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.
As of June 2015, this product's name has been changed from Canadian Business Patterns to Canadian Business Counts.
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.