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January 17, 2025HALIFAX BUSINESS CONDITIONS: JANUARY 6-12, 2025 Statistics Canada has released real-time local business conditions from January 6 - January 12, 2025. Reference dates reported now refer to the date following the end of the reference week. These data are not adjusted for seasonality and monthly or weekly changes may simply reflect regular seasonal patterns.
From August 10 of 2020 to January 13, 2025, the local business conditions index for Halifax increased by 263.1%. Regina, Moncton, and Kelowna reported the strongest growth in business conditions over this period while Toronto, Hamilton, and Halifax had the smallest gains.
Halifax business conditions decreased by 15.8% in the week ending January 13. Of 30 urban centers, 26 reported weaker business conditions compared to the week prior. Only Kitchener, Barrie, Windsor, and Saskatoon reported improvements in business conditions. St. John's (followed by Halifax) reported the steepest decline in business conditions.
Compared with four weeks prior, business conditions were down 21.8% in Halifax. 17 cities reported stronger business conditions compared with four weeks prior. Montréal reported the strongest gain while Halifax had the steepest decline, followed by St. John's.
Compared with the same week a year ago, Halifax business conditions have improved 19.3%. All cities except Toronto reported improvements over the same period last year with the strongest gain in Québec City.
In the first two weeks of 2025, Halifax reported a 6.0% improvement in business conditions compared to the same period in 2024. All cities except Toronto reported gains compared to the first two weeks of 2024. The largest gain was reported in Kanata.
Halifax business conditions typically fall sharply during the winter months and rebound in the spring. Weather and cultural events also cause volatility in Halifax business conditions. Halifax's business conditions fluctuated around a stable level through the spring, summer and autumn of 2024, and have started a typical steep winter decline in the first two weeks of 2025. This puts Halifax behind most large urban centres (population >800,000), currently ahead of Hamilton and Toronto.
As often happens in winter months, Halifax's business conditions are falling behind those of all other medium sized urban centres (250,000<population<800,000).
Halifax business conditions have also fallen behind levels observed in all other smaller urban centres (population<250,000).
Notes
This experimental data product starts from information on the number of businesses listed in the business register in "business dense areas" of a large urban centre. Data from 2019 business locations provided baseline (ie: pre-pandemic) insight on business revenue and employment.
The data focus on 27 industries in particular: retail bakeries, furniture stores, electronics/appliance stores, building materials/garden supply stores, food/beverage stores, gas stations/convenience stores, clothing stores, cycling stores, book stores, general merchandise stores, florists, cinemas, dental offices, museums, zoos/gardens, amusement/theme parks, casinos, fitness/recreation centres, bowling alleys, drinking places, restaurants, and personal care services (such as hair care or esthetics).
Data on current operating conditions (open vs. closed) were collected from commercial application-program interfaces (API). Most of the information is drawn from Google's Places API, which is similar to what is available publicly on Google Maps, with supplementary information from APIs offered by Yelp Fusion and Zomato. Queries to the API are based on a sampling approach ('density-based cursory search') that focuses on the densest areas for business locations in the selected industries. Statistics Canada cautions that the sampling methods used do not follow standard statistical methods due to cost and technical limitations.
Data on current traffic volumes were drawn from TomTom's historical traffic information. As with operating conditions, the information was drawn from a sample of routes within identified business-dense areas. Statistics Canada cautions that traffic volume estimates and their relationship to business conditions may be sensitive to changing traffic patterns, construction/detours, and changes to business models such as curbside pickup or delivery.
The index of real-time local business conditions is estimated as the value of retail revenue, adjusted for both percentage of reported business closures as well as changes in traffic volumes from pre-pandemic levels.
The value of the index was set to 100 as of August 2020. As such, the index shows changes since then, but does not represent the variations in business conditions that existed in the initial period. A location with strong local business conditions in August 2020 would have less opportunity to grow than a location with weak conditions in the same month.
Source: Statistics Canada. Table 33-10-0398-01 Real-time Local Business Condition Index (RTLBCI)
Statistics Canada catalogue 71-607X. Real-Time Local Business Conditions Index: Concepts, data, methodology,
https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2021/statcan/71-607-x/71-607-x2021017-eng.pdf, July 15, 2021
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