LaPointe: Why killing B.C.'s Small Business Roundtable was a mistake

B.C. business advice

Photo: DVA

Downtown Vernon. Statistics Canada's Business Counts data confirms 98.3% of rural and 98.6% of urban businesses in B.C. are small enterprises.

As B.C.’s premier and his jobs minister were traipsing around India this week in search of big business deals, fired members of the province’s Small Business Roundtable had to be wondering why their services were no longer required.

It has been long understood that the B.C. NDP government has a tin ear and heart when it comes to business, and Premier David Eby has demonstrated a propensity to make the pursuit of prosperity a profound problem. His government hadn’t met with the roundtable of small-business entrepreneurs for more than two years when it was dismantled at year’s end after two decades of service.

The roundtable was a sounding board for (former B.C. premiers) Gordon Campbell, Christy Clark and John Horgan, but the Eby government thought itself so obviously wiser than to listen to representatives of 99 per cent of the province’s businesses.

Eliminating the roundtable was not a housekeeping move. It was a signal that structured, independent advice from people who actually sign the front of the cheque hardly mattered in the shaping of economic policy. It replaced dialogue with a digital suggestion box in a new initiative in the wake of last year’s collapse of Small Business BC, and called it progress.

For 20 years, the roundtable did not dispense grants, cut ribbons or write cheques. Its value lay in institutional listening, something far less visible and far more important. It gathered business owners from across regions and sectors, filtered anecdote from trend, and distilled hard-earned experience into recommendations governments could ignore only at their peril. Sometimes they did. Often they did not. But the mechanism existed, and that alone imposed a measure of discipline.

Small business is not a lobby in the classical sense. It is fragmented, time-starved and notoriously bad at collective action. The roundtable translated a cacophony of individual frustrations into a coherent signal that government could act on. In a province where all but one per cent of businesses employ fewer than 50 people, that function is not ornamental but foundational.

The government, naturally, takes a different view.

“While the Small Business Roundtable was a helpful way to hear from a small number of sector leaders, our new Ease of Doing Business initiative is a broader, more efficient way to hear the perspectives of all businesses,” Ravi Kahlon, the minister of jobs and economic growth, emailed in a statement. “That includes trade barriers, regulatory complexity, permitting and approvals, access to skilled labour, and tax policy.

“We are also providing more supports for businesses, resources, tools and services to help businesses start and grow, including resources previously delivered by Small Business BC, with more coming soon.”

But the comparison of the initiative with the roundtable does not survive serious examination. And given Kahlon never met the group, it’s also hard to swallow his reading of its value. The new program is not a table; it is more like a portal. It invites submissions, not debate. It aggregates complaints, not judgment. It offers no continuity, no peer-to-peer testing of ideas, and no independent voice capable of saying, “Minister, this won’t work,” before a policy is announced rather than after it fails.

This matters because small business pain is rarely solved by isolated fixes. It lives in the seams between ministries. It is in a world of permits that stall because environmental and municipal timelines collide, or labour rules written for large employers but enforced on family firms, or tax and fee increases that look modest in isolation but crushing in aggregate. A roundtable could see those patterns.

The economic context today makes the loss more damaging. Small businesses are absorbing higher interest rates, insurance costs, energy bills, crime-related losses and wage pressures. Many are confronting succession challenges as owners age out with no buyers in sight. Others are quietly deciding not to expand, not to hire, or not to stay. In that environment, governments should be desperate for unvarnished feedback. Instead, this one chose to walk away from it.

Thus, while ministers fly abroad courting multinational investment, the domestic economy that sustains communities from Fort St. John to Fort Langley is treated as background noise. Big projects photograph well. Small businesses vote quietly, or they close. One makes headlines. The other hollows out main streets.

Defenders of the decision will argue that government still consults widely, that business associations exist, and that anyone can submit feedback online. All true, but consultation without structure becomes performative. The roundtable created accountability on both sides. Business owners had to show up prepared and accept trade-offs. Government, in turn, had to respond to a standing body with memory and credibility.

What makes this especially puzzling is that the roundtable posed no political threat. It was not partisan. It survived governments of different stripes precisely because it focused on operations, not ideology. If anything, it provided political cover, allowing premiers to say they had heard directly from the people most affected by their decisions. Walking away from that asset suggests not confidence, but discomfort.

The deeper risk is long-term. When small businesses conclude that government neither understands nor cares about the cumulative effect of its policies, they stop engaging. They comply minimally, invest defensively and plan exit strategies. Reinstating the Small Business Roundtable would not solve every problem facing entrepreneurs in British Columbia. But eliminating it guaranteed that problems will be harder to see, slower to diagnose, and easier to dismiss.

Kirk LaPointe is a BIV columnist with an extensive background in journalism. He is a podcast host, teaches media law at University of British Columbia, and is a special advisor at Fulmer and Company.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.