Canada is really a small business economy. This is not a matter of opinion; it follows directly from how the labour force is distributed across our private sector.
If you include the estimated 1.29 million unincorporated self-employed individuals working on their own, fully 31.6% of our 14.7 million private sector workers work in businesses that employ 19 or fewer staff. By contrast, only 26.6% of workers are employed by Canada’s largest businesses (with 500 or more employees).
If you ignore them (as many think tanks, business schools and policymakers often do), consider that Canada’s 13.48 million private sector enterprises employ an average of just 9.83 employees per firm.
So, why do Canadians tend to overestimate the role of large firms?
Here are nine important biases that influence policymakers, business schools, the business press, and Canadians generally:
1. Legibility bias
States govern what they can see (James C. Scott – “Seeing Like a State”). Large firms have PR offices, audited statements, named leadership, and associations that translate their interests into policy language. A million small firms are an aggregate abstraction; 3,380 large firms – in particular, the 20 largest – are a phone list. Policymakers don’t prefer big business’s interests — they’re just easier to find and process.
2. Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs
Mancur Olson (1932–1998), American economist and political scientist who taught at the University of Maryland. According to Olson “a policy worth millions to one large firm justifies permanent lobbying; the same cost spread over a million small firms is nobody’s priority”. The concentrated side always shows up to the consultation; the diffuse side never does.
3. Administrative transaction-cost bias
Programs are cheaper to deliver at scale, so design drifts toward large intermediaries — big banks delivering credit programs, large anchor firms delivering industrial policy. We get bias by convenience rather than ideology.
4. Risk and accountability bias
“Nobody got fired for hiring IBM.” Backing many small firms means more failures per dollar, each attributable to the official who signed off. Bureaucratic self-protection structurally favors incumbents and scale.
5. Source bias in the business press
Journalists need quotable, credentialed sources; large firms supply polished spokespeople and data. Coverage of “the economy” defaults to the firms that speak fluently to journalists.
6. Funding and agenda bias in think tanks
Research agendas reflect donor and foundation concerns — competitiveness, trade, innovation clusters are the preoccupations of large organizations. They’re irrelevant to a 9-employee firm worried about cash flow, remittances, and local permitting.
7. Curriculum and pipeline bias in business schools
MBAs teach large-organization management because that’s who funds faculty research. Small-business management is coded as vocational. Since business schools feed the policy pipeline, the bias reproduces itself in government.
8. The productivity narrative (and its over-extension)
There’s a real kernel — small firms have lower average labour productivity, and most business exits come from the bottom productivity third (Fraser Institute, ISED 2025). But it gets over-extended into “policy should focus on scaling firms up”. Small, owner-managed or lifestyle businesses aren’t failed bigger businesses. Their size and scale may be appropriate in relation to management’s objectives.
9. Status and social-sympathy bias (your Adam Smith point)
Adam Smith’s great observation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments — humans naturally admire the rich and powerful and neglect the poor and mean. This is “the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Even advisors with no financial stake find it easier to project into the boardroom than the home office, and the man with a horse in the race finds his side’s arguments sincerely convincing. Prestige and sympathy do the work a bribe would otherwise do. The unifying thread: none of these biases requires anyone to hold an explicit pro-big-business belief. Large-firm interests are systematically cheaper to hear, cheaper to serve, and safer to act on. That’s simply how regulatory capture works.
