September 23, 2026
This week, Ottawa made its biggest-ever pitch to global investors, aiming to catalyze $1 trillion into the Canadian economy over the next five years. In the same stretch of weeks, Canadian exporters are absorbing a fresh round of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, the latest turn in a trade relationship that no longer looks dependable.
These are being told as two separate stories: an investment story, and a trade-war story. They’re actually the same story, and small and medium-sized businesses are the part of it few people are asking about.
I’ve spent close to a decade studying why some small businesses in western Canada break out of their home market and others stay confined to it, and not just from the outside. I founded Growth Catalyst, a strategic leadership and growth program for established small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and ScaleUP, a Western Canadian year-round community program, and work directly with many of the firms I write about. The short answer isn’t what most people assume: it’s not an export problem; it’s an organizational one.
In 2017, I surveyed nearly 400 Alberta small and medium-sized businesses. More than half generated the bulk of their revenue locally. Eighty-seven per cent said they wanted to grow. Only two per cent identified international expansion as how they’d do it.
It would be easy to write that off as a decade-old snapshot. Since then, the tools available to small businesses have been transformed, including cloud infrastructure, e-commerce platforms, and AI; all of it dramatically lowering the cost of reaching a customer anywhere in the world. What researchers call “scale-free” resources are now within reach of almost any business that wants them, allowing revenue to grow without costs climbing at the same pace. If access to those tools were the whole story, the gap between ambition and action should have closed by now.
It hasn’t. A 2025 study of Alberta’s high-growth firms by the Centre for Innovation Studies found the same disconnect, eight years later, in a different sample: these medium-sized businesses didn’t struggle with the formal mechanics of entering a foreign market, including permits, financing programs, and trade missions. What actually slowed them down was finding the right partners and customers once they got there.
This is not a knowledge problem, and it isn’t solved by another export-readiness seminar. It’s a capability problem, and it breaks down into three parts I call the ORB test: Organization, Resources, Business model. Resources are the technology, the talent and the treasury a company can put behind expansion — the part that has gotten easier over the past decade, which is exactly why they may not be the priority bottleneck for most firms. Business model is whether the value a company sells, and how it delivers that value, survives the move to a new market intact, or whether it was quietly built around one market’s customers and relationships. Organization is the hardest and most overlooked of the three: whether the structure holding a company together, its decision-making, its people, its internal wiring, can hold up as complexity multiplies.
Most firms that stall internationally aren’t missing one of these outright; they’re missing the alignment between all three: capital with no organizational capacity to deploy it, or a business model that travels but a structure too thin to support it. Firms watching the past few weeks of tariff escalation are getting a fast, expensive lesson in what happens when that alignment isn’t there.
It also matters for the other half of this moment. If Ottawa’s investment push succeeds, the real question isn’t whether the capital shows up; it’s where it goes. A trillion dollars concentrated in a handful of large incumbents does little for the broader economy. A trillion dollars that reaches deeper into the small and mid-sized business base, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of private-sector employment in this country, does a great deal more. Which outcome we get depends on whether those businesses can pass the ORB test at scale.
Diversification is no longer optional for many firms; it’s happening out of necessity. Non-U.S. markets took their largest share of Canadian exports in four decades last year, and Export Development Canada now finds 72 per cent of exporters planning new markets within two years, up from 65 per cent months earlier.
The policy conversation hasn’t caught up. It still defaults to asking why more firms aren’t exporting, and answers with programs built around market access: trade missions, export grants, matchmaking services. These aren’t wrong, but market access isn’t the constraint for every firm. Sometimes the real gap is resources, sometimes it’s the business model, sometimes it’s the organization itself, and no amount of market-access support fixes a business that fails the other two parts of the test.
Canada has spent the past several weeks making two big bets at once: that global capital will still choose this country despite the uncertainty next door, and that Canadian exporters can find enough new customers to offset the ones they’re losing. Both bets depend on the same overlooked variable. SMBs aren’t a footnote to either conversation. They’re the mechanism through which both succeed or fail.
Source: Calgary Herald
