The study looked at all the recessions and recoveries that occurred in Canada at any point in the last 50 years, of which there were six. After each one, it gauged how much benefit workers versus corporate profits had attained following that recession and recovery. In some cases workers were up, and in some cases corporations were up.
What was quite unique about this recovery was how much more corporate profits were up—three times more than in any previous recovery in Canada. It's unprecedented in Canadian history to see this kind of concentration of the recovery of GDP going to the corporate profit side. Workers are actually slightly worse off than they were in 2019, in large part because wages haven't kept pace with rising inflation.
The implications for small and medium-sized businesses are unclear. The way the GDP accounts work is that corporate profits are for larger or medium-sized enterprises. Smaller enterprises, where it's more difficult to determine what is profit and what is revenue, are put into a category called “mixed income”. That's not represented in this particular study.
I'm not sure what it says about small businesses. It might tell us something about medium-sized businesses, but it's mostly about large businesses.