The latest Business Insights Quarterly from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Business Data Lab (BDL) revealed weak business confidence in the country for the third consecutive quarter, with businesses facing increasing economic uncertainty and with goods exporters the most impacted.
“Our findings underscore the growing headwinds that businesses are facing as trade tensions increase,” said Patrick Gill, the BDL’s vice president, in a news release of the Chamber of Commerce. “Supply chains are strained, tariff-driven price pressures are rising, and businesses — especially exporters — are struggling just to stay afloat.”
While exporters have been more optimistic than the wider business community since 2021’s third quarter, this changed in late 2024 amid rail and portway strikes, supply chain disruptions that directly impacted 180,000 businesses, and trade policy uncertainty, the news release of the Chamber of Commerce noted.
“Supply chain challenges, once easing, are reemerging as a top business obstacle — not just for exporters, but across industries,” Gill said in the BDL’s message accompanying its new report. “Many of these disruptions trace back to last year’s transportation bottlenecks triggered by labour disputes across Canada’s trade-enabling infrastructure.”
Findings of report
For its new report, the BDL asked economists and data scientists to analyze responses from Statistics Canada’s quarterly survey of more than 15,000 employers in the country.
The BDL’s report revealed that:
- The least optimistic province is Ontario, particularly in Oshawa, London, and Hamilton in Southwestern Ontario, areas experiencing the most impacts to trade-exposed industries
- After a year of expecting prices to lower, more businesses expect to raise their prices due to tariffs
- For the second quarter in a row, businesses consider weak consumer demand their biggest concern, even above labour shortages
- 40 percent of exporters expect supply chain conditions to grow worse over the following six months
- Many exporters are finding it difficult to obtain the domestic and international inputs that they need
- 73 percent of businesses are still optimistic about 2025 regardless of the recent challenges
“Canadian businesses have a strong track record of resilience,” Gill said in the message from the BDL.
“But optimism alone won’t fix these problems — businesses need real solutions to navigate today’s unpredictable economic landscape,” stressed the news release of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
“Navigating this evolving trade landscape will require strategic adaptation — from diversifying markets to strengthening domestic supply chains,” Gill said.
Gill added that the BDL “remains committed to providing timely data and insights to help businesses navigate these turbulent times and prepare for the future.”