Written by: Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc. Originally published in WorkLife by London Inc.
How employee-owned businesses could shake up Canada’s business scene
Employee ownership trusts are here to stay. That’s a good thing
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business released a weighty stat in a report last month, suggesting the amount of Canadian small business assets that are likely to change hands could amount to more than $2 trillion over the next decade, with 76 per cent of small business owners planning on making exits, most due to retirement.
Who might be licking their chops, looking to gain ownership? Investors, family members and other businesses of course, but another group is also starting to factor into the picture: employees.
In its recent spring economic update, the federal government made permanent a tax incentive that could make that a reality for more employees, offering business owners who sell their companies to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOT) — an ownership structure that holds shares on behalf of the company’s employees — a “juicy tax incentive” that would exempt them from up to $10 million in capital gains tax if they transfer the business to an EOT.
“It’s perfect timing given all the forces we’re facing,” said Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners, speaking to The Peak. “One day, hundreds of thousands of Canadians will look back at this as the reason that they now own a share of their businesses.”
Tax incentives to promote EOTs first appeared in the federal budget in 2023, but uptake has been slow, largely because the expected wave of business exists hasn’t arrived yet. “This is really good legislation, it just hasn’t had a chance to breathe,” Chad Friesen, CEO of printing company Friesens Corporation told The Hub.
Proponents frame the EOT structure as one that makes sense at a time of heightened national anxiety about who owns our assets, what role large corporate ownership should play in business ownership and how to spur productivity when there’s a sense that doing so won’t benefit the average worker.
One such proponent is former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, who has been a (somewhat unexpected) fan of this kind of ownership.
“There is a caricature of a big, anonymous and distant pool of capital — like private equity firms and pension funds — that buys up often smaller, medium-sized businesses, many of them originally family enterprises, and then just stripping their assets, laying people off, moving jobs overseas,” he told The Hub.
Others see it as good old fashioned economic nationalism.
“One of the primary reasons why politicians love these is a sovereignty argument, right?” noted Shell. “So, if a Canadian company were to sell to an employee ownership trust, that company remains Canadian and owned by Canadians.”
Can WFH help solve the fertility crisis?
As countries worldwide seek ways to offset declining birth rates, researchers say a widespread remote-work model could provide a sizable baby boom
There’s an increasing amount of handwringing and nervousness around fertility rates these days. Stateside, President Trump has made it an issue, calling himself the, uh, “fertilization president” (he might want to workshop that one a little bit…) and aiming to increase the rate at which Americans are having children.
In Canada, think tanks like the Macdonald-Laurier Institute have waded into the conversation, trying to promote income growth and cost-of-living reductions as ways to increase fertility. Everywhere in the western world, it seems, governments are keen to see more babies. (Even former Pope Francis was worried about a “demographic winter.”)
A new paper from a global research team thinks it has a simple answer: end the war on remote work and give would-be parents their flexibility back.
“A growing literature argues that the compatibility of family and career has become a key determinant of fertility in high-income countries,” wrote the team of researchers, who published their findings this month. “Both datasets reveal clear evidence that realized fertility, plans for future fertility and lifetime fertility are greater for respondents who work from home at least one day a week.”
In other words, give both men and women the option to work from home, and their minds turn to babies in increasing frequencies.
According to Yale professor Joanne Lipman, a host of countries already see evidence of this as they sift through the data from the pandemic lockdowns, which seemed to be tied with a statistically significant increase in births as more people worked from home. “Want more babies? Abolish commutes,” The New York Times concluded.
It’s not just a Covid-era phenomenon, either — the team of researchers looked back in the data and found their findings held true in pre-pandemic times (2017-2019) and in the RTO era (2023-2025). “For societies faced with undesirably low birth rates, work from home can yield societal benefits that go beyond any direct benefits to employees and employers,” the research team writes. “As countries search for ways to support family formation, they may need to think more seriously about how working arrangements shape the trade-off between family and jobs. One of the most important family-policy margins in the coming decade may not look like traditional family policy at all.”
One of the study’s authors, Mathias Dolls, said increased flexibility is one of the easiest levers that governments can pull when they try to increase fertility rates. “It doesn’t cost anything for the government,” Dolls told The Globe and Mail. And yet, for all their concern about it, governments are consistently working against themselves, Dolls pointed out. “If you want to support fertility, it’s not a good idea to call back people five days a week to the office.”
That’s, uh, one way to use AI
Telus Canada has been using AI to erase call centre worker accents: is it fighting bias — or perpetuating it?
Telus Canada is facing some tough questions after it was revealed to be using AI for a rather curious use case: softening the accents of its largely offshore customer service agents.
It appears Telus has been using this technology since at least last year — a post on their website talking up “AI-powered speech enhancement” and promoting their partnership with technology provider Tomato.ai dates back to June 2025.
The practice came to light at a parliamentary committee hearing on industry and technology in late April, when Roch Leblanc, Unifor’s telecommunications director, called on the government to set regulations around this kind of use of AI.
According to Michael Phillips, president of telecommunications union United Steelworkers Local 1944, it had learned more about the technology when a Canadian Telus employee was speaking with an agent in the Philippines, who was “laughing about it, turning the accent masker on and off, revealing their Filipino accent, and then, taking the accent away when they turned on the AI technology.”
Not everybody finds this so funny. “I think that a very clear right that Canadians should insist on is the right to not be deceived by AI, especially not by folks that they are paying to provide telephone services for,” Phillips told The Globe and Mail.
Other Canadian telecom companies, specifically Rogers and Bell, said they won’t use this kind of technology. And call centre employees at Telus based in Canada worry about the impact that this will have on them, with one wondering to the CBC, “Will I have a job to feed my family tomorrow?”
And then there’s the uncomfortable questions of perception here. While Telus can claim the use of the technology is aimed at improving understanding and helping smooth over any hurdles to resulting from accents, you wouldn’t be out of line to question whether the effect of this tech is to obscure offshoring, or to simply make the call centre employees sound more (heavy scare quotes here) “Canadian.”
“You have to ask yourself, would we be doing this if it was for an accent from Australia or the UK?” asked University of Waterloo professor Maura Grossman. “Because if the answer is no, then that sounds rather discriminatory.”
The fading of the teen summer job
It's shaping up to be another tough year for summer jobseekers. And the consequences are greater than you might think
The good news if you’re a teenager: summer’s coming, school’s winding down — no more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks. The bad news: you might have too much free time, because it’s really hard for teenagers to get jobs right now.
“The younger the jobseeker, the worse it gets,” says The Globe and Mail’s economics editor Matt Lundy, who published data this week showing the employment rate for those between 15 and 19 has plummeted by nine per cent since mid-2022. That data is pulled from a recent Indeed hiring report, which noted that “teenage employment rates have plunged, the net decline concentrated in retail trade and accommodation and food services.”
Under the hood, the data suggests teenagers are finding themselves at the back of the line for jobs and are now struggling to land the traditional teen summer gig — fast food, retail, etc. — in part because the upstream disruptions to the job market is pushing older workers into those jobs instead.
In immediate terms, teenagers not being able to get jobs might seem limited in impact: annoyed parents and reduced spending money, sure, but it’s not as if mortgages aren’t getting paid. But that doesn’t mean that a teenage job crisis doesn’t have real consequences. Economic research over the past few decades has found the effects of not landing a job as a teenager might compound over the next five to ten years of someone’s career.
A landmark study on the effects of teenage employment from the late 1990s found that working as a high school senior, for instance, “substantially elevated future economic attainment, whether the latter is measured by earnings, wages, occupational status or the receipt of fringe benefits.” The study also found that even sacrificing a bit of study time could a worthy trade off, because even if “time spent on the job detracts slightly from educational human capital investments, it more than compensates for this loss through employment-related experience.”
Although the nature of work has changed substantially since the late 1990s, a follow-up study by the same authors in 2014 found the benefit of teenage employment held, and that working as a high school senior “continues to predict positive effects on labour market outcomes five to 11 years after the expected date of high school graduation.”
So, while a teenager stuck at home all summer is annoying, the real damage is in the career scarring effects it potentially leaves for years to come.
“When shocks occur, whether those are recessions, pandemics or changes in particular sectors (such as the energy sector), dealing with the short-term impacts tends to be of primary concern to policymakers,” wrote the Toronto-based Future Skills Centre. “Job losses are easy to see and often demand a policy response, but the longer-term impacts — including on those who do not yet have a job to lose — can be even more consequential, even if they are less visible.”
