It has never been easier to start a business.

Not that long ago, entrepreneurship often required significant upfront capital. You might need to lease a storefront or office, buy equipment, carry inventory, hire administrative support and pay to reach customers through traditional advertising channels.

Today, much of that infrastructure has been replaced by software. A business can be registered online. A website can become the storefront. Social media can provide the marketing department. Zoom can replace the meeting room. AI can take notes, transcribe calls, draft content and automate administrative work. E-commerce platforms can process sales, while third-party logistics companies warehouse products, ship orders and manage returns.

For self-employed people and microbusinesses in particular, this transformation has been extraordinary. Technology has allowed one person to operate with capabilities that once required an entire office.

But we have misunderstood what happened.

We did not eliminate the infrastructure required to run a business. We outsourced it, and much of it now sits outside Canada.

That distinction matters.

The typical Canadian small business is increasingly dependent on a collection of software platforms, cloud services, payment processors, marketing tools, e-commerce systems and, increasingly, artificial intelligence products. Together, these form a company’s “tech stack”: the digital infrastructure required to keep the business functioning.

And a significant amount of that infrastructure is controlled by U.S. companies and priced in U.S. dollars.

For Canada’s smallest businesses, that creates a vulnerability we rarely discuss: foreign exchange risk has quietly become a major operating cost.

Your $100 subscription doesn’t actually cost $100

Consider a Canadian consultant paying $100 US per month for a software subscription.

If the exchange rate of the Canadian-dollar to the U.S. dollar moves from $1.35 to $1.40, that $100 US subscription goes from costing C$135 to C$140. The software company has not raised its price. The Canadian business owner has not purchased anything additional.

Yet the expense has increased. Five dollars may not be a crisis. The problem is that few businesses have only one subscription.

There may be website hosting, cloud storage, bookkeeping software, email marketing, graphic design, project management, video conferencing, scheduling, customer relationship management, e-commerce, payment processing, cybersecurity, transcription and now multiple AI tools.

Ten or twenty small foreign-currency expenses can add up to a meaningful........

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