Entrepreneurship and Barriers to Scaling Up

Considering the high levels of newcomer arrivals to Ontario, and some preliminary evidence around their entrepreneurial activities, the goals of this research project are to examine the level of entrepreneurial activity among newcomers in the Greater Toronto Area and to examine the regulatory framework governing entrepreneurship in Ontario in terms of incentives and impediments to newcomers’ entrepreneurship.

As the province of destination for more than 38 percent of Canada’s newcomers (immigrants and refugees), it is important for Ontario to benefit from this additional human resource potential (Statistics Canada, 2017b). There is ample research showing that newcomers are critical to Canada’s prosperity through their positive effect on labour market stability and long-term growth (Momani, 2016). While the majority of Canada’s immigrants are selected on the basis of a merit-based system, refugees are accepted on the basis of humanitarian considerations, and this has often led to the contributions of refugees to Ontario’s economy being overlooked as the public discourse turns to the popular perception of newcomers as a drain on our resources. It is time to change this conversation in the light of emerging evidence of newcomer success stories and accounts of self-motivated entrepreneurial activities (Cohn & Adebayo, 2016).

This project aligns with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada's (IRCC) Settlement Delivery Improvement Program because it involves the creation and evaluation of a targeted, web-based application which will support and encourage the active participation of refugees in Canadian society and economy. While the application will not provide a direct settlement service, it will serve as a tool for settlement workers to offer refugee clients, as well as a resource available for individual use by refugees themselves. As the province of destination for the majority of refugee newcomers to Canada, it is important for Ontario to have evidence-based understanding of refugee entrepreneurship. There is a well-established link between entrepreneurship and economic growth; and the findings of the study will capture the creativity and innovation within refugee entrepreneurial communities. This in turn will provide the need for new supportive policies and programs. We are interested in the barriers to upscaling. Many refugees have already opened up businesses or developed entrepreneurial projects since arriving in Canada and it is important for Ontario to help them to grow their businesses, especially in light of the foreign markets attracted by newcomer businesses. This approach will allow the research team to make recommendations to help the Ontario government to prioritize refugee entrepreneurship among both newer and older refugee cohorts.

Refugee entrepreneurship has been an underdeveloped domain of research in Ontario. The research will treat integration as a dialectical process, in which both refugee newcomers and host societies undergo significant transformations. Exploring the factors contributing to successful entrepreneurship as well as the barriers to scaling up, including economic exclusion and marginalization, the research will generate valuable insights and empirical knowledge for systemic change within. The unit of analysis for understanding entrepreneurship and integration will range from the individual, to the family (broadly defined), to the community and society at large. The research program will collaborate with refugee communities to draw on their strengths and lived experiences for understanding the complexity and diversity (factors of influence) of economic integration and entrepreneurship in the GTA. Interviews with refugee entrepreneurs and BIAs will yield insights into the obstacles encountered by those who have endeavoured to start small businesses before. By the end of this project we hope to have collected enough information to develop an entrepreneurial profile of refugee newcomers in the GTA, building knowledge and capacity around refugee entrepreneurship. This research also offers the opportunity to validate a number of theoretical concepts such as integration, citizenship, intersectionality and social capital.

We will complete qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys with newcomer entrepreneurs to gather information about their entrepreneurial experiences. We will also conduct interviews with Business Improvement Associations (BIAs), both mainstream and ethno-racial, in order to gain a better understanding of the regulatory environment impacting entrepreneurial activity in the GTA. For the qualitative interviews and the quantitative surveys, the participants will be over the age of 25, with experience starting a business in Canada, who came to Canada within the last 30 years through different pathways (refugee, economic or family). For the informational interviews aimed at examining the regulatory environment, the participants will be knowledgeable individuals from the BIAs. The project will be implemented in the City of Toronto, Mississauga, Newmarket, Brampton and Markham, which are municipalities with high population density and where the majority of newcomers in the GTA settle.