Interprovincial Trade & Women Entrepreneurs
Building One Canadian Market for Growth
As governments work to strengthen economic resilience, improve productivity, diversify markets, and build a more integrated domestic economy, an important opportunity remains underleveraged: helping more women-owned businesses grow across provincial and territorial boundaries.
To help inform discussions with the Office of the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc on interprovincial trade, the Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada (WEOC) conducted a rapid national consultation with organizations supporting women entrepreneurs across Canada.
The resulting report, Interprovincial Trade & Women Entrepreneurs: Building One Canadian Market for Growth, captures the key insights, opportunities, and recommendations emerging from organizations working directly with women entrepreneurs across diverse regions, sectors, and communities.
Key Insights
The report highlights several important themes:
- Women entrepreneurs are successfully launching businesses, generating customer demand, and creating economic value in communities across Canada.
- The greatest barriers often emerge when businesses attempt to expand beyond their home province or territory.
- Many women entrepreneurs continue to experience Canada as a collection of separate markets rather than a single domestic economy.
- Access to customers, buyers, procurement opportunities, distributors, and supply chains can be as important as regulatory reform.
- Domestic market expansion is increasingly serving as both a growth strategy and a resilience strategy.
- Canada already possesses significant ecosystem capacity. The opportunity is to better connect existing supports into a more seamless national growth pathway.
Why This Matters
The report argues that interprovincial trade should not be viewed solely as a trade policy issue.
It is also a business growth issue, a productivity issue, a market access issue, and an economic resilience issue.
At a time when Canada is focused on strengthening economic sovereignty, diversifying markets, building domestic supply chains, and improving productivity, helping more women-owned businesses access opportunities across Canada represents a significant and largely untapped source of growth.
About the Consultation
The consultation engaged organizations representing British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories, including Agricultrices du Québec, Centre for Women in Business, Immigrant Entrepreneur Canada, PARO Centre for Women’s Enterprise, Réseau des Femmes d’Affaires du Québec (RFAQ), S.U.C.C.E.S.S., Thebacha Business Development Services, WeBC, WeMB, Women Entrepreneurs of Saskatchewan (WESK), and Yukonstruct.
The report is intended to support ongoing discussions among governments, ecosystem leaders, entrepreneurial support organizations, and industry partners working to strengthen Canada’s domestic economy.