Business dynamism: employers, credit and financial distress

The opening rate is 4.92% and the closing rate is 5.00%. Each is calculated as the current month’s count divided by the preceding month’s active count, 937,066. These are Countability’s count-based rates, not a separate published rate series.

Openings minus closures is -736, while the active count changes by -107. The difference is 629. Seasonal adjustment and the construction of these separate series mean their rounded values need not form an exact accounting identity. The discrepancy is retained.

Source: Statistics Canada — Experimental estimates for business openings and closures. Experimental monthly estimates, January 2015–May 2026. Business sector industries, Canada. Active means at least one employee; businesses without employees are outside this population.

An entrant need not be a company that has never existed before. The issuer uses activity in the current and previous calendar year. A reopening is a previously active business that returns to employing people. Neither label alone tells us how much employment, innovation or productivity the business will create.

The latest published exit estimate refers to 2025-11: 17,537 exits. The final six months have no published exit values. Permanent exit takes time to establish: Statistics Canada uses employment-file evidence over as much as twenty-four months and regression projections for recent eligible periods. A published exit value can therefore still be an issuer estimate.

Temporary closures are the issuer’s closing-business count less its exit estimate. No unpublished recent exit is filled with zero, extrapolated by Countability, or presented as a confirmed failure. The opening components and active-stock movements remain separately adjusted series.

Source: Statistics Canada — Experimental estimates for business openings and closures. Definitions and exit projection treatment are pinned with this edition’s table metadata.

Provincial, territorial and metropolitan figures overlap. An enterprise operating in several industries or geographies can appear in each relevant group, and seasonal adjustment is done separately. Adding the rows does not reconstruct Canada.

Tourism and manufacturing detail overlap broader industries. Rates use each row’s own preceding-month active count. Small territorial counts can produce large percentage changes; suppressed cells stay suppressed, and a point difference alone is not a statistical-significance test.

Source: Statistics Canada — Experimental estimates for business openings and closures. The industry table contains the issuer’s complete national selection, including nested and special aggregates; no cross-industry total or composite ranking is calculated.

The employment-size table reports 936,907 active employers nationally for 2026-05; the main dynamics table reports 936,959. The totals are retained within their own tables. They are not substituted for one another.

These are employment-size categories, not revenue bands. Changes in the number of active businesses within a size category can include employers moving between categories. An opening still means a transition from no employees in the previous month to at least one in the current month; moving between size bands alone does not meet that definition. For closures and exits, the issuer uses average employment over the preceding twelve months to assign size. Separate seasonal adjustment means the size bands need not sum to the separately adjusted total.

Source: Statistics Canada — Experimental estimates for business openings and closures by employment size. Experimental estimates. Each count-based rate uses its own size-table, region and preceding-month active denominator. Quality flags remain attached.

The corporate credit series includes non-mortgage loans, mortgages and debt securities owed by private non-financial corporations. It excludes equity from the debt total. This borrower population is narrower than all employer businesses, and an outstanding debt balance is not the flow of new loans or a measure of who could obtain credit.

Source: Statistics Canada — Credit liabilities of private non-financial corporations. A stock of outstanding liabilities. Component residuals are retained rather than forced to zero.