Minister Ng met with entrepreneurs and small business owners in Montréal

Canada’s Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion discussed government policies and supports that help small business owners succeed

February 11, 2019 — Montréal, Quebec

Small businesses make up 98% of all Canadian businesses and employ 8 million hard-working Canadians from coast to coast to coast. They are the backbone of our economy and critical to the middle class.

Today, the Honourable Mary Ng, Canada’s Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion, was in Montréal to meet with entrepreneurs and small business owners to share how the Government of Canada is supporting them as they start up, scale up, and access new markets.

Minister Ng began her day in a roundtable with black women entrepreneurs hosted by Dorothy Rhau of Audace au Féminin. Following this, she participated in a panel discussion titled One Objective: Profit and Social Impact – New Business Models hosted by HEC Montréal, where Minister Ng discussed government support for social enterprises and purpose-driven organizations.

When meeting with small business owners, Minister Ng shared the government’s many initiatives that are making it easier for small business owners to do business, like:

• lowering the small business tax rate to 9%, one of the lowest rates in the world;
• getting credit card companies to lower the fees they charge businesses when their customers use credit cards;
• providing access to over a billion and a half new customers through trade deals like the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, commonly called the new NAFTA;
• allowing businesses to immediately write off the full cost of machinery and equipment used for the manufacturing and processing of goods;
• allowing businesses to immediately write off the full cost of specified clean energy equipment;
• introducing the Accelerated Investment Incentive that will allow businesses of all sizes in all sectors of the economy to write off a larger share of the cost of newly acquired assets in the year the investment is made;
• investing $2 billion to help double the number of women-owned businesses by 2025; and
• reducing over 450 federal rules that impose an administrative burden on business.