Immigrant-owned businesses were responsible for what a new Statistics Canada study says was a “disproportionate share of net job creation” between 2003 and 2013 compared to businesses with Canadian-born owners.
The study distinguished private incorporated businesses owned by immigrants who entered Canada since 1980 from firms with Canadian-born owners.
This amounted to roughly 400,000 net new jobs created between 2003 and 2013 and translated to a higher per-firm net job creation average than Canadian-owned businesses.
“Immigrant-owned firms were more likely to than firms with Canadian-born owners to be job creators than job destroyers,” the study reads.
Immigrant-owned private incorporated companies were also 1.3 times as likely to be high-growth firms with annual employment growth exceeding 20 per cent than were those owned by the Canadian-born, the study found.
Canada is set to welcome a growing number of immigrants over the next three years, from 330,800 this year to 350,000 in 2021.
Although the data file used currently ends in 2013, the study said the information “provides a useful first step in understanding the role of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Canadian economy.”
