The impact of COVID pandemic on self employment in Canada

I think to say that the pandemic was transformative is a no brainer. Yeah, duh and we all get it. But in regards to career and self-employment I think statisticians are still looking at the numbers to see how this once in a lifetime event affected us in regard to how we live and work.

 This transition both from un-incorporated and incorporated business ownership during the pandemic is less documented in the Canadian context unfortunately. There was a study that used the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamic database, which covered the period from 2017-2021 which quantified the dynamics of entry and exit from self-employment around the pandemic, but it doesn’t stretch to the recent years. However it found that the largest changes in self-employment was observed among women, low-income earners, immigrants, and young workers.

However I found a paper here that seeks to determine how the dynamics of self-employment changed between 2017-2021 at the individual worker level. This table is taken from the same article and shows the rates of workers by job transition state from 2017 to 2021.

In section three this article states that the majority of workers moved to a different industry. And it states that the arts, entertainment, accommodation and food services were among the main sources of the worker self-employment flows during the pandemic. In its conclusion, it states that the results are consistent with those from other previous studies that concluded that there was an overall decrease in self-employment during the pandemic and that this decline was greater for those in un-incorporated businesses rather than incorporated businesses.

This is surprising to me, because I had this thought that more people would have moved into self-employment during this financial hardship. Maybe the reason is because I myself moved from employment into self employment during this time.

At the start of Covid, I had just returned to Canada on a post-graduate work permit. I literally arrived here on February 20^th 202 and then everything shut down two weeks later. I was desperate for a job and eventually found one as a dishwasher at a new start up restaurant. Now looing back, that was probably a bad choice for those owners, but at the time I pounced on the opportunity. I was overqualified, but I poured my heart and soul into those dirty dishes. I worked there for the next two years until they went under. Which coincided with my son being born so their closing didn’t affect me too much.

But here’s where my experience differs from the data. Though, I’m not sure where the official end of the pandemic is. But after my maternal leave, I began my own business again.  About ten years after me selling my first.

I went into birth work, partly due to my own experiences with the birth of my son and partly due to the great flexibility that it provided. I think I’ll save that story for another post, but I’ve met some many dear friends during this time. Doulas and wellness coaches in Toronto, queer birth doulas from Vancouver and OG postpartum doulas that have been in the industry for over ten years.

So while it seems like my experiences are outside the generally movement of people in regard to self-employment, I would still recommend it to anyone reading this blog. Especially if you are interested in birthwork or the wellness industry. There is so much need and therefore so much possibility.