Canada's Best Companies of 2025

Time​ Magazine

10-07-2025

C anadian brands like lululemon and Aritzia have become increasingly commonplace to U.S. and global consumers. To assess which companies are helping Canada carve out a place in the global market, a new TIME and Statista study ranked the top Canadian companies based on metrics like sustainability transparency, positive employee reviews, and continuous revenue growth in the last three years where complete financial data were available. Out of the 125 companies ranked on the list, the industries most represented are resource generation, infrastructure, and utilities—all of which are likely to see business disruptions in 2025 due to tariffs and geopolitical tensions.
Outside of the large legacy industries in Canada like natural resources, automotives, forestry, and agriculture, digital tech and IT companies have been steadily growing, and two Canadian cities rank in the top ten tech talent markets, according to a CBRE report. Notably, analysts and legal experts predict that digital services will be largely resistant to tariffs. Companies like Shopify (no. 6 on the list), which is capitalizing on the booming creator economy to compete with Amazon, and TELUS (no. 7), which plans to launch a sovereign AI factory in Canada, lead the charge. They're followed by older companies like Thomson Reuters (no. 22) and Blackberry (no. 80), both of which have had to evolve their approach to technology.
Thomson Reuters, which today calls itself a content-driven technology company, was formed in 2008 from the merger of Canada-based Thomson Corp and London-based Reuters Group. It's now focused on three main business segments: technology for lawyers including the research and analytics tool Westlaw, software for tax and accounting purposes, and the Reuters newswire service. During its shift from content provider to content-driven tech, it also started exploring generative AI initiatives in its law and tax products starting late 2022. Importantly, 'we have the underlying content and expertise…to ensure that the AI output is very accurate,' says Steve Hasker, CEO of Thomson Reuters. The company won a major lawsuit in February against Ross Intelligence, which scraped its Westlaw platform's legal summaries to train a competing AI product. The ruling, which protected proprietary content within the Westlaw platform, could make original data more valuable and set a precedent for what is 'fair use' for AI models.
As a media tech conglomerate, it's figured out how to make money off of AI as well as good quality human-generated content by licensing factual, bias-free news generated by Reuters to foundation model providers. 'It is a unique, proprietary content source that's very expensive to generate, and Reuters needs to be paid for that,' Hasker says.
BlackBerry, often still associated with its once-iconic tactile keyboard phone, made the pivot from handset to software around seven years ago. Its business is organized into two categories: software in cars, and secure communications for enterprises and governments. The software, which the company initially acquired to use in the BlackBerry phones, now controls fundamental features in cars from Stellantis, BMW, and Mercedes, including their safety, autonomous driving, and infotainment systems. It also underlies robots roaming in warehouses, as well as medical and surgical equipment, says John de Boer, senior director of government affairs and public policy at BlackBerry. The company has additionally developed a software platform certified by the Canadian government and the NSA called BlackBerry critical events management platform that can help government bodies communicate with personnel or respond to disasters like wildfires. 'There's a whole bunch of verticals that are increasingly becoming software defined,' de Boer says. 'We're one of the only companies that guarantee data sovereignty in many of our products.' The company raised its earnings forecast due to cybersecurity demands in June following a surprisingly profitable 2024.
But Canadian companies that make physical products, especially those that are frequently exported, may see some challenges to growth in the coming years. 'The roller coaster ride of tariffs has created an unprecedented uncertainty that we've seen, and that itself is really paralyzing decision makers, particularly business investment,' says Tony Stillo, director of Canada Economics at Oxford Economics. Most Canadian businesses are heavily tied to the U.S., says Stillo. 'When we went to this free trade agreement with the U.S. in the late 80s, we built an integrated North American production system.'
Auto part maker Magna (no. 14) and fuel distributor Parkland Corp (no. 20) are some of the Canadian companies most exposed to U.S. tariffs, according to BNN Bloomberg. Other companies on this list include fertilizer maker Nutrien (no. 69), natural gas operator TC Energy (no. 71), dairy company Saputo (no. 87), and aerospace manufacturer Bombardier (no. 11). Firms that are USMCA-compliant, part of a specific agreement around material origins, are somewhat buffered against the impact of tariffs. In a first-quarter 2025 report, Magna told investors that 75% to 80% of their parts crossing the border were USMCA-compliant, which puts their tariff impact estimate at about $250 million. The company said that it is working on increasing USMCA compliance to mitigate tariff impacts, but that may require design modifications. Another auto company, Linamar (no. 33), told shareholders in April that it expects minimal impacts from tariffs since virtually all of their parts are compliant. —Charlotte Hu
See the full list below.