Across Canada, more women are working for themselves. They’re freelancers, consultants, creatives, and tradespeople carving out income between school pickups and elder care.
And yet, despite making up a significant and growing share of the workforce, self-employed women remain largely invisible in Canada’s economic policy. Programs and protections are still built around a traditional employer-employee model, one that often treats self-employment as an exception.
That gap is what the Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce is hoping to close, says CanWCC’s Founder & CEO, Nancy Wilson. The group, which began in 2018, recently launched its three-year national advocacy campaign to drive recognition, data, policy frameworks, and support structures where none have existed before.
“We are done trying to fit into models that don’t work,” she said. “This strategy is about building something new – and demanding that governments, institutions, and decision-makers catch up.”
A flurry of hurdles
The CanWCC estimates there are one million self-employed women in Canada, with one in four of them coming from a racialized background, and 54,000 from Indigenous communities.
That’s one million women who won’t have access to social safety net services like employment insurance, maternity benefits, or income support because the system was built to prioritize the traditional workforce, explains Wilson.
Most government programs and policies are designed around businesses that employ staff, leaving self-employed women – who technically employ only themselves – without protections, largely ineligible for supports, and rarely included in policy discussions.
“Self-employed women so often fall through the cracks,” she said. “To gain access to these programs, you’re really just expected to jump that chasm and become an employer out of nowhere, when, for many women, that isn’t even the goal.”
On top of that, 40 per cent of self-employed women earn $50,000 or less per year and experience a wider gender pay gap than in traditional employment, with self-employed women earning 72 cents for every dollar earned by self-employed men, compared with 87 cents among traditional employees.
Yet self-employed women are far from marginal, explains Wilson. They represent 11 per cent of women in the workforce, and are a foundational part of our economy.
“If they all tried to re-enter traditional employment at once, the unemployment rate would jump from about seven per cent to 15,” she added. “That’s no small impact.”
A call for change
The CanWCC is now pushing for three core policy shifts: income supports that aren’t tied exclusively to employment status; fairer tax treatment that reflects the higher risks of self-employment; and reduced exposure to financial risk, such as increasing the outdated GST/HST thresholds.
“The requirements around how much money you make before you become a tax collector for the government haven’t changed since GST was introduced in 1991,” says Wilson. “Just by virtue of indexing it to inflation, it should be twice as much.”
These changes, she argues, wouldn’t require billion-dollar investments – but they could deliver outsized returns. And, as wages stagnate and affordability pressures rise, more Canadians – especially women – are turning to self-employment or side hustles to make ends meet, meaning the time to act is now.
“We can’t have a discussion about nation building, economic growth, economic development, and a new Canadian economy that doesn’t include discussion about the economic contributions of 50 per cent of the population,” she said. “These are important issues that affect real people, real lives, and we can’t afford to put them on the back burner any longer.”
