Canadian business patterns data provide counts of active establishments by industry classification and employment size categories. The data are compiled from the Business Register, which is a repository of information on the Canadian business population.
Included in the Business Register are all Canadian businesses which meet at least one of the three following criteria:
- Have an employee workforce for which they submit payroll remittances to CRA; or
- Have a minimum of $30,000 in annual revenue; or
- Are incorporated under a federal or provincial act and have filed a federal corporate income tax form within the past three years.
For further information on "establishments" and "locations", see Page 8 of this Statistics Canada guide.
Statistics Canada advises users not to use these data as a time series. Changes to the Business Register’s methodology or to business industrial classification strategies can cause increases or decreases in the number of active businesses. As a result, the data do not represent changes in the business population over time. To view recent methodological changes, please refer to the Data variations caused by methodological changes, by year.