Survey Insights on Business Conditions

The outlook for Canadian businesses remains weak, despite modest improvements in the first quarter of 2024, according to Statistics Canada’s latest Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (CSBC). More than half of all businesses are getting squeezed by high interest rates as cost-related challenges dominate the top business obstacles. Larger businesses have been better able to navigate this challenging environment, but smaller firms, interest-rate sensitive industries and those with persistent labour shortages are most affected.

Firms are reporting concerns around weak consumer demand. This is understandable given that consumers are pulling back on discretionary spending — in January 2024, for the first time in three years, our Local Spending Tracker showed negative year-over-year growth in nominal terms.

This report introduces our latest effort to enhance understanding of business conditions — the Business Expectations Index (BEI) allows users to quickly gauge trends in sentiment for more than 70 different business concepts. And to continue democratizing data, there’s a new tab in BDL’s Survey Insights Generator, with customizable results that can be downloaded for use in your own analysis and outputs. You can also explore results by geography (including for the 20 largest cities in Canada), industry, ownership, firm size, age, trade status and more.