text: Spring 2020 wasn't all shuttered windows and red ink: threaded through all the loss and hardship, business owners found jewels of community, generosity, and ingenuity. Some also found belonging. Along with her husband and their three children, Sarah Taher moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, from Dubai at the end of June 2019. The family is Muslim and originally from Egypt; they left both places because, as Taher put it, "We wanted a place we can call home." The family applied to move to Canada under New Brunswick's immigration program—although, Taher admitted, she had never before heard of the province itself. It wasn't a happy welcoming. Really, she didn't feel welcome at all. Fredericton's lack of racial and cultural diversity shocked her; it felt like she had arrived on a completely different planet. (The 2016 census shows that visible minorities comprise less than 10 per cent of Fredericton's population.) She felt like she, and her hijab, had popped the Maritime town's white, isolated bubble. The only friends she was able to make were other Egyptian immigrants, other people who looked just like her. One of them apologetically told her, "Don't try to be friends with Canadians. They will never like you." A man in the supermarket yelled right in her face, "Ignorant mountain girl!" She thought: What is that? She thought: Will I ever fit in? She was depressed and lonely, an outsider in the place she wanted to call home.
  
  Both Taher and her husband are engineers. After her arrival in Canada, Taher eventually got a job working from home as an SEO specialist for a Toronto-based company. She enjoyed it, but she had always wanted to start her own business. An idea for what it could be had started forming even before she moved to Canada: she wore custom-made hijabs; she could make beautiful, unique head coverings for others, too. She'd always wanted to learn how to sew and had vowed to cross it off her bucket list after moving to Fredericton. As she planned her new business and dodged closed-minded attitudes, she also started taking sewing lessons, watching online tutorials, and practising with her own machine and materials. In January, she felt skilled enough to open her own business, Sufeya, selling handmade scrunchies and hijabs both online and in person at the city's Northside Market. There, she finally started to feel like she was part of something. A florist at a nearby booth helped Taher on her first day, showed her to her table, and kindly and patiently answered all of her questions. Taher had also started a blog to process and share her experiences with discrimination in Canada. Readers started to visit her, buying silky, colourful hijabs—even if they weren't Muslim, even if they never planned to wear them.
  
  Two months later, COVID-19 couldn't interrupt Taher's burgeoning sense of community. In fact, against all odds, it accelerated its progress. Forced away from the market, Taher, like Kaboré, looked at her leftover cotton material and decided to begin making masks. She was surprised when they were an immediate hit. "I've sold hundreds," she told me in July, just a few weeks after her one-year anniversary in Canada. "I've stopped counting, actually." She'd wake up early, spend a couple of hours making masks, work a six-hour shift for her day job, then spend time with her family. She dedicated most of her weekends to sewing, finishing one mask every ten minutes—she could now probably do it blindfolded, she joked. While she shipped her masks all over the country, she also sold plenty locally, both directly to customers and through local vendors. Working with the latter to buy fabric supplies, sell her finished product, and coordinate prize giveaways only widened her network. Her husband often delivered the masks himself, driving around Fredericton, dropping them off and saying hello. "I started to actually like the place," she said. "I thought, 'I can be part of this. People are starting to give me a chance. They're getting to know me.' " In the middle of a pandemic, both sides were starting to build trust.
  
  This kind of community echoed throughout the country. People encouraged each other to buy local, to order every week from their favourite restaurants, to purchase monthly passes and yearlong memberships to small gyms and studios that they couldn't go to. In return, many restaurants and other shops donated food and supplies to frontline efforts, to homeless populations, to anyone who needed it. Thousands joined Taher, Kaboré, and MacLean-Magbanua in getting creative and pivoting their business, whether by adopting new practices, making entirely new products, or both. Plenty of designers started crafting masks. Distilleries began making hand sanitizer. Restaurants assembled meal kits and picnic baskets. Gyms and fitness studios across Canada moved their classes online and into living rooms. Consultants, instructors, and therapists alike offered video sessions. Musicians streamed concerts. Indeed, on the whole, women-owned businesses were more likely to enact changes during the initial months of the pandemic. Over half of them introduced new ways to interact with or sell to customers. And more than one-third modified their products or services—compared to just over one-quarter of all businesses in Canada. In other words: they got creative so they could survive.
  
  Unfortunately, in many cases, it simply wasn't enough. In Toronto, seventy-seven-year-old Frances Wood was one of the many restaurant owners to call it quits. After nearly forty years, she closed her famous Cajun-and-Creole spot, Southern Accent, in April, which had served everyone from Helen Mirren to the Rolling Stones. The closure curtailed several decades' worth of plans to sell the restaurant and use the profit for her retirement; she told media that her future "doesn't look good." By the end of June, about 40 per cent of women-owned businesses were forced to lay off employees, and more than 30 per cent had to reduce staff hours. What's more, nearly two-thirds of those who did lay off workers sent pink slips to 80 per cent of their staff. Women also account for almost 40 per cent of self-employed Canadians; many of them rely on contractors, not employees, to run their business. Both factors put the majority of government support programs out of their reach (something that was true even before the pandemic). On top of that, small and medium-sized enterprises with under twenty employees—the type of business women are more likely to own—suffered disproportionately more revenue loss than larger companies with over one hundred employees. More women business owners reported being unable to pay their rent or mortgage payments, and more women reported being denied payment deferrals. In other words, while many businesses and entrepreneurs buckled under the mass shutdowns, for women the economic story was gloomier and more complicated.
  
  That's largely because the crisis only heightened barriers women already face in the business world: a lack of access to capital, a bias against the sectors where they're most represented, and unbalanced domestic responsibilities. In April, the Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce and the Dream Legacy Foundation teamed up to survey underrepresented founders and entrepreneurs about the impacts of the economic shutdown on their business, home life, and mental health. It defined underrepresented as "those outside the main entrepreneurship narrative"—i.e., anyone who wasn't white, cisgender-male, or Canadian-born. The results are depressing. While data showed that only 22 per cent of small businesses in Canada expected a 10 to 20 per cent decrease in revenue at the time, a whopping 50 per cent of those surveyed reported the same. More than 60 per cent of women-owned businesses stated they had lost contracts, customers, or clients, compared to 34 per cent of all small businesses in Canada. More than half told of negative health impacts and roughly the same number said they'd taken on additional child care duties. When narrowed down to racialized respondents' experiences, the already-dismal numbers worsened. A full 80 per cent of racialized founders of all genders reported lost contracts, customers, or clients. It's perhaps no wonder that their mental health costs were similarly higher.
  
  One Indigenous woman in B.C. shared her experience: "I am home trying to balance work and family life. My sales have dropped significantly and I am facing delays in the shipping of my supplies and my product. I am limited to pursue my growth plans as they involved travel to the U.S. I have had to defer several bills due to no revenue coming in from sales." A Black businessowner in Montreal wrote of not receiving refunds for cancelled events, adding that all of her funding applications had been unceremoniously cancelled. A facilitator in St. John's chillingly noted that nobody was interested in training because they didn't know if they would be around in a year. Others reported not being able to take meetings and important business calls because they were parenting their children. Many had lost revenue from long-term, almost-completed projects that were abruptly trashed. Event and conference revenue vanished. One woman in Whitehorse summed up the strange reverse feeling of sixty-to-zero: "Within one week, we lost every single booked contract we had for the foreseeable future. Our business effectively came to a halt in the middle of what was, to date, the busiest March of our career."