Unify Action - December 06, 2025


Canadian Business Owner Sounds the ALARM on Canada’s Economy

Hosted by
Sarah Dotzert
Mentioned
Mark Carney
He Wants CASTLE LAW — But Says Canadians Can’t Defend Themselves ANYWHERE Else？! Business Owner Breaks Silence — DEMANDS Ottawa Step Up Immediately

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

164.44

Word count

672

Sentence count

23


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with the CEO of Affinity Integrated Facility Solutions, a janitorial services company based out of Toronto, Ontario. We talk about the current economic situation and how it affects their business.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's not an easy time right now.
00:00:02.280 Yeah, so you're seeing less business as a result of raising prices?
00:00:05.680 Yeah.
00:00:07.660 Why don't you just start off by telling me a little bit about your company and what you guys do?
00:00:11.980 Affinity Integrated Facility Solutions, and we provide janitorial services.
00:00:17.180 We started in Toronto, but we provide services all over Ontario and even coast to coast.
00:00:22.440 We have some clients that have grown coast to coast, and we were able to grow with them.
00:00:27.040 Nice. Okay. So, how are you guys finding the current economy? Is it good, bad, growing?
00:00:35.180 Well, you know, just to look at the current economy through the lens of affinity,
00:00:42.560 you know, there's been a construction slowdown, as many people are aware,
00:00:48.420 and, you know, the rental market is not on the up and up anymore.
00:00:53.140 it was until let's say two years ago and at that time business was you know continued to boom
00:00:58.820 but then in the current in the past year or two since interest rates started started really
00:01:03.920 getting high we've noticed that an inflation you know so minimum wage keeps on going up
00:01:09.320 which by the way i'm very uh i'm very um not anti people making a good living but the problem is
00:01:16.860 is that if you continue to, the government keeps on raising,
00:01:21.620 you know, mandating that prices raise,
00:01:23.820 that just keeps on pushing inflation forward.
00:01:26.560 It actually affects unemployment too.
00:01:28.720 Yeah, big time.
00:01:29.360 So you can't have, I mean, 30% of the, you know,
00:01:33.420 you can't have the federal, the Bank of Canada
00:01:36.180 targeting a 2.5% inflation rate
00:01:38.680 and then 30% of the workforce getting a 3.5% raise every year
00:01:44.140 because that will drive inflation so we've had our costs go up labor costs go up because which is
00:01:52.980 which is not uh unfair it's actually you know i understand that because food costs and all this
00:01:59.440 other inflation goes up is causing prices to go up so our prices are going up and then it's very
00:02:04.620 sensitive with our customers we try to raise the prices it's not easy for them to pay and then the
00:02:09.380 you know interest rates are rising so our customers cash flow is standing up it's hard
00:02:15.480 for them to pay us so yeah it's pretty uh it's not it's not an easy time right now
00:02:21.020 definitely a constricted constricted time yeah so you're seeing less business as a result of
00:02:26.520 raising prices yeah yeah definitely people are choosing to go in-house rather than uh rather
00:02:32.280 than outsource which is you know that had been the um the mode you know a lot of people were
00:02:39.360 doing that before they were they were outsourcing and not so much anymore yeah i'm trying to find
00:02:45.700 people who will tell me like i've heard that the housing startups has slowed down do you know the
00:02:51.040 answer to that like to why so like why housing has slowed down so much oh housing has slowed
00:02:57.240 down so much because there are a number of reasons. First of all, there's less immigration
00:03:03.080 now, less people are buying. You know, there's less people to sell it to. Interest rates
00:03:07.640 are high, so mortgage prices are high, so it's hard for people to buy. The home builders
00:03:13.740 aren't able to charge less because the government charges, I think like something like, I think
00:03:20.340 like 25% of housing costs is actually development fees, so that goes straight to the government.
00:03:27.240 Yeah, the government definitely does not make it easy to build houses.
00:03:33.260 Yeah.
00:03:34.760 And how are you liking Mark Carney right now?
00:03:39.400 Is that something you can answer?
00:03:42.000 You know, time will tell.
00:03:43.780 You know, ultimately, you know, as an entrepreneur and as a business person,
00:03:48.720 you know, we really, you know, we really try and take our destiny into our own hands
00:03:53.680 so we don't rely on the government or the Prime Minister to, you know, to be a partner.
00:04:01.320 So I guess I'm not disappointed in that sense.