Optimism among businesses in this province appears to be holding its own, as we move into 2020.
That’s from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Prairie Region Senior Policy Analyst Jennifer Henshaw says the provincial barometer indicates optimism remains two points ahead of the national average, so we’re in the middle of the pack, compared to the rest of Canada.
“Full time hiring plans for the next three months are also fairly muted,” she says. “So I would say it’s not negative per se, given some of the seasonality in some businesses, and it has been a bit of a slow winter for some. But what small business owners are going to be looking for in both the provincial and the federal budgets coming up is that they will lay a path to improve small business confidence in the future in Manitoba.”
Henshaw Henshaw says tax relief is imperative.
“To really help their bottom line,” she says. “We’d like to see that tax relief even before the budget is planned to balance by 2022 here in Manitoba. We’d really like to see the basic personal exemption increased to the national average before 2021. That really will put some more money into the hands of business owners and their customers.”
Henshaw says it’s too early to forecast optimism for 2020, noting the barometer’s a three-month rolling average, and businesses will be looking toward the next provincial and federal budgets.
“And I think a lot of that will determine where we see that optimism level go,” she says. “Small business owners are definitely dealing with a number of cost increases, including the CPP increase, the carbon tax, and they’ve also been dealing with a lot of agri-business uncertainties and trade issues, and it was definitely a difficult harvest. That being said, hopefully, we’ll see an improvement in 2020.”
