I think there's a bit of a sense of hopelessness around this issue and a feeling that things continue to get worse: Will this ever be a high enough priority for government to turn the tide?
On top of that—and I'm speculating here because you didn't ask why my view has changed—although in the study we explicitly asked survey respondents to put aside COVID-related regulatory challenges so that we could have some data with which we could compare, my strong suspicion is that it was very difficult for business owners to do that, particularly when it comes to questions such as “Would you advise your children to start a business?”
The comment I would make is that, whatever caused it, the state we're in with respect to this is quite worrying from two perspectives. One, we have a number of boomers retiring from their businesses, so we have a generational business succession that we want to go well in Canada, independent of COVID-19. However, the second overlay is, with COVID-19, you have a number of small businesses—we've all seen it in our communities—that have closed their doors.
The economy overall is smaller. The small business economy is much smaller than it was going into COVID. I think we as Canadians want independent businesses to thrive and survive. That's going to require new businesses to start. If they're saying it's not worth it because of the red tape headaches they're going to have to deal with regarding the government, that's a big problem for all Canadians, because they are over half the private sector employment in this country.