sits at the heart of one of Canada’s most conseq…