Better Way Alliance | June 2025 Newsletter

Let’s address the obvious: yes, we’re alive — and just crawling out from under our busiest, most fruitful Better Business Day (BBD) ever. After an intense advocacy push at Ontario’s legislature, both Lili and I took a step back to breathe. Burnout is real. We felt it. So we’re easing into June a little slower – and a little more strategic. But first, a huge thank you to all our 2025 BBD delegates, the MPPs and staffers who met with them, and everyone who joined our (at one point) shoulder-to-shoulder reception at Queen’s Park.

What’s Next?

Based on the success of this year’s BBD, we’re already planning editions in British Columbia and Ottawa later in 2025. We’re also knee-deep in development on:

The Fixed-Cost Crunch Campaign — expanding our rent advocacy to include skyrocketing insurance and utility costs
The Good Jobs Accelerator — building the tools small employers need to hire, retain, and thrive long after the startup phase
A fundraising push to help us grow our impact across Canada

The Good Jobs Accelerator has caught interest from government, philanthropic funders, and business owners. With it, we’re going to answer the question “What if business owners had a suite of tools to help them hire and simply operate the fundamentals of their business?”. Many biz owners start with a dream and no real roadmap. After the startup phase, there’s often a “NOW WHAT?!”. We want to give biz owners the answer to that all encompassing question based on real life research from businesses like yours (or exactly yours).

The Fixed Cost Crunch campaign builds on our commercial rent advocacy and layers in additional pain points such as insurance and utilities.

I’ve had many discussions recently with business owners who have said something along the lines of “I just can’t afford to increase my wages” – which I totally empathize with. But as you know, labour isn’t the real cost holding back most businesses – it’s the fixed costs that have become anything but fixed. We know the value of good jobs in our businesses, they lead to higher productivity, better retention, and generally better culture. To ensure that our businesses and others can keep these types of ideals, we need to stabilize commercial rents, insurance and utility costs back to inflation.

Fundraising Goals

We’re aiming to raise $100,000 by the end of 2025, and $1M through 2026. That will help us

Onboard 2 additional core staffers + 2 part-time staffers (likely in membership development & project administration + content development)
Scale up our events & travel budget so we can be developing more relationships, building partnerships, and executing on more projects
Aggressively increasing our membership numbers
Improving our reach through organic and ad campaigns in both digital and in-person spaces that make sense

We’re building an ambitious plan to make sure that the BWA continues to have an impact in Canada’s business ecosystem. Like you, we believe our businesses are vessels for social impact that aim to improve the lives of everyone we touch.

We’ve engaged a fundraising firm for the first tranche — but if you’ve got ideas or leads, send them Lili’s way.

Upcoming Events

Summer – Member meetup in Kitchener-Waterloo
Summer – MDRNZE Summit in partnership with Little Jamaica Community Land Trust
October – BBD at BC Legislature (+ maybe Alberta?)
Fall 2025 – First-ever Federal Better Business Day in Ottawa

Want to get involved? Email Aaron.

Grants & Such!

Get Paid to Train Your Staff

One of the country’s most under-advertised grants is the Canada Job Grant (COJG) | ontario.ca. It exists in every province (and all 3 territories) except Quebec. If you’ve been thinking of investing in employee training, now could be the best time. We’re posting details for the Ontario grant below (and linked above) but search “Canada-[MY PROVINCE] Job Grant” and you’ll find details for your respective province.

“The Canada-Ontario Job Grant (COJG) provides funding to help businesses train their employees and update their skills. This helps employers ensure their workforce has the right skills to adapt to a changing economy. The grant lets employers choose who to train, and what skills to focus on to address their needs. Employers can use the grant to:

train existing employees to upgrade their skills
train new hires, whether currently employed elsewhere or unemployed

Employers and the government share the costs of the training. An approved third-party training provider must deliver the training.”

Federal Work-Sharing Program

The Canadian government has outlined special measures in their Work-Sharing program to support businesses affected by the threat or potential realization of U.S. tariffs are effective March 7, 2025 to March 6, 2026.

You may be eligible if you have experienced a decline in your business activity attributable to the threat or potential realization of U.S. tariffs.

Check your eligibility at: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/services/work-sharing.html

Find More Grants, Subsidies, and Tax Credits

We’re huge fans of the Canada.ca – Business Benefits Finder. It’s a fairly simple tool that takes 5 minutes of your time to answer a questionnaire – it’ll then output any active Grants, Subsidies, and Tax Credits that your business is eligible for.

This is a great tool to bookmark and use every few months – there are programs launching throughout each year!

Better Business Day 2025 | Ontario Edition

We went, we met, we partied.

Better Business Day is always a whirlwind. It’s hard to overstate just how much planning goes into a single day when 16 business owners & allies, 12 MPPs, and 1 reception are involved.

But we did it thanks to you. We also had (delicious) assistance from our reception food sponsors:

Neal Brothers Foods
Riverside Naturals
Counterpoint Brewing
Little Mushroom Catering

Throughout the day we had 3 delegate teams bouncing around Queen’s Park meeting with MPPs from all parties about tariffs, good jobs, (un)fixed-costs, and what a future of small business looks like with smart policy ideas. Our reception was, at one point, out the door and into the hallway – and we spoke with Staffers and MPPs from across the political spectrum about our policy concepts.

We came out of these meetings with 3 main thoughts:

1) There’s a clear disconnect between ground level business owners and policymakers
2) This type of civic action really matters as an education & advocacy tool – our MPPs are still just finding out about rent and employment issues
3) We have a huge opportunity to scale up our advocacy into actual policy wins – in Ontario, other provinces and federally

Our approach is to identify the root cause of issues and then figure out the best fixes.

We’re aiming for big generational changes that help business owners like you succeed now and in 10-20 years. It’s ambitious, but right now as a quickly shifting world order is upon us, we need to build a solid foundation because the cracks in our current foundation are deepening.

But we can fix it – and we know that the BWA message is starting to resonate with political decision makers at all 3 levels.

Based on the success of Better Business Day in Ontario, we’re expanding it to BC and Federal Parliament in Ottawa! If you’re a BC member, let’s chat. We’re looking to have 2-3 business owners join us in Victoria this October.

You can read our full rack of policy concepts here.